Taking Their Pulse: Five Weeks In, And Students Are Feeling . . .

One of the key takeaways I’m getting in a professional development program I'm attending is how the subject I’m teaching is more significant than English. 

The real subjects I’m teaching are the humans in the classroom. On a grammatical tip, students are agents, the ones doing the learning, not passive objects. They are people on a journey to resolve the problem of how to express ourselves in written academic discourse, the objective of our class.

So it’s on me to find out who the humans in my classroom are, what’s on their minds and in their hearts - just as it's on me to know the subject matter. A strategy I often use is focused free writes with stems, sentence starters that focus students on a particular topic or theme. 

At the five-week mark, I used sentence stems for a brief class warm-up. These "stretches" are part of an effort to ease students into the day's lesson, using writing and/or partner discussion, to help folks “enter” the classroom. On this day, I provided three sentence stems for students to share in partners or triads: 

1. Five weeks in, and I am . . . 
2. An obstacle to learning I’m facing . . . 
3. A unique gift I bring to our learning community is . . . 

I wanted students to reflect on their experiences. They’ve been working hard, and I figured it was a good time to do a quick self-audit. And I wanted to prepare them for a low-stake writing task, giving students a chance to mull over the questions before a take-home writing task.

The purpose of this homework assignment was to have students practice with written fluency and to reflect on their experiences as college students and writers. Most of the students are first-generation college, so in addition to thinking about writing and reading, they need time to focus on their experience, even for a minute. 

Here’s a sampling of the kinds of comments students had to the “Five weeks into the semester” stem:

• I am excited for what's to come! I'm motivated by my classes and looking forward to new challenges.
• I am feeling pretty good, because I am getting really good into school, and I might be experiencing some difficulties. However, nothing is impossible to get over.
• I'm feeling more confident than the first day of class and I'm excited to keep learning on how to break down and put together my ideas.
• I'm feeling more confident in my abilities as a student. I have learned many new things that are helping me discover more about myself and what I wish to do with my life in the future.
• I'm feeling like I have learned a lot since the first day of class, the different learning and writing techniques that I have learned throughout these five weeks have helped me a lot in my other classes and I strongly believe that they will help in my future semesters
• I'm feeling like I have a good hold of most of my classes so far. Primarily in this class, I think the workload seems manageable but not boring, as it still engages me without overwhelming me.
• I'm feeling like I've gotten much better at expressing my own thoughts and personal takes on topics at hand.
• I’m feeling very overwhelmed but at the same time I’m very happy as well because I’m finally in school.
• I'm feeling more confident that I was at the beginning, I was just scared of being here in class but not anymore.

I'm encouraged by these responses; students seem to feel safe and brave. I hope we are setting a good foundation for when we come closer to some writing deadlines that are fast approaching. I plan to ask students at the end of the semester about their thoughts and feelings about doing activities that attend to their affective domain and student development. I wonder how activities like these help or hinder learning. And the next time I do something like this, I'll ask anonymously, too, to encourage more honesty.  

Check out subsequent blog entry where I will post some of the students’ self-reported "obstacles to learning" they are facing.