Blogging Pedagogy

Liz's lesson plan covers 3 class periods, and takes students through the process of revision as a group. The lesson serves two purposes: First, it takes the students through a practice rhetorical analysis, allowing common mistakes to come to light and be discussed before the Unit II essay. And second, it demonstrates honing a paper through revision. In the end, the students produce a coherent sample paper as a group. Read on for Liz's comments on her experiences using this assignment.

Q. How did your students respond to the assignment?

A. I thought the group discussion was generally good while we worked on it. I think the students had more to say because they had all worked on the paper we were discussing. A few of my students mentioned the activity in recommendations they wrote for my teaching portfolio.

Q. Is this an assignment you use regularly? Were there any unexpected problems or benefits?

A. I am doing it again now, and I would do it again for any rhetoric class.

Q. What is your favorite aspect of this assignment?

A. The best thing about the assignment is that I can talk through common mistakes with the students. Since many of the students work on each paragraph, when I criticize something the students don't feel singled out. Also, often the students notice problems I would not have picked out, and then we can talk about how to fix them. It's nice to able to distinguish between aspects of the paper that people might disagree about (like using "I") and aspects that really need correction (not having evidence in a paragraph). We can agree that there are multiple ways to organize the paper that make sense, and then debate the advantages and disadvantages of each scheme. It helps the students realize that they have some creative control over their papers.

Q. If you were to use this lesson plan again, is there anything you would change?

A. The one problem I had was that the paper was too long (each student had written a paragraph). This semester, I had them write paragraphs in pairs so that we had a shorter paper to work with. This semester, the paper has 8 body paragraphs, and that is a good length