Tag: Writing

  • Embracing complexity in writing instruction

    Embracing complexity in writing instruction

    Key points:

    Early in our careers, when we were fresh-faced and idealistic (we still are!) the prepackaged curriculum and the advice of more experienced colleagues was the go-to resource. Largely, we were advised that teaching writing was a simple matter of having students walk through and complete organizers, spending about one day for each “stage” of the writing process. At the end of the writing unit, students had finished their compositions–the standardized, boring, recreated ideas that we taught them to write.

    As we matured and grew as teachers of writing, we learned that teaching writing in such simplistic ways may be easier, but it was not actually teaching students to be writers. We learned with time and experience that writing instruction is a complex task within a complex system.

    Complex systems and wicked problems

    Complexity as it is applied to composition instruction recognizes that there is more than just a linear relationship between the student, the teacher, and the composition. It juggles the experiences of individual composers, characteristics of genre, availability of resources, assignment and individual goals, and constraints of composing environments. As with other complex systems and processes, it is non-linear, self-organizing, and unpredictable (Waltuck, 2012).

    Complex systems are wicked in their complexity; therefore, wicked problems cannot be solved by simple solutions. Wicked problems are emergent and generative; they are nonlinear as they do not follow a straight path or necessarily have a clear cause-and-effect relationship. They are self-organizing, evolving and changing over time through the interactions of various elements. They are unpredictable and therefore difficult to anticipate how they will unfold or what the consequences of any intervention might be. Finally, they are often interconnected, as they are symptoms of other problems. In essence, a wicked problem is a complex issue embedded in a dynamic system (Rittel & Webber, 1973).

    Writing formulas are wicked

    As formulaic writing has become and remains prevalent in instruction and classroom writing activity, graphic organizers and structural guides, which were introduced as a tool to support acts of writing, have become a wicked problem of formula; the resource facilitating process has become the focus of product. High-stakes standardized assessment has led to a focus on compliance, production, and quality control, which has encouraged the use of formulas to simplify and standardize writing instruction, the student writing produced, and the process of evaluation of student work. Standardization may improve test scores in certain situations, but