Handout for Session A37, NCTE 2004 Convention

Significant Partners in Cyburbia: College Teacher Certification Students Responding to High School Writers Via Email

Michael Day

Northern Illinois University

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Practical Application at Last! The Online College-High School Connection

Excerpted from “Language Arts Online – Technological Literacy in the Secondary Language Arts Classroom,” a chapter in Strategic Alliances to Improve Secondary Mathematics, Science, Technology, and English Education (AAHE, 2004).

Although I had originally planned an exchange between Dan Warlop’s senior English classes and tutors in NIU’s writing center, at some time between the class visit and the time I wrote the module, I realized that this would be an appropriate learning experience for my English 300C Advanced Composition for Teacher Certification Class. After having seen the range of students in Dan’s classes at Auburn High School, I thought that my students at NIU might benefit from an assignment that would ask them to respond to writing from the sort of students they might eventually encounter in their teaching assignments. I created a module (see appendix 2) planning out how the exchange might look the following fall. Crucial to this module, in the eyes of the grant coordinators, was my attention to district standards in the plan, so I was careful to explain how the exchange would help students meet a particular standard requiring them to “apply acquired information, concepts, and ideas to communicate in a variety of formats.” Of course, I was also mindful of a now generally accepted principle, that computer networks allow students to contact and communicate with outside audiences whose very presence may change their commitment and attention to their writing, because that writing is now truly public. In this exchange, then, I reasoned that we had the potential to strongly influence the attitudes of both groups of students toward writing by giving them audiences other than their teacher for their written work/communication.

Throughout the spring of 2001, Dan and I exchanged ideas to learn more about each other, and the learning environments of our students. I learned that Dan was passionately committed to the idea of creating a writing center at his school, and encouraged him to work with Brad Peters, our NIU Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum Director on this idea. At one point Dan stated that he wanted Auburn High School students to be able to post work at an NIU writing center site, so that they could get feedback from trained professionals. With an extra planning period from his school, he worked on this idea until it became evident that the budget would not allow it. However, he remained enthusiastic about our anticipated class exchange, and in August 2001 we began serious planning of the logistics.

The most serious problem for us was the fact that the Rockford school district would not allow students, even seniors, to have email accounts that they could use at school. So, that first semester, Dan collected copies of his students’ essays on Beowulf and emailed them to me along with questions from the students about how to improve their essays. But another big problem made it even more difficult and time consuming for Dan; some of his students did not have access to computers to draft their Beowulf papers, so he ended up scanning them in and sending them to me as attachments. Further, since he sent the twenty or so papers directly to me, I was faced with the task of distributing them to my students. Even with all this work to do, Dan and I persisted, and by mid-semester had collected and distributed his students’ papers to mine. Because the high school students could not directly email my students, after determining who would respond to whom, I had to email instructions to each of my students along with the high school students’ scanned or word-processed papers as attachments. A few of my students were unable to open the attachments or lost my messages, meaning that I had to track down the right files and resend them.

Upon seeing the level of work from the senior English students, some of my students expressed shock to me because they had expected lengthier papers with more coherence and mechanical correctness. Yet I knew that it was good for them to see what they might encounter on the job in just a few short years if they made it through teacher certification. I coached them on how to respond with a few model comments and some suggestions for the kinds of phrases that might be the most encouraging to their high school counterparts. Although there were a few of my students who didn’t respond with very helpful or lengthy comments, for the most part, the twenty-two students replied to their high school counterparts with candor, specific advice, and a great deal of encouragement. Following are just a few examples of the range and kind of comments they made, both in fall 2001 and spring 2002.

Great Beowulf paper! I remember reading it in high school. It was tough poem but you did a great job explaining the theme.

I have just a few suggestions for you. Make sure you go back over your final draft a couple of extra times to make sure you don't have any spelling errors, and to make sure that you are using good punctuation. You had some good transitions between paragraphs. Sometimes I have a hard time with them too. Try to end a paragraph in a way that will be an easy lead into the next paragraph. For example, at the end of your first paragraph you say that Grendel died in his den. If you add one more sentence to that paragraph such as "Grendel's mother was angry and wanted revenge," it would make the transition into your next paragraph much smoother. Finding good transitions is similar to putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You have to make each piece fit so the final product looks right. In writing, you have to make each paragraph fit together so the final draft looks right.

