Читать книгу Engaging Ideas - John C. Bean - Страница 44

Many teachers would gladly require more writing in their courses if it were not for the need to mark and grade all those papers. If teachers do not currently assign any writing in their courses, adding a writing component will admittedly require extra work, although not necessarily more total time devoted to teaching if some of the teacher's current preparation or conference time is shifted toward responding to writing. If teachers already require writing in their courses (say, a couple of essay exams and a term paper—assignments that often have low learning value for students), following the suggestions in this book might reduce the total time they spend on student writing while simultaneously making that time more rewarding for themselves and more productive for students. The NSSE/WPA research cited at the beginning of this chapter (Anderson, Anson, Gonyea, and Paine, 2009) has shown that what matters in using writing to promote deep learning is not the amount of writing in a course but the quality of the writing assignments themselves.

There are many ways to work writing into a course while keeping the paper load manageable. Some methods require no teacher time (for example, in‐class freewriting); some, minimal time (perusing a random selection of posts on a class discussion board); and some, very modest time (assigning write‐to‐learn microthemes using models feedback). Even when you require several formal papers or a major research project, you may employ any number of time‐saving strategies to reduce the paper load (see chapters 14–16). The key is to decide how much time you are willing to spend on student writing and then to plan your courses to include only what you can handle—always remembering that you do not have to read everything a student writes.