Pedagogical Practice 3: Easy steps to literary analysis

My Gender and Literature students don't write traditional essays for my class. We practice close reading, we talk about themes, we analyze in class discussions, and they can choose to do a final paper, but most choose unessays instead.

All that being said, understanding the steps for literary analysis is still important. In one of my past classes I had students work through the steps of an essay (wrote introduction, sample body paragraph with integrated sources, Works Cited page) without writing the whole essay since I wanted them to learn the process.
Thinking of this, as we finished Between the World and Me, I wanted to walk my students through literary analysis, so this was what I gave them:

Steps in literary analysis

• What do you have to say about the topic?
• What evidence supports your stance/analysis?
• What key scholars have written about this?
• Do you agree or disagree with their scholarship?
• Use sources to support YOUR stance, don’t just summarize
• Sandwich:
• Thesis
• Textual evidence
• Citation
• Explain how evidence shows thesis
• Color coding ensures you do everything you’re supposed to
• Introduction: roadmap to argument, outline, mention all the sub-topics
• Body paragraphs: parts of analysis
• Close reading
• Theme
• Other big ideas
• Conclusion: now that you’ve done all this micro work take a step back. What is the big picture? What have you learned? Why is it important?
• Works Cited

I particularly like the color coding, and when I HAVE had students turn in papers, I have them keep it. It helps me see where misunderstandings may happen, they think they explained their evidence, but they just restated it. Their thesis is just a description. It also helps them as they draft, to see during revision if they've missed anything.

I also always suggest they write their introductions last, and that I should know the outline of the paper when I finish reading it. 

I make sure too to tell them that this is not the ONLY way to write a literary analysis, but it's a way I like, and that once you have something you like, you can riff off of it.

Pedagogical Practice 2: Teaching Students to Use Feedback

Teaching Students to Use Feedback

Many professors struggle with how to get their students to use the feedback they've been given to improve.

When my students come to grade conference with me I tell them they need to bring a copy (hard or electronic) of their piece. They also need to be able to answer what grade they think the piece deserves and why. Finally, they need to have something to take notes on the feedback they receive. This is step one.

I have made the feedback part of the process.

When I grade conference with them, I always ask if there's anything they want me to know before I read, or anything they want specific feedback on (this is something I teach them to ask for in workshopping and peer editing as well).

When I give them feedback I use the sandwich method: 

1. I really liked...
2. One suggestion I have for improvement is...
1. Or As a reader one thing I was confused about was...
3. One of the strengths of your writing is...

Second, I integrate USING and REFLECTING on this feedback part of the process as well.

As their exit ticket they had to turn in a short write up. It needed to include:

• What feedback they received
• How it was helpful
• How they will apply it in the future

They turn these in, and I read them. This formative assessment only.

On the next assignment, I will ask them to answer HOW they forwarded/transferred the feedback they received on the last assignment.

The key takeaway is that if you want students to read and USE the feedback you give then you have to create ways for this to happen, specific structures and class activities that allow them time to process and reflect on this.

Pedagogical Practice 1: Teaching students how to participate in class discussions

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of short blog posts that will focus on a single issue or topic in a classroom and then provide easy to implement pedagogical practices that will help your students.

"Teaching your students how to participate in class discussions"

Over the years I've heard a lot from teachers and professors that they do not know what to do when students either 1. do not do the reading or 2. do not participate in class

This post will present some ideas on how you can improve this in your class. I am a literature professor, so my examples are from there, but they apply to any content area where reading is done.

1. Students do not do the reading.

First, ask why. Was the reading large? Did they run out of time? Did they find the content or jargon daunting? Once you know the WHY you can figure out a way to fix. When my students read Beloved, they were unprepared to discuss Part I, which is 190+ pages. I did two things. First, for our next book I put page numbers not just parts/sections, so they could "see" how much they had to do, and second, I gave suggestions about breaking up reading- scheduling time every day, starting the week before, etc.

Second, do not shame students. There can be a variety of reasons why students did not complete the readings and none of them are improve with shaming them about it.

Too often a teacher's response is snarky, mean, and punitive. The only purpose this serves is to show your students how awful you are. That you do not care about them, the barriers and struggles they face. It signals that you are not interested in helping them learn how to do this, or what difficulties they had.

That day my students did not all do the reading I told them that I always prepared a lecture to cover the class time but they would see that class was more interesting and engaging when it focused on what they wanted to talk about.

Third, ask yourself what the pedagogical reason is for assigning that reading. If you assigned an article or short piece because it contains theoretical concepts that are important for your content area then what is important is that they learn those things. So as soon as you can see that students did not do the reading stop what you're doing, tell them you're going to give them time to. Break them into groups, assign sections, have them Jigsaw it (each group reads a section, identifies key ideas, then presents out to the class). Or give them class time to read and assign a short exit ticket response when they leave to check for comprehension- what was one thing that struck you about the reading? What was one thing you didn't understand? What questions did you have?