Good luck on your next paper, you are doing great!

…

At the bottom of your paper, you asked the question, "How could I make this longer with more information?" My suggestion would be to develop a thesis statement about the themes you mentioned (loyalty and power) and how Macbeth's character resembles loyalty and power. To make this paper longer, write about different scenes in the play (like you have already begun), and then apply these scenes to support your thesis statement. You have a lot of great examples here; the next step would be to expand on those ideas and formulate a thesis statement that would tie all of these scenes together.

I hope these suggestions have helped you. Good luck with future papers and

the rest of the semester!

…

Also, here are some other pointers for your paper:

--avoid using the second person point of view (the use of "you")

--introduce your quotes (i.e. "According to _____")

Good luck with your paper and don't forget to email me if you need extra help.

…

I am not completely aware of what goes on in your class, so I am not totally sure what your teacher expects or how he grades. Good luck on this assignment and all future essays you write. Remember, I still make mistakes in my writing and have to constantly proofread.

…

Since I was giving my students credit for responding to the high school students, I asked them to copy their messages to me. Reading through their responses, I was impressed not only at the detail of advice that they had to offer, but also the sort of comradeship they displayed toward their counterparts. They faithfully answered the sometimes vague questions that the students send along with their essays, they always included encouraging words, and often ended their messages with a friendly closing such as “Your NIU buddy.” In short, they tried to offer some human element, a bit of sharing about themselves and their own lives, and/or their own difficulties with writing, with the high school students.

The second semester of the exchange, spring 2002, we managed to streamline the process somewhat by having Dan send the students’ draft research papers directly to my teacher certification students’ email accounts. My students then send their comments to Dan, who distributed them back to his students. Of course, I had everything copied to me so that I could help them with problem cases and give my students credit for their work. This time, we were able to get Dan’s paper assignment to show my students beforehand, so they knew approximately what to expect and how to coach Dan’s students to meet his expectations. We were also tantalized by the Rockford school district with the possibility of getting just ONE email address to cover all of Dan’s students. But even that didn’t end up becoming a reality. Because we had learned from our mistakes, Dan and I made the entire process run a bit more smoothly, with better results from all involved. Late in the semester, in an email message appropriately titled “trench warfare,” I was saddened to learn that Dan found that he had had to fail about 50% of the papers he received because of plagiarism. Since both of us are adept at identifying plagiarism from the Web, instead of concentrating on the symptoms, we took this occasion to diagnose the sources of the problem discuss more proactive approaches that he might take with preventing plagiarism on his research paper assignment.

I would have continued this exchange in following semesters, but in spring 2002 I was asked to direct NIU’s First-Year Composition Program, beginning that summer. However, since I was eager to have the correspondence maintained on some level, I suggested to my colleagues, Susan Callahan and Larry Johannessen, that they might want to try it out with their Teaching of Writing classes in the upcoming academic year. I offered to consult with them, be an intermediary, and “direct traffic” if they would get their teacher certification students involved. Unfortunately, our teacher certification faculty members are extremely busy, with new standards and requirements being handed down from university and state accrediting bodies almost daily, so Susan and Larry were not able to try out the exchange until spring 2003. It was at this point that we finally discovered a much more efficient method of having students from both groups share their work and comments online. As mentioned above, the NIU English Department uses commercial software called WebBoard to give all English classes online discussion spaces. Luckily, even with Bess protective software filtering connections, students at Auburn High School can access our WebBoards on the World Wide Web, so it was easy to create a new WebBoard that would be used solely for the exchange.[1]

Larry participated in all of the preparatory discussions for the spring 2003 exchange, but because of a very tight schedule and timing in his class that did not meet the timing of Dan’s students posting their papers to WebBoard, Larry was unable to have his class be part of the collaboration. Susan, however, followed most of the plan that we had devised for the semester. This plan was more elaborate than the one we had previously followed because it required the NIU students to ask questions of Dan, and Dan to provide a rubric for evaluating his students’ work along with the assignment itself. Because Susan’s class was for more advanced teacher certification students and focused on the teaching of writing (not just advanced writing itself, as my class had), she expected that their responses to the Auburn students would be both helpful and detailed. However, not all of her students, including several graduate students, were able to adopt the appropriate tone and vocabulary level to really help the high school students. For good reasons, including the fact that her students did not have time to evaluate such long drafts of research papers and the fact that the high school and college semester schedules did not mesh very well, Susan felt that her results were mixed and that we would have to rethink our plan.

Here is a sample of the Auburn High School students’ comments on the exchange:

"By sending my paper to NIU, it gave me an opportunity to see how other ideas could help me out. The only thing that was a downfall was that it took a long time to receive any information regarding my paper. If the process was faster, it would be a good thing to continue."

“[name omitted], Thank you very much for the encouraging words you gave me on my Macbeth paper. The advice you gave me was very useful and helpful and your encouraging words make me more interested in writing. Someday you will be an excellent English teacher like Mr. Warlop."

"Dear NIU, I am writing concerning the comments you suggested to Mr. Warlop's English class. We enjoyed the information a lot. It gave us the opportunity to learn our flaws in writing and correct our papers. Thank you very much and please feel free to advise us again anytime."

Indeed, according to Dan, his students very much appreciated the feedback, but the less accomplished writers had some difficulty following the advice because they did not understand the concept and terminology used by my students very well. Still, many students did revise according to the comments sent to them, thus improving their papers. But most importantly, they received attention to their writing from helpers far removed from the immediate context of their educational setting: the four walls and bell-punctuated class periods of the average American high school. As Ted Nellen and others have argued, the mere presence and occasional comments of an outside “telementor” can do more to motivate students to care about their writing than any amount of written or oral commenting from their teacher (Nellen 224-225). Hopefully, this encounter with college students will spur the high school students to understand that writing occurs within a social context, and is meant for an audience who will read and respond to it. Of course, we might ask why, if the social context is so important, do we still ask students in high school and college to write the “academic” essay analyzing a work of literature? What sort of world are we preparing high school students for? Success in academia or success in life and on the job? These are questions that might in the future lead us to favor more direct exchanges of ideas, such as letters about literary works and the ideas they represent, between high school and college students.

The college students’ responses to the exchange were not overwhelmingly positive, but most indicated in their end-of-course evaluation comments that the assignment had been effective in helping them understand how to comment on secondary school student writing. A few expressed shock at the low quality and minimal efforts of the high school students (“A real life experience shocker!”), but others admitted that the exchange helped them “understand what high school writing was like and how to grade it.” Still others expressed appreciation for having been given the opportunity and challenge to work with students much like the students they would eventually teach. One student commented that it “put me in a situation I was unused to” but that it was “fun.” Another said “I loved corresponding with high school students about papers! It was nice to be in contact with actual high school students.” It is interesting to note that even though the earlier class (fall 2001) should have had a harder time because we had not planned for all the problems, they tended to say that they appreciated it more than the later class (spring 2002). Overall, though some of the teacher certification students complained about our adding even more to their heavy workloads, most could see the benefit of the exchange in preparing them for responding to secondary school students’ writing.

In the future, I would like to expand these exchanges to other high schools and other college teacher certification programs. I have had at least a dozen inquiries from high school teachers who would like to have outside readers respond to their students work. However, the problem is in finding certification faculty who can make time for such activities in an already crammed curriculum. Perhaps it would be possible for just a few students in several classes to work on informal exchanges with secondary school students for extra credit. Or, as Dan and I had speculated early on in the planning process, such an exchange might be ideal for students gaining experience as writing center tutors. As part of their preparation, they might be expected to respond to a certain number of secondary students online. Indeed, in the early to mid 1990s, the idea of the Online Writing Laboratory (OWL) took off at many institutions, notably Purdue University. It would not be unreasonable for other writing centers to implement some forms of online feedback on written work for secondary students. Dan and I will most likely regroup and begin to explore this possibility with the director of NIU’s University Writing Center.

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[1] At the time of writing, this board was still available for guest login at http://www.engl.niu.edu:88/~rfd_tcert.