Low Stakes + Building an Academic Community: Two for One!

Two important lessons I re-learned during professional development last summer was the importance of assigning low-stakes writing tasks and of building community. During the California Acceleration Program’s Summer Workshop, facilitators urged us to consider using low-stakes (sometimes called “writing-to-learn” activities) to ease students into more complex writing tasks. At the UMOJA Community Summer Learning Institute, we reviewed the significance of building communal intelligence, the intentional calling out and supporting of students efforts to build their knowledge base together. 

This last week, I attempted to weave together both these principles in all four of my classes.  We used a digital bulletin board to compile “meaty” quotes from their readings and the reasons they thought those quotes were meaningful. Students are in the middle of composing a synthesis essay based on texts by Paulo Freire, Jean Anyon, and bell hooks - a pretty heady, complex set of readings for first-time freshman. One of the big objectives of this assignment is to give students practice incorporating quotes into their essay. They have to select quotes that support a larger claim, which not only means finding quotes. It means being able to interpret those quotes, explaining to readers how and why that quote supports the student writer’s synthesis.