Jump Start Your Students!

Jump Start Your Students! Robert Alfonso, Mike Hill RSCC Learning Center

The Problem of Introductions:“I just don’t know where to start.”

Conflicting Advice “Before you write a paper, always spend 15 to 30 minutes creating an outline first.” “An introduction should generally be four to five sentences long. Begin your introduction with a general statement, and with each sentence that follows get more and more specific, until you get to the last sentence, which is a clearly stated thesis. This thesis states the point of your paper. The thesis should be like an umbrella which spans your essay, including all major points found in the essay.” -- Ella Berven, RSCC Online Writing Lab

“Essay introductions, like other kinds of introduction, are nothing more than a way of telling the reader what’s coming up. Along with the title, they help the reader find out whether this is a piece he or she is going to enjoy or be interested in and learn from.” “Essay introductions also follow formats, but you have a fair amount of leeway in how you handle the opening paragraph of your essays.” -- William S. Robinson and Stephanie Tucker, Texts and Contexts: A Contemporary Approach to College Writing, 2006.

The Conflict Continues “Begin with a quotation.” -- MIT Online Writing Center “Types of introductions to avoid: Memorable Quotations” -- University of Richmond Web for Writers “An introduction should grab the reader’s attention.” – Harvey Mudd College Writing Tips for Humanities 1 “The popular -- or “Wowee!” – introduction is often, for reasons that are ill understood, taught in high school and even some college English classes. This introduction is supposed to grab the reader in some way or other . . . . but grabber introductions are not in great demand in academic work or in the business world. The last thing you want to do is begin a paper for a history or a sociology or business class with an introduction like Tom Wolfe’s.” – Robinson and Tucker

Active Learning “Active Learning: In progressive schools, students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they . . . have been. Their active participation in every stage of the process is consistent with the overwhelming consensus of experts that learning is a matter of constructing ideas rather than passively absorbing information or practicing skills.” -- Alfie Kohn, “Progressive Education,” Independent School, Spring 2008

Teaching By Doing “Learning by doing, a common shorthand for the idea that active participation helps students to understand ideas or acquire skills, is an established principle of progressive education. Much less attention . . . has been paid to the complementary possibility that teachers are most effective when they show rather than tell. In fact, this idea doesn’t even seem to have a name – so let’s call it ‘teaching by doing’ (TBD).” Alfie Kohn, “Challenging Students,” Phi Delta Kappan, November 2004

TBD in the Writing Class • “One version of TBD has gained favor in the field of writing instruction, where teachers are urged to reveal their own rough drafts – or, better yet, write things in front of students. It’s one thing to analyze the techniques of a story or an essay, a finished product, but it’s something else again to observe the process of writing. Particularly if the teacher/writer is narrating, explaining the rationale for choosing this word or that sentence structure, students can witness the false starts, the way errors are made and corrected. In short, they can watch a piece of writing come into being.” -- Kohn, “Challenging Students”

From Conversation to Writing: The Learning Center Why are you interested in this topic? Why do you think your instructor is interested in this topic? What would make you want to read a paper on this topic? What do you want to learn about this topic? What do you already know about this topic that you can teach to your reader?

Our Own Writing Habits How do we plan out our own narratives and essays? How do we envision our audience? What is our writing process? What can our students learn from our writing experiences? Are we giving our students advice that conflicts with our own practices?

I know it when I see it, The introductions none of us want to read (much less grade!): • “I couldn’t find a job this summer, and it’s hard to write much about my summer vacation.” • “ ‘The Lottery,’written by the author Shirley Jackson, takes place on the morning of June 27th. June 27th is the day the lottery is always held, and everything seems normal. But the reader is in for a surprise.” • “This paper will attempt to tell you something about the emotions I felt on viewing the Grand Canyon.” -- actual student examples from Sarah E. Skwire and David Skwire, Writing with a Thesis, 2005.

Or do I ??? • What exactly am I looking for in my students’ introductions? • How would I define a “good” introduction? • Have I communicated those criteria in a way that students understand and can practice? • Are class discussions of assigned readings as much about craft as they are about ideas?

TBD in Other Disciplines “It’s not unusual . . .for math teachers to walk students through the steps of solving for x, just as science teachers often do demonstrations to illustrate various laws and principles. But this is teaching by means of scripted performance. It’s a matter of going through the motions to show that following certain procedures will produce predictable results. Students are then instructed to imitate what they’ve seen. What intrigues me, by contrast, is having a science teacher actually conduct a public experiment . . . . In such classrooms, teachers can be heard to say things like: ‘I’m not sure what’s going to happen here, but let’s take a stab at it.’ Those who teach science by doing science spend a lot of time erasing or crossing out, as do their colleagues who teach writing by writing.” -- Kohn, “Challenging Students”

Integrating Writing In Other Disciplines Art Young’s “One Minute Essay”: “At the end of class, whether it be lecture, lab, or discussion, the teacher asks students to write for a minute. . . about two things: (1)what they learned in class that day and (2) what questions or concerns they still have.” Learning Outcomes of the “One Minute Essay”: The student “Pat puts the main points of this day’s lecture in his own words. In the act of reviewing the notes, Pat realizes he doesn’t understand something and asks . . . questions. . . . Pat is reviewing what he does know and what he doesn’t know and then appeals to the mentoring teacher for help.” Among other benefits, the one minute essay “provides opportunities for students to become confident with technical vocabulary and concepts by putting [them] in their own language.” -- Art Young, Teaching Across the Curriculum, 3rd ed. (1997) http://wac.colostate.edu/books/young_teaching/young_teaching.pdf

Jump Start Your Students!