The Group: Adam S., Jenn K., Kyle, Mike, Heather, Matt F.
The Answer: No final answer arrived at.
The Best Guesses:
- We've got to deal with at least two issues right off the bat: what the students are interested in (if a whole class can share an interest) and what is just simply too long.
- Is it possible to create curiosity in a topic? Is it possible to create enough curiosity to read a 15 or 20 page scholarly article?
- And a third issue: Is there something necessarily wrong with using the first page or two of the text?
- We teach students to look for the thesis statement and general argument summary first. We teach students to write that first.
- When we teach peer review, we emphasize what goes on in the first few paragraphs as a way to set the tone of an argument.
- Should we just tell students to start peer reviewing from the middle?
- If we want students to analyze someone's evidence/building-block arguments, how do we enforce that over looking at the thesis?
- Don't they need to make a point of the thesis/overall argument to contextualize their source use?
- How do we teach reading/analyzing/writing about both?
- We can work critical reading skills into peer review.
- "Summarize your writing" or "summarize your partner's writing." "Respond"
- Jenn suggested having students write a request for their reviewer's, something to pay attention to in particular. Reviewers read through once without commenting, then again paying attention to the request.
- Forces annotation, paying attention to the whole text
- Hard to assign too much during peer review, especially in a 50 minute class.
- Do reading in class
- Time is a concern, but it's worth it.
- Teach annotation along with it
- In student writing, we can respond to misread or misquoted sections by saying "Check your annotations" or "I read that as something different," and students should have enough to fall back on to fix errors or better explain reasoning.
- Class conversations about reading
- Adam had trouble getting much of a response out of Harry Potter book reviews
- Matt had trouble getting much response out of short readings about privacy and terrorism or long readings about putting tracking chips in released prisoners
- Heather had really good luck bringing in an article from a British Labor Journal. Not necessarily because it's British or about Labor issues, but because she had Business and Econ students in class. They knew which questions to ask and could help lead the rest of the class through it.
- Suggestion: Find something that at least a few people are ready to deal with, then use the resulting conversation to model close reading.
- Tell students to pick a topic that interests them and find an article in one of the library databases (maybe make sure it's longer than a few pages). Read those articles in class.
- Model scholarly reading by telling students to use their phones and various internet machines to look up words they don't know. Encourage using context clues, but enforce the way scholars and professionals actually read these sources ("That writer is showing off. Now we look up what s/he meant.")
- Make annotation an assignment
- Jenn assigns several annotations by asking students to mark texts in the ways that seem most helpful (more than check marks and underlines, when possible). Gets students in the habit and shows that it isn't so bad.
- Would this help explain the weird marks (check marks and circles) we leave when we feedback papers too?
