Bridging the Gap Between Teacher and Student: How my teaching has changed since I've returned to school

By Steffanie Triller Fry

This January, I returned to school full-time to earn an MFA in Creative Writing. This is a degree that I had coveted for more than a decade, and that I finally decided I was ready to earn. My program is a low-residency distance-learning program, so I attend seminars on campus for ten days in January and June, and submit the rest of my work via email to my faculty mentors and instructors.

            On the fifth day of our first residency, my new mentor, a published writer whose work I knew, led a workshop on my own fiction submission. She began by asking each person in the workshop what my story was about. She then told me what she thought my story was about, and went through it page by page, pointing out the character details, descriptions, and turns of phrase that didn’t work. “I think you can keep about 30% of this story,” she told me.

            By the time the critique was over, I knew what I needed to work on, but I did not know how to do it well, or if I had ever done it well. Yesterday, I prepared my third submission for this same mentor. My work was due at midnight, and I turned it in at midnight. Stymied by anxiety, I kept making revisions to my fiction moments before it was due. Plagued with procrastination, I had only begun the story days before, even though I had a month to work on it.

            As an adult student, I bear much resemblance to our own SNL students. Though I regularly tell students to begin writing early, to explore various techniques for revision until they find what works, and to consider my feedback when they revise, I find it challenging to follow this same guidance from my own instructors.

            With a different instructor, I’m taking an interdisciplinary studies course in travel writing. Our main assignment is to “write a travel story.” That’s it. That’s the assignment: “Write a travel story.” There is no word count, page limit, or suggested content. In the course we are learning the elements of a good travel story. We are reading multiple examples of published travel stories. We submit drafts and receive feedback. Some of my feedback includes comments like: “delete,” “change to,” “avoid dangling modifier,” “comma,” “this sentence is awkward and long.” Comments like “delete” and “dangling modifier” remind me of tendencies I am already aware of: to be unnecessarily wordy and to misplace my modifiers. But comments like “change to,” of which there are many, confuse me. These are edits; I will make them gladly, easily, but I will struggle to learn from them. Moreover, I struggle to see how these in-line edits connect to the instructor’s narrative feedback: that I need more personal information and a theme in my story. This feedback is painfully familiar: I offer it on nearly every student draft! But, I’m not sure which is more important or more humbling: my need to find a central theme in my piece or my need to be less lazy about my grammar.

            I’m no neurologist, but I suspect that we use a vastly different part of our brain when we wear our teaching hats from the part we use when we wear our student hats. As I co-exist in the roles of both teacher and student, I’ve realized that I need to bridge the gap between teaching and learning for my adult students; moreover, I need to heed my own advice and be my own best instructor. After all, at SNL we operate on a definition of learning that requires the student to take what they already know and apply it to future situations. The more we can teach students how we teach, and how they can teach themselves, the better they will learn.

            To better help students to teach themselves, here are three specific ways my teaching has changed since I have also returned to being a student:

• I do more meta-teaching.

I have theories behind why I do what I do, and I share them with students. On first drafts, for example, I offer little feedback, most of it narrative. I prepare students for this, and teach them beforehand how to read and use this feedback.

• When I offer both narrative and in-text feedback, I coordinate the two rather than duplicating my efforts.

So that a student, like me in my travel writing class, does not get a different message from the narrative feedback and the comments, I consider how I can offer comments that enable the student to enact the revisions suggested in the narrative feedback. I reserve highlighting for grammar errors, so that students can better separate the local revisions from the global revisions.

• I write clear assignments; or, if I want to leave part of the assignment up to the students’ discretion, I explain why.

As an adult student, I find myself in a tender relationship with my instructors. While they may not have more knowledge than me about writing, they have had more experience and more success with their skill. Leaving an assignment “open” respects that knowledge that students already have, if they are told why the assignment is being left open in the first place. This is different from failing to give clear guidelines and then marking a student down afterwards because they failed to meet invisible requirements.

An SNL Graduate's Story

The following email arrived at SNL this morning: 

I am a graduate of DePaul SNL 2009,  and I wanted to send a note of thanks and let you know how my DePaul L-7 Collaborative Learning Class has served me.

My mother passed away 3 years ago and afterwards my 4 sisters and I began really talking about our memories of growning up, etc.   We decided to write a book.   I am the youngest so I would begin each chapter and then email it to my other sisters.  They would then write their parts and send back to me.  I would then compile everything together.

We wrote the whole book this way so I was the only one to see it all till it was finished.  After it was done we submitted it and had it published.  We officially released the book on December 18, 2012 and so far have seen great sales and have really connected with people.

I do not think I would have had the confidence and ability to do this project has it not been for my DePaul Education.

