A Glimpse into a Consultation
Michael Reyes, Assistant Professor of Francophone Literature, requested a consultation to discuss adapting a final paper assignment. He was looking both to meet the students' needs better and to reduce grading time. I asked him to provide me with the syllabus and other documents related to assessment, and when he did so, he also gave me a nice overview of the intended learning outcomes and particular difficulties the students faced in meeting them.
When we met, we discussed how best to prepare students to write the final paper, including by adapting smaller assessments earlier in the term and designing some in-class writing activities and lessons. Guided by the principle of backward design, I encouraged Michael to deconstruct the final assignment and identify the skills students needed to succeed. I learned that he was already considering reducing the amount of content covered in the course, and we explored possibilities together for making space for analytic and other skill-building activities and integrating more low-stakes writing and formative feedback.
At the end of term, I contacted Michael to follow up on the consultation. His response is duplicated below (with permission).
"Overall, I would say that the modifications we discussed were a success; by taking out a few readings and leaving in a bit of time to discuss, the course felt less rushed as a whole. To improve the composition, I added in a workshop where we looked at the introductions to scholarly articles about a novel we were reading at the time and dissected just the introductions to see how they can be built. Many students took this workshop to heart and you could really see it in their writing. I also used the mid-term essay question to give them a lot of feedback on successful and less successful forms of analysis that we went over in some detail in a post-mortem. And, taking your advice, I integrated a few more writing activities (including one into their homework journal for feedback) but not as many as I would have wanted.
Overall, the average for the compositions for this term was 4 points higher than last year (which is a nice improvement) While it's still fresh in my mind I'm going to make a note of which writing specific skills students struggled with and try and build a few activities into other parts of the course that begin to address these. Several C level papers, for example, really struggled with identifying salient information from a quote to advance their argument. (So, they met the course objective of selecting a quote pertaining to their argument, but could not yet articulate what in it was useful to their case.)
At any rate, I just wanted to say that, it's still a work in progress, but the papers as a whole improved for the better!"
