New semester, new adventures

You know the old “good news/bad news” thing. Here’s mine: Good News? I am teaching Composition Theory this semester with handpicked, upper level students! Bad News? It meets from 7:50 AM til 9:05 Am, Monday and Wednesday. Those of you who know me are probably fallen to the floor in disbelief. No, I am not teaching it virtually, from my bed. I am actually getting up, exercising and showering before class so that I can be coherent. Fortunately, I lean toward collaborative classrooms anyway so I try not to talk too much…
I have decided to use Mondays for discussion of readings and Wednesday for application activities. I didn’t feel like the group metacognition blog worked well last semester, but I did think the research blogs worked well for those who used them. So this class will also do research blogs, and they will also do their own reflection blogs. The reflections are very specific–one each time they serve an apprenticeship hour in the Writing Center. They are more like traditional logs/journals that way, except they come with a date and time stamp, so they can’t delay making the entries until the end of the semester. That is actually an important feature. Those kinds of reflections are so much more effective if they write their experiences down right away. The details matter! I am considering having them read each others’ and commenting, but I am not sold on that idea yet. I am also considering having them use this blog and their experiences as the basis for their creative project/paper.
I am bringing back an old friend this time too–the discussion board. They post quiz questions on the readings there, and I chose from them for our Monday reading quiz. (It is a group quiz, where they get to practice the conversation of mankind, as Brufee calls it.) They also write a once a week reflection explaining what we talked about on Monday and how we applied the ideas on Wednesday. Interesting things are already bubbling up there.
And finally, the adventure: a wiki. They are researching high school writing centers and creating a resource for high school teachers who might be interested in starting a center at their schools. We are going to give a presentation to local K-12 people about it, and the wiki will be a lasting (and growing?) resource. It would make me so happy to see more writing in high schools, and more good talking about writing!
So that’s the plan. Three different kinds of technology tools, all enabling different kinds of conversations. One of my students wrote in his first reflection:
“Ok. I won’t lie. I really expected that we would be doing a lot more writing in this class. DON’T GET ME WRONG… this is a GOOD thing. With most of my classes I have a lot of writing, so this class focusing more on teaching writing is something that I was inwardly hoping for.” I have to laugh; by the end of this semester he is going to realize he has never written so much in his life!