Motivation, Annotation, & fewer complications!

Much like the menu at a diner (remember going to a diner? We’ll be able to do that again eventually), there’s many choices to be made when it comes to the various writing assignments we can choose as teachers. With food and writing assignments alike, everyone has a preference as to what they want to consume. Some of the choices are great (like a French dip… Can’t go wrong with one of those) and some are awful, but the options are plentiful and that can seem overwhelming sometimes.

In reading Jim Burke’s book, The 6 Academic Writing Assignments, I’ve come across countless ideas that have stuck with me and some of them I’d like to continue to have in my mind when crafting my future assignments. I’ve taken the liberty of breaking down some of the basic ideas into three categories for you, so… You’re welcome.

Motivation:

Telling your students that they need to write something without providing them a reason that goes beyond “because I said so and you’re getting graded on it” is not going to work out well. As Jim Burke states: “In other words, students want to know the problem for which a WTL activity is the solution. Or, as some have said, students do not care about the what or the how until they know the why.” (17)

To be fair, I don’t think this attitude ever really goes away because I know from my personal experience that I don’t like doing anything unless there’s a good reason for me to be doing it. If there is not a good reason for a student to be writing something, why should they bother in the first place? To me, that seems reasonable.

Annotation:

Annotation is an important tool for students to learn if you ever want them to close read efficiently. However, making students annotate things too much and forcing them to pick apart a piece of literature may also cause them to develop an aversion to reading in general. How can we expect students to read for leisure when every time we ask them to read something, we make it into a chore?

On page 50 of The 6 Academic Writing Assignments a student is quoted saying: “This is why reading is over. None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore.”

Annotation is important, but what is more important is getting kids to read in the first place. Close reading can’t happen if students don’t develop reading skills at all and for literacy levels to rise, the first step is to get kids to read.

An exercise in annotation that Burke suggested which I found incredibly clever was one in which students annotated their own writing. Have students write a response to something and then have them respond to themselves later to examine how their own opinions have (or haven’t) evolved. Making students read and annotate something they wrote helps them to develop their own ideas further while also making them close read something they are sure to care about because they wrote it.

Less Complications:

In chapter 3, Burke talks about writing on demand and how we can develop accessible writing assignments for our students. The key word of that sentence is “accessible”. Here’s the thing, I’ve mentioned it before in other blogs, but one of the best things a professor has ever taught me when I went for my A.S. in theater was “KISS” – Keep It Simple, Silly. KISS has applied to nearly every other job I’ve had and countless other scenarios and this is no different.

Burke states:
“The important lesson here is that we are never just designing a prompt or a writing assignment; rather, we are designing an experience, a document, as assessment, a tool that students must be able to use without struggling to make sense of it or taking too long to read it.” (71)

Don’t make things more complicated than they need to be. It’s a pretty simple concept.
(See what I did there?)

So, next time you find yourself staring down the endless options of offerings on the menu of writing assessment, bear in mind these three basic principles.