Innovation in the CAI Classroom

A Short Reading List

Critical Thinking

One of the best ways to gauge what sort of critical thinking your students must engage in is to determine what sort of writing tasks other professors (or perhaps future employers) will require of them. One way that I’ve done this in a computer classroom is to connect to http://www.searchedu.com and type in the phrase "write an essay in which"; to limit this search, you might include another term with this quoted phrase, such as "Shakespeare" or "Biology" or "poem." It’s best to find a few examples ahead of class so that you don’t spend much class-time fumbling with the web, as I inevitably do during these workshops. Then simply pose the essay question to your students, asking them, as a class or in groups, to consider how they would approach, organize and write the essay that responds to the assignment.

Other Critical Thinking Resources available on the web include

http://www.calpress.com/critical.html (The author of this long report, "Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts," wants 80¢ every time you make a copy for your students. I’d make just the one copy and review it carefully, for it expertly presents several approaches to making our students think, question, and consider.)

http://www.ceap.wcu.edu/Houghton/Learner/think/thinkSkillsCritical.html (A collection of sites related to critical thinking and education).

Thesis Formation

One way that I have taught thesis formation in the computer classroom by presenting students with a definition of a thesis and then ask students to discuss, rank, and then improve a series of attempts at writing thesis statements. The definition I usually use is "An assertion that is interesting and not immediately obvious." Determining what is interesting or not obvious also engages students in the sort of critical thinking skills I discuss earlier. Asking students to rewrite faulty thesis statements encourages students to realize how dynamic the writing process can be. Sometimes I break students into groups of three or four and force them to rewrite poor theses in a variety of ways to discourage oversimplified right-wrong thinking.

You might look over http://english.ttu.edu/courses/1302/kemp/sp96/help/thesis.htm or http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~writepro/writing_center/thesis.html for examples of academic handouts on the thesis statement, both with positive and negative examples.

 

Paragraph Formation

One of the best ways to teach the paragraph is to choose a medium sized and clear paragraph from an essay you’ll introduce later in the quarter and offer it to your students as a scrambled mess. Students must then determine which sentence would make the best topic sentence, how the supporting sentences function in the paragraph, and how the author wishes to conclude. Usually students can determine the order of the middle sentences from the author’s use of transitional devices, so they will get a lesson on that, too. Occasionally I purposefully remove such transitions and ask students to figure out how individual sentences can best be connected. We finish by looking over the original.

A web-savvy version of this assignment would call for the plucking of such a paragraph from a smart on-line journal, such as Salon or Slate, especially when that journal is reviewing a (current-events) discussion topic raised in the previous class.

 

Revision

Revision is the most important part of writing, or at least that’s what I e-mail my students a few days before a paper is due. Recently in my Writing in Food Science class I asked students to bring in a revision handout that they had created from an on-line resource or Online Writing Lab (You can find a list at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owls/writing-labs.html ). I also asked students to bring in paper copies for me to share with future generations of students. As my students were working on this assignment, they complained to one another on the ACML about having to reformat documents that did not translate well from HTML, or about rediscovering the location of their handouts when I reminded them to cite their sources.

In class I had each student drop off his or her handout in my dropoff folder. I then moved those handouts over to the pickup folder and asked each student to find some ingenious bit of revising advice from another student’s handout, something that will help the students revise their subsequent papers more effectively. I was gratified to hear my students begin to use the same phrases and sometimes jargon that I use when talking to them in office hours. Finally, before the draft workshop, I had each student share with his or her peer review group a particular problem that had plagued his or her previous essays, as well as some advice from a handout about how this problem could be addressed. In effect, this assignment forced students to "research" the writing process with the same focus that they had conducted research for their final paper.

 

Revision, II

The "Track Changes" tool under Microsoft Word’s "Tools" menu allows an instructor both to present obvious "in-text" comments on students’ virtual essays, as well as to model the dynamic, real-time revision process on the instructor’s Macintosh. When this tool is used, changes, cross-outs, and additions do not obscure the original draft, so students and instructors alike can note the thinking process that occurs as a student revises her work. See the following URL for further documentation on this process: http://lpc1.clpccd.cc.ca.us/lpc/vigallon/pdc/tr-track.shtml

 

Others’ Classes

Almost any professor who is attempting innovative techniques in the computer classroom will make evidence of that innovation available on the web. I’ve been communicating with one such innovative professor, Megan McClard of Metropolitan State College in Denver. Students in her Advanced Composition course, available at http://clem.mscd.edu/~english/351mm/, meet only once, in the first week of school. Otherwise, all class communication and resources, including readings, are available on the web. I don’t know if I’d want to teach such a course, but I’m impressed with Dr. McClard’s organization and attention to the needs of her students. Hers is just one of the many classes available at the World Lecture Hall: http://wwwhost.cc.utexas.edu/world/lecture/e/.