2. Students don't know how to participate in a class discussion.

First, have you taught them how?

I always make sure my students have copies of texts (hard or electronic) that are theirs so that they can annotate the text. While I don't have them number paragraphs (we just refer to page numbers), I do like the easy concept of "Marking the Text" because I like presenting to students the idea of ACTIVELY reading the text.

• So I tell them to circle words they don't know
• Highlight or underline what they think is important
• Ask questions
• Make comments

I also encourage them to think of this process as interacting with the text, the author, and the ideas. For larger pieces, like books, I encourage them to at the end of chapters or sections write the main ideas on a Post-It and then stick it at the end.

I teach my students that this is just the first step, the prep work. Next, I tell them before class to review their annotations. They are looking for the lines/quotes, big ideas, patterns they notice. I tell them to write these in their notebooks (with page numbers). These are the things they want to discuss in class.

Once we're in class, students often get excited (or sometimes are covering lack of prep) and start summarizing, "I can't remember where this was but..." or "She says..." I always stop them and ask them where they are in the text. If they have prepped, they can give us the page number so we're always grounded in the text. If they haven't, I tell them to find it and we'll circle back. This ensures that students all have the same context for conversations but it also shows students why the work is important.

Some of my class discussions are whole group, certainly at the beginning of the semester, or to start out a new novel, but once the students have these skills, I spend more time having them talk to each other.

Since Beloved was our first novel in class but I wanted them to start getting used to talking to each other, I made a worksheet that guided them through a response. I provided the big ideas, and they had to discuss, and respond to HOW they were seen in the book. For our next book discussion I'll pull back on this while also using the formula. So they'll identify the big ideas, they'll track how they are seen in the book, always with an emphasis on textual evidence, citing specific parts, not making generalized statements. This means that when they go to work on responses or papers, they have the ground work for these assignments.

I've provided models for what I'm looking for, and given the students time and support to then follow those models, but also revise them for what works for them.

Professional Development and Reflective Teachers

In order to be good teachers, whether you're k-12 or higher education, there are several things that have to happen. You have to be aware of the ongoing conversations in education, both trends in teaching and the science informing those trends. You have to be doing the work applying those things in your classroom. And you need time. You need time to keep up with reading, follow people on Twitter, attend professional development, and reflect on what is going on in your classroom and how you can continually improve how you are serving your students.

Yet most teachers will tell you that they are overwhelmed. That they do not have the time or money to attend PD, that PD is not accessible, that educational research is not accessible.

If schools want better teachers they have to build in paid time for their teachers to attend valuable, relevant professional development that they can use immediately. They need to provide time to workshop and talk through these ideas, not just to listen to a lecture. The ideas and approaches need to be presented in such a way that it is EASY for them to implement.

This semester I am giving a series of professional development workshops on campus. The theme is "How to Serve Our Students" (and yes, this is totally why I chose that phrasing. I like to amuse myself).

There are four parts. I've present the first two, and I'll update this post with links when I present the other two.

• Designing your syllabus
• Making your class accessible
• Supporting the whole students

• Anti-racist pedagogy, a roundtable with students

Very little in these presentations is "new" and my way of doing things is not ground breaking or unique. BUT it does take concepts and ideas that are fairly accepted in k-12 and amongst educators and presents them to professors, assuming little to no familiarity. Provides easy steps, tips, and models for them to use.

The professors and staff who have attended have found them useful.

But not many have.

So we have an issue of access.

This is why I share my materials online, maybe more people find them useful them.

But I'm also thinking of starting short blog posts that deal with every day classroom issues, short posts that cover a very narrow topic or thing that happens and provides easy answers or suggestions.

It continues to be a culture shock for me the divide between higher ed "experts in content" not "teachers" I think because even if that's a distinction you make, if you've been a professor for a while, surely you've gotta see that being a better teacher is easier on you and better for students, right? Or maybe I'm just projecting. I know these things are culture shifts and those can be hard.

Capture 1.3

Capture 1.2

First Week of Classes Spring 2020

I am not unique or special in stressing how important the first day, week, of class is.
In the years since I shifted how I approached this time- from reading the syllabus and hammering out how serious I am about rules to actually focusing on centering the students and doing the work- the difference in my classroom is night and day.

On my first day last week my composition classes walked into this:

All my classes make name tents, and usually by the end of the first week I know most names, and know all of them by the second. Since reading Being the Change, and especially since this video of Hasan Minaj's sharing about his name I approach names differently in my class. I tell them with my name I am not okay with "okay, I'm going to just call you Kate." Um, no. 
I stress to them to be proud of their names. And the slide about my name on the class info and resources shows my pride in my name.

In my composition classes I also do this the first day, asking them to write in their notebooks. It sets the tone right away that our class will center on them.

We do four assignments in composition and they get to choose.

You will have four major assignments this semester, each based on a type of writing (genre). We will cover mentor/model texts so you can see how they look, the elements that they include, and review mini-lessons to teach you the parts of the writing assignment. In class we will also check in on your progress, and the smaller skills needed to create the major writing assignment. You list of composition assignments to choose for each genre are listed here.

Major writing assignment #1: You will write a personal narrative	25%
Major writing assignment #2: You will write an informative piece	25%
Major writing assignment #3: You will write an argumentative/position paper	25%
Final Writing portfolio	25%

In all my classes we also dive right into the word. I choose poems, videos that I think represent the big ideas of the course. For these classes it was Clint Smith.

For my Gender and Lit class it was “A Song for Many Movements,” Audre Lorde (In case you don't know it)

Nobody wants to die on the way
and caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation
three planets to the left
a century of light years ago
our spices are separate and particular
but our skins sing in complimentary keys
at a quarter to eight mean time
we were telling the same stories
over and over and over.

Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall
too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence

Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.

Just like centering my students, what they want to write about, I think immediately diving into the work of the class shows them what we'll do, shows them what I'll honor, and it goes a long way.

We end the first day with them going onto Blackboard, going to our syllabus, learning how to click on the links for Class Notes and Course Information and Resources. They read through the information and do an exit ticket- one thing they like, one thing they think will help them, and any questions they have.

The proof is in the pudding- that first day, just 50 minutes, and the exit tickets tell me my class has done what I want. They tell me that they appreciate that the class seems chill, that I seem interested in them, letting them learn how they want, that the attendance policy (or lack thereof) will really help, they like the choice, that they can tell I care.

I don't have to tell them these things, they know because of how I've set up class AND because I SHOW them. I don't just say things, we do them.

I do this because it is what I have found is best for my students. I don't do it to fend off complaints (I don't get them) or to avoid plagiarism (never an issue in my classes) or grade challenges (don't get those either). 

I do this because this is the culture I want my class to have.

I want them to know their voices are valued. And, applying what I learn from all the Teachers and Scholars of Color online, when a students said they liked that I gave them a voice, I knew to say that I was going to push back on that- that no professor especially a White one could give them a voice, they ALWAYS had voices, just in my class they would be centered.

I want my students to explore, and learn, and be challenged, and to do so in a space where they will be valued.

This is not to say that the first day or even the second day was not without issues. I teach 11a Composition, 12p Capstone, 1p Gender and Lit all in a row, and that's a lot the first day with lugging supplies and books and notebooks and I was a sweaty, gross mess, which is not an ideal first impression. One classroom had the heat on, and it was 70 degrees out, so that was also not ideal. Another classroom was cramped because I didn't have time to think through the seating and arrange it quite like I wanted, although I fixed this by Friday. I did not have advanced notice that I had students who had accommodations, so I worried about that, even though I try to make ALL my classes accommodated by default, I still worried about this.

Because so many of the texts we're dealing with in Gender and Lit are hard ones, I spent a day lecturing about the harm of bias, stereotypes, and assumptions. Following models on anti-racist work, I stressed to them that in order to do this work we first had to confront where we were, honestly. So they chose one of the gender related implicit bias tests. They had to write in notebooks one instance where they were harmed by bias and when they harmed someone else. Using activities from Not Light But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom we also set guidelines for how we will deal with the horrific things in the texts we'll cover this semester, and I was explicit about the hard lines, that "kindness" was not an excuse to accept or act in racist ways, and that there would be no arguing of "both sides."

Building on this, part of Wednesday's class will center these questions for our work

We're also going to talk about how intent does not negate impact.

In all my classes I'm continuing to work on being explicit about the choices I made, how we're working, and citing the ideas and work of others.

I've also doubled down on the less grading, grading conferences this semester which is a natural outgrowth of last semester but still a big change, as is the implementation of writer's notebooks in all my upper level English classes.

I think most students really liked the first two classes. The composition students had fun with the PB & J exercise in John Warner's The Writer's Practice which is our new key text. There were arguments about the "right" way to make it, and some even texts family group text to ask questions. In gender and lit we had to set some ground rules, so a hard class, but I checked in with students after, and all seemed to think it went well.  

But not everyone's going to like my classes, or me, so there were a couple of rough spots.

That's okay.

Every class is a fresh start.

I am very excited about this semester, the classes, the students. I was very happy that I had students in my office all week, just hanging out. Even had several students from last semester just stop by to say hi, which I also love.

Today I'll lesson plan for the upcoming week, and I needed to backtrack and add some things to class notes that I did not have a chance to during the week. I've added this gem to a slide in Gender and Lit so I thought I'd share here because, well, it's the perfect look.

Or at least, it's a perfect ME look.