Attitude of Gratitude #14: Five Things I've Learned

Today's question asks me to reflect on five lessons I've learned during my teaching career, lessons that make me feel grateful. The biggest challenge this prompt poses is which five! So, in the order they pop up in my head, the list: 

Growth Mindset: Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology Success of  has had a huge impact on my teaching. It takes time, but I see that nurturing a growth mindset encourages students to celebrate mistakes, see them as opportunities for growth rather than as proof of their inadequacy. Assignments feel, I hope, like experiments to improve decision making skills rather than measuring a static, immutable trait. 

Blogging. There is no substitute for writing to a real audience. Learning to assign blogs  compelled me to think of relevant, meaningful writing assignments that help students develop and publish their ideas. I get better at developing these assignments semester-by-semester. And the quality of students' writing (and their feelings about writing) improve accordingly.

Mutt Genres: A "mutt genre" is the kind of writing that only exists in first-year college composition courses, formulaic writing  no one ever reads (or writes!) outside of a classroom. Certainly, the notion behind teaching mutt genres is laudable: teaching form, structure, and rhetorical patterns is important. But we run the risk of training students that there is a single, right way to produce text, one that doesn't exist in the "real world." 

Recognizing the risk of  mutt genre assignments pushes me to shift focus. When I'm at my best, my assignments compel students to make intentional choices based on their purpose, audience, and their own voice - not on strict adherence to a generic formula.  I wrote about mutt genres in this post, and I hope to keep moving away from highly standardized, decontextualized prompts to to those that challenge students to solve problems real writers encounter. 

On Course: This is one of the first professional development programs I ever attended, and the lessons I learned at On Course reverberate today. Two concepts that  stuck with me are the difference between teaching and learning and  the difference between a victim and a creator mentalities. 

Critical Thinking Community: This was also one of the first professional development programs I attended, and just like On Course's lesson, what I learned from the Critical Thinking Community remains vitally important to my teaching. Being able to identify the elements of thinking  and the standards of reasoning helps me make lessons relevant and meaningful beyond my subject area. 

Naming the elements and standards helps students claim and strengthen their application of those concepts. I don't know about you, but I never took a class on what constitutes thinking and how to judge my reasoning. Not in psychology classes. Not in my education classes. Not even in when I took philosophy. I learned about cognition but not anything directly applied to improving my thinking. 

Their publication, Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools, is indispensable. 

All these lesson improve my approach to designing learning experiences. That's for sure. The other through-line is that these lessons also apply to me. I have to maintain a growth mindset to stave off insecurities and fear of failure - and to recognize that it takes effort, not some innate talent, to be a good teacher. Blogging keeps me writing. I have to practice what I preach, and  remain will to feel the burn of finding and sharing my own voice. And so on. 

Big ups to those thinkers, writers, and organizations that make me a better designer of learning experiences. And to the folks who run the professional development programs where I work. 

Mutt Genres: How My Teaching Has Changed

The penultimate prompt for the reflective teacher blog challenge! Home stretch: "How have you changed as an educator since you first started?' I'll take this to question to mean "since I first started teaching". I'll save the question "since I started the blog challenge" for my 31st reflection. 

I've changed in so many ways. Most of those changes are less about doing a 180 degree reversal or flipping a switch from off to on. The changes have been gradual, processional. And I hope, ongoing.  

One big change is my ongoing transition from assigning "mutt genres" to designing "real world" genres. By mutt genre, I mean the kind of writing that only exists in first year (FY) college composition courses, that mutant mash of modes and patterns. The prompts for such assignments often  no where else except a classroom, devoid of context.

I can't think of anywhere else I'm asked to write or read a five-paragraph composition. Even if the topic or inspiration for an FY composition compels students, that formula evacuates any joy students may have felt discussing the book or topic. The format is stale, deadening, and demonstrates less about student voice than their ability to conform. Nor does the format allow us to assess students' ability to make choices beyond fitting square pegs into square holes, round pegs into round holes. 

Sure, I want students to be conscious of form, shape, and structure. But rather than providing a formula or template to follow, I'd rather have students learn to ask the questions about their purpose and their audience, questions that help them make intentional, deliberate choices about particular strategies they use, about the modes they select and manipulate.

Blogging serves that purpose - composing something actually meant for public consumption. I've also come up with scenarios, (semi) realistic situations where students have to compose something for an audience they can imagine, something that doesn't fit the five-paragraph format. I asked students to compose a two-page informative flier to teach incoming students the meaning and significance of "audience". Another prompt asks students to compose and annotate a web page that curates a particular grammar or composition skill. In another assignment, students compose a newsletter article for high school teachers that argues for using pop music to teach rhetoric appeals to apathetic students. 

These example assignments focus on particular content students must understand: audience, grammar, or appeals. Each composition has an authentic audience, and the writing has a purpose. The trick for me is to come up with a thoughtful self-evaluation or meta-commentary where students discuss how they approached the assignments, what deliberate choices they made. I want to know their decisions and intentions and for students to become conscious of those choices and deliberations. 

These assignments allow me to lead discussion about the use value of composition, its relevance and application. Ideally, these kinds of assignments engender more excitement (not a whole lot, but at least not the groans or glazed-over eyes that mutt genres tend to generate). Investment is often higher. And assessing their learning is much easier (and less painful) than slogging through mutt genre essays, compositions I used to assign . . . for far too long!