Anita Lewis

Proud SNL grad.

Co-Author of 

Fluffy, Funny, and Fabulous: A Tale of Five Sisters

To learn more about Anita's story, see www.thefivesisters.net

Dry-Erase Dictator: Reflections on Student Comfort in Writing Workshop

By Nicholas Hayes

Sometimes on Sunday mornings, I wake naturally. My partner snores gently. A cat stretches over my chest and belly. Another cat, balled tight, leans against my calf. In these moments, I don't have to worry about my inadequate health insurance or my student loans. These mornings are the navel of my world. Everything on the queen-sized mattress seems right. In these moments, my comfort is supreme. But eventually, inevitably, the adorable ball of fur will swat the cat on my chest. They will hiss and spit. Eventually, inevitably, I have to think about my finances. I have to get out of bed.

            Students who have enrolled in Writing Workshop are often running from the bad dreams of previous academic experience or doubt in their own academic ability. Their nerves can be so frayed that I find myself wanting to create the academic equivalent of the Sunday morning bed for them. I don't want them to worry. I just want them to sit in the classroom, talk with each other, and find that this can be a comfortable environment.

            In the classroom, I want students to know they are not alone. I talk to them about my own struggles with writing. At times, I will even show them drafts of papers I am writing. I show them the notes I make on my work. I point out the errors I have made. I insist that they are not alone. Most people have made the same bed and take the same steps to get out of it. I invite students to talk about their writing difficulties. They see they are not alone. I try to show them they do not have to be uncomfortable when they write or when they are in class.

Having created this environment, many students find ease in silence when I ask a question or request a volunteer for peer review. Some think they can hide in the silence. But I break this silence by saying I will take "voluntary volunteers first, and then involuntary volunteers." Everyone needs to participate not because of some grading checklist, but because attempting to answer and finding the confidence and comfort to share work is the only way to build a worthwhile learning experience. Some students try to bargain. They'll share their work if they can do it anonymously, but I have tried to do this in the past. And when their classmates were unshackled by anonymity, their feedback was blunter and the anonymous students' found less comfort than in the open peer review.

Certainly, comfort is not always conducive to learning.

From my own educational experience, I learned the most from the teachers who made me uncomfortable. Those instructors who inhabited tiny, book-cluttered offices would clear a small square on their desks so that I could set my work out for them to scrutinize. If my reasoning or translations were unsound, Dr. B would sigh, "Nicholas, I didn't think you were any idiot but [the quality of that thought was lacking.]" In graduate school, one of my advisors would disdainfully slide my short stories back to me. She grit her teeth and made me map out each sentence and explain how the syntax fit the nature of the story. The anxiety from these experiences still makes me want to vomit. But the lessons I gleaned from these experiences are clear and indelible. When students ask me to hit the metaphorical snooze well past the time we need to be challenged, I imagine Dr. B whispering in my ear to stay firm for the students' sake. This academic daimon knows I must demand clearer thinking and finer phrasing. I push (but with a softer touch than Dr. B could manage.)

A vocal minority of students who believe they can only learn from a dry-erase dictator armed with a free-flowing red pen complicates this reflection. These students think education is to be battle hardened. But they miss out on the fact we need to know we belong. At times, I have to send these students to their metaphorical beds to look at the good work they have done. 

Workshop more than other classes requires balance between comfort and challenge. So many students have been traumatized by past educational experiences that they are reluctant to attempt writing. Providing an environment in which they can salve their wounds is the first step in getting them on track. Of course, once students know they can be comfortable they need to start the difficult task of writing. Finding this balance changes from class to class, and it requires instructors to use the soft skills of reading a room. Most importantly it requires instructors to remember Writing Workshop prepares students to find comfort in an academic community that will challenge them.

Writing Groups at Suburban Campuses

The University Center for Writing-based Learning (UCWbL) offers writing groups at our suburban campuses on Saturdays. Writing Groups provide an opportunity for you to share your writing with others, and to give and receive feedback on it.

To learn more about Writing Groups and the UCWbL Writing Group Leaders, visit the links below:

Writing Groups
http://condor.depaul.edu/writing/what/WG/index.html

Marianne – Naperville
http://condor.depaul.edu/writing/who/staff_profiles/marianne_b.html

Time/Place: Room 219/Saturdays from 10:00-11:30 a.m.

Martina – O’Hare
http://condor.depaul.edu/writing/who/staff_profiles/martina_m.html

Time/Place: Room 307/Saturdays from 10:00-11:30 a.m.

Quintin – Oak Forest
http://condor.depaul.edu/writing/who/staff_profiles/quintin_c.html

Time/Place: DePaul Foyer/Saturdays 10:00-11:30 a.m.