What would happen if instead of composing predetermined
assignments, college composition students could
compose whatever they want to compose? What would
happen if students could set their own deadlines
and grade their own work? Find out. as Assistant
Professor Mason Joiner and I explore these questions
with a few of our fellow English Department colleagues.
I'm Monica Mankin, and this is the English 101
Experiment. All right. So we are here for episode
four of the English 101 experiment. And this
is, what's the date today? The 9th already? The
9th of November. November 9th. 2023. Wow. The
semester has just been flying by, I feel like.
All right. Well, I'm Monica Mankin, Associate
Professor of English at Delgado Community College.
I am Mason Joiner, assistant professor of English
at Delgado Community College in New Orleans,
Louisiana. And I'm Audra Rouse, associate professor
of English at Delgado. And how long have you
been working at Delgado? Since 2012. So I started
as an adjunct for one semester. And then so I'm
going on like 11 years as a full -time instructor.
Yeah, I think we have the same. Backstory, like
one semester of adjuncting here and then full
-time. I think I did two academic years of adjuncting
before coming on full -time. I thank you for
joining us today. Thanks for inviting me. It's
exciting. I've been enjoying listening to information
about your experiment. Cool. So today our focus
is going to be on... I think it was like what's
fair and other questions of self -evaluation.
So we thought you would be a good person to talk
to us about this because I know last year you
and Mason were working on kind of trying to revise
our departmental rubric. We're all on the standards
and assessment committee together. Right. So
we were the collaboration. It's not collaboration.
Yes. But calibration team for a while. Yes. So.
sort of relevant? Yes, definitely relevant to
our interests. So I was hoping maybe you could
start off with giving the audience just an overview
of how you are assessing student work during
this experiment and how you are establishing
what's fair. So just kind of start with a big
picture overview of how you're doing that. Well,
big picture overview of how the students' work
is being evaluated. We're, I guess, looking at
a grade breakdown to start with. That's pretty
bird's eye. Attendance and conferences are taking
up a big chunk. I think we, off the top of my
head, I'm actually, I know it's, is it 20 % for
attendance and journal, 20 % for conferences?
10 % for their action plan, proposal, and then
that remaining 50 is their body of work, their
compositions over the course of the semester
and whatever form those projects take. Along
with a self -evaluation where they are actually
designing their own grading rubric. And then
composing a self -evaluation type of essay, reflective
self -evaluation, where they then grade their
project. Okay, and I know that... From listening
to other podcasts, students are doing different
numbers of projects. So some are taking on like
one big project while others are doing smaller,
slightly less ambitious projects. So how do you
establish what's fair in terms of the number
and ambition level of projects? have there been
any problems or did you have any worries about
some students being a lot more ambitious than
others? Because I remember from what you've talked
about before, an example of like a cookbook versus
synthesizing 50 articles on cancer research.
Throwing together some recipes with some commentary
sounds a lot easier to me. So how do you balance
that out? Well, yes, of course. I mean, even
in a traditional English 101 class, I think you've
got students who take on more than they necessarily
need to. Those ambitious students are the ones
that synthesize dozens of sources on cancer research.
I think this conversation with our students began
first by really us asking them the question you
just asked us. We asked them, What do you think
is fair? And sort of let them just really out
of curiosity to see what standards they would
pull out of the air to describe what's fair for
an English 101 class. Go ahead, Monica. Yeah,
I was just going to add to that, that part of
that conversation included what everyone else
is doing in English 101 at the college, that
these are the expectations of students in this
course. So how is this going to translate? to
this style of composing throughout the semester.
And we talked a lot about word counts and how
they're pretty useless. Most students said that
when there is a word count, that's all they care
about, and they're just trying to get to that
number of words, and so they lose sight of the
quality of what they're producing. And I think
we talked a lot about the number of hours, right,
the work hours that would go into these projects.
And that if you are talking to a classmate and
they're wanting to do, you know, a podcast on
autism and you're like, I'm going to write a
cover letter for my resume, that's an imbalance.
So how do we correct that? And they actually
really helped each other. thinking about that
at the beginning. Now that we're kind of wrapping
things up, there are some concerns, but is there
anything else to the fairness question that you
want? I think this, for me, kind of feeds into
this self -evaluation part. My students today
just started generating thoughts for their self
-evaluation in their journal based on the questionnaire
that I gave them. One of the questions was, you
know, would you say the amount of work you compose
this semester exceeds, equals, falls below, or
falls far below what your classmates, the amount
of work your classmates composed? And so I think
we're still addressing the fairness question,
even in their self -evaluation, encouraging,
you know, honesty, integrity, accountability
for what, how much work have you done, and do
you think it's enough? Right. And I circle actually
circled that it was the third question on your
list of questions that I added to that was just
the straightforward. Did you complete what you
set out to do? Because I do have a couple of
students and it's really only two, literally
a couple who haven't even started the second
project and their first project wasn't. Super
demanding, like it really didn't need 12 weeks.
So we're going to have to have that conversation
about how, you know, this is not this 50 percent
of your grade is probably not going to be an
A. And so, yeah, we're going to have some hard
conversations happening. I think starting having
those hard conversations all together helps lay
a foundation to make the individual conversations
easier. Last class, we'd started by saying, think
about the body of work that earns an A in this
course and describe that body of work. Think
about the body of work that earns a B, that earns
a C. Describe that body of work. And so then
it was really the students telling me what a
C looks like. sort of taking ownership over,
well, that kind of describes what I've done.
So sort of laying the foundation there for maybe
I'm going to get a C in this class. Okay, great.
So a lot of it is about community and kind of
setting the standards together. I was actually
wondering about that a lot. This goes a little
bit off of the idea of assessment, but since
everybody's doing their own individual projects,
like having enough commonality to be able to
evaluate each other's or give feedback or um
so I was just kind of wondering like how do you
keep the social component um of the course and
it sounds like a lot of that does have to do
with assessment and kind of establishing the
class norm like or the class expectation a lot
of that energy was spent in the first few weeks
establishing the class norms, expectations, class
community, you know, what we expect of each other.
Yeah. And I think that does pay off further down
the line. Yeah. And having the opportunity for
them to all share what they're working on throughout
the entire semester, like the workshopping that
we've done. And it's like, I don't like we, I
have not been using educational. Like I don't,
we don't talk about assessment or grading. We
talk about feedback. We talk about the quality
of the text. We talk about, you know, how do
we develop this or how do we sharpen the language
or the style? Because we did so much practice
at the beginning that the students all have that
in common to be able to make, to draw from that,
to make suggestions, no matter the type of composition
that they're putting forth for feedback. And
because everyone's projects vary so highly, it
does leave a lot more room in discussion and
workshop to focus on the purpose of a particular
text and the audience and letting the author's
purpose and the author's target audience sort
of guide what your feedback should be for each
other. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. And how
do you tie that all into the SLOs for the course?
How do you make sure that you're keeping on track
with that? I'm just going to say that has been
one of the struggles this semester. And I think
we've had a lot of conversations, Mason and I
have, about when we do this again, how do we
fold in? I think it's just more of the academic
part of it. But I think there's still a lot of
academic work that's been done. And I think especially
with the self -evaluation essay as the final
culminating text that they produce, that they
are, I mean, they have been practicing citation.
They're very concerned about documenting sources.
I think the way that our SLOs are written, there
is a lot of... there's some wiggle room like
everything doesn't have to be an essay to assess
whether a student can have an idea and support
an idea or achieve a purpose or appeal to a specific
audience like those things are happening and
so they're that's pretty clear I feel like those
SLOs can be checked off but it is the uh you
know um I guess did have has anyone had to write
an MLA paper no but I mean, some of them are
doing that, but it's not like a requirement.
So I can see how like that might cause trouble.
But we are addressing that and coming up with
ways to kind of integrate that better into the
second round of this experiment in the spring.
Yeah. And we've had we have at least had the
position from from early on that they are doing
a lot of academic kind of work. Like you mentioned,
the self -evaluation is ultimately very academic.
And the action plan that they write to sort of
moderate the timeline of their projects is at
least a very professional text, if not strictly
academic. It's certainly a professional text
that they're creating. Yeah, and I think that
applies. Yeah, and I think that's a very transferable
skill to be able to take that. process and that
type of composition that we all created and I
mean use that again in a class where you are
going to maybe be asked to compose a midterm
paper or a final paper it's a big project and
you need to break it down and you need to manage
your time like I think that was one of the benefits
of doing that is that it really made that more
concrete for a lot of students instead of me
saying okay we need to do this by this time they
had to really think carefully about their lives
and their schedules and and map that out themselves.
Yeah, I think we're both looking for ways to
integrate academic writing into the philosophy
of this course more. But I think it's also important
to remember that English 101 is an introduction
to that. I think English 102 is where we really
go deep with that kind of writing. And so students,
I think my students will leave with... what they
need to be in a good place to start 102. It's
not like they've never heard of citing and documenting
sources or, you know, they've never heard of
how to organize an essay or what the purpose
of the paragraph, all those things are still
happening. They're just, they just look very
different. So I could see how that might make
people nervous. Like, oh, they're just, they're
just writing poetry and keeping journals. They're
not doing anything they're supposed to be doing
in 101. But I think it's just a very different
approach. getting students to actually care about
what they're doing in a composition class. That's
a much harder battle to win is teaching how to
care about what you're writing. So just a logistical
question. Have you looked at any finished projects
yet? Or are you going to wait until the end?
Because I see their final... Self -evaluation,
that's going to include all the work that they've
done. So are you sort of waiting until the end
to look at everything that they've done? Or have
you been sort of checking in and making sure
about the quality all along? I would say, yeah,
we're seeing rough drafts throughout. I wouldn't
say we're seeing anything final throughout because
I think we're also encouraging them to. Keep
working. Keep working on it, right? There's always
more improvement to be made. I do have students
that did successfully complete a first project
and then moved on to a second one. And so, yes,
I have seen some final projects. We all agreed
when we were making our timelines that we would
be delivering our texts to their audiences no
later than the 20th. So this next week, tomorrow,
in fact, in class, we're going to talk about
how do we do that. And so some students. their
delivery will be to submit their work to images.
Some students, like the student who did the cancer
research, she wants to submit that to a journal.
So I'm going to help her figure out that process.
We've created a space also, I think. In progress.
Yeah, it's in progress, but a space for students
to be able to publish. And of course, that's
going to include, it has to meet standards just
like it would for any publication. It can't just
be like, here's my shitty first draft for this.
for this publication so i think so like it's
coming together but there's there are still things
that i'm concerned about as far as like and i
asked mason i think it was yesterday or the day
before it's all running together um but just
like what do you do when you have a student who
their work is not really deliverable yet Right.
I can't I can't really deliver it to an audience
because it's not ready. And so I'm still trying
to sort out that question. And I think maybe
that's even a question to ask the students. Like
what, you know, what is the result of that? It
brings us to the conversation with our students
of what does it mean for a text to be ready for
its audience? Yeah. Which is an interesting conversation
to have. Yeah. And I don't think I mean, I think
it's important for them to understand like this
is. This is a place to be practicing these things.
So if you didn't succeed at making it ready,
you know, I don't think you should fail. But
like, but what what does that mean for your grade?
What does that mean for your learning process?
What does that mean for the future courses you're
going to take? That was one of my questions was,
are there projects going to be graded? Do you
feel like they're going to? the final grade for
the project portion of the grade, do you think
that that will be more based on effort or the
actual quality of the work? Or how will that
balance out? Well, I think for me, I'm expecting
a lot of it to depend on... I'm really curious
to see, A, how they score their own compositions
using the rubrics they've designed. And I'm interested
in seeing how honest they are in their evaluations
of themselves. I feel like integrity in those
two parts will play a lot into it for me, I think.
I think I'm focusing more on the quality, the
product, because I think the effort was in showing
up to your conferences and showing up to class
and participating in what we were doing in class.
making the most of workshop, taking advantage
of all of the processes that we participated
in together. So I think really for me, I want
to see them grade it based on what it is, not
how much time they put into it or what they feel.
Because we have kind of different guidelines,
I guess, for our students. I definitely want
them to... I had them actually do a social annotation
of our department rubric. And we talked a lot
about, like, well, what do these qualities mean?
And then how would, you know, what language can
you borrow from this to help build your own rubric?
Because, I mean, if you're not all writing this
particular kind of... essay the language doesn't
necessarily translate very well but having I'm
having them gonna they're gonna create their
own actual rubric and I'm gonna be very much
like this is about the actual product that you
created so you have to put that aside and actually
I was having a conference with one of my students
today And I've been kind of as we've as I've
introduced that and I'm conferencing, I've been
asking them, you know, how are you feeling about
having to grade yourself? You know, and she was
like, actually, like, I think I'm going to just
like after I finish, I'm just going to put it
all away. And then I'm going to try to, like,
look at it like I didn't write it and try to
be objective. And I'm like, that's exactly what
I want you to do. So it was good to hear that,
you know, and just kind of an informal discussion
about it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking forward to
those conversations. as well. And I think and
hope that at least many of the students will
surprise me with how objective they are about
their own writing. I hope, yeah. Can you talk
more about having students design their own rubrics?
Are you both doing that? Yes. So I didn't do
the social annotation of the existing departmental
rubric. Well, yeah, so I had them start by thinking
about, for each of their projects, the type of
composition that it is, and then writing in their
journals a list of qualities that make that type
of composition strong. And then from those qualities,
they draw out some criteria. And then, yeah,
so for... For each criteria, then I'm asking,
so we sort of did this practice already of describing
the body of work that earns an A, and now they're
going to say, it's going to be like describe
an article that has an A in presentation, and
what does a B look like in presentation, and
so forth. So these are the criteria that they've
come up with, and I'm just sort of guiding. guiding
their criteria. I think if there's something
that I think they need to add, I contribute my
thoughts. And then in the final conference as
well, I might say, I feel like, you know, for
this rubric, you might have also considered,
I don't know, language clarity. And what would
you have scored had that been on your rubric?
Stuff like that. So when you say presentation,
are you talking about like the document formatting?
Like, is that what you mean? That's a kind of
presentation. Yeah. How do they know what the
sort of platonic ideal of their genre or whatever
their project is? Do you have them find, here's
an example of a great cookbook that I can use
as a model? Or like, how do they know what those
qualities are? Well, I think in conference leading
up to this point, we've talked about examples
and trying to emulate an example. That sort of
ties into the imitation part of the course. And
so if you're writing a cookbook, let's just Google
image some cookbook pages. And here's what this
recipe looks like in this cookbook. Compare that
to what you've got in this Google Doc. How can
you make this, if you like the way this looks,
how can you make this look more like that? Stuff
like that. And also the clarity of the writing.
The cookbook particularly was interesting to
workshop because it brought up a lot of things
like the need to pay attention to detail. You
can't just... make stuff up when you're giving
someone a recipe and your instructions have to
be very clear and you almost have to write it
like the person is an idiot and they don't know,
you know, they've never cooked a day in their
lives. So, um, yeah, I think a lot of it came
up. It's come up. over the course of the term.
Like when they were first thinking about what
they wanted to compose, I introduced them to
research. We used the databases. We talked about
why we might want to prefer to use those instead
of Google to sort of learn about our subject
if we want to become an expert on something or
to learn about the genre that we're interested
in. And so they... kind of gathered some sources
I also put together some guidelines based on
like once I heard what everybody was interested
in I built out some resources for each of those
that did include examples of things so that they
would have an idea of what to aim for and then
and then as we've workshopped it's just kind
of come up again as a case -by -case basis of
like well what makes a narrative you know, a
strong narrative effective? What makes a short
story effective? How can we make sure that this
person isn't plagiarizing these sources? So I
thought it was interesting that you did incorporate
the departmental rubric a little bit. How did
that work out? Did the students end up using,
just out of curiosity, a lot from the rubric
or no? So we've only just taken that first step.
And next week, we're going to spend a lot more
time crafting their rubrics. I really, this week,
I just want to to plant the seeds like you need
to start thinking about this here's how everyone
else is going to be graded this is the language
our department uses to talk about writing which
I think they need to know that moving on right
like anyway so um it was a it was a good conversation
like we talked about what holistic means especially
because i have a lot of english language learner
students and they they worry so much about like
is my grammar gonna mean i get an f you know
it's like well not if we're looking at it holistically
but we talked about how these criteria, while
we're separating them, they all work together
so that, you know, if your language is a hot
mess, your purpose isn't clear. So we had a good
talk about all of that. And I think, I'm hoping,
you know, that they're, I'm hoping they're thinking
about it when we're not together, but I don't
know if they are. So we'll see next week how
it develops. But I think it was a good exercise
in just thinking about criteria that they could
use and then also just understanding how your
teachers are going to look at your work. Okay,
so I have a question. I know you probably haven't
dealt with this yet because you haven't done
the self -evaluation yet, but at the end, what
will you do if a student's self -assessment differs
wildly from your assessment of their work? I
think both Monica and I have addressed directly
with our students that At the end of the day,
it's still our decision. We want to make this
as co -evaluation as possible with each student.
But if it comes down to a wild disagreement between
the quality of the work, we're going to make
the final decision ourselves. And having done
I haven't done it like in the context of this
kind of experiment, but I do have my students
self -evaluate a lot at the end of the semester.
So I've already had some practice with those
conversations of like, no, actually, no. And
it's just, you know, I think. Most students do
rise to the occasion of being able to reflect
and evaluate themselves in an honest way. But
sometimes you just have that student that they
haven't been paying attention to anything all
semester. So, of course, they're wildly out of
line with their self -assessment. And that's
a lesson that they still have to learn. Sometimes
by repeating the course. So but I don't know
my feeling because I feel like I've gotten to
know my students so much better this semester
than ever before. And I just don't foresee that
much discrepancy. I think there are going to
be some realizations in the next week that are
going to help some of them understand that. Like,
no, they probably didn't. Their product probably
doesn't earn an A. But. You know, we'll cross
those bridges as we come to them. Yeah. Yeah.
I know. It's like we're so close to the end,
but I feel like there's still so many like question
marks. It's the fun of doing these podcasts as
we go. I know. Yeah. Yeah. I can't wait to find
out how it all turns out in the end. Neither
can we. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you very
much, Audra, for joining us today. Oh, thanks
for having me. Thank you. Thank you, listener.
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the
English 101 Experiment. Special thanks to Christopher
Nicotera, Instructor of Music Business at Delgado
Community College, for his recording assistance.
All music heard during this episode comes from
the free music archive. Specific titles and artists
are listed on the English 101 Experiment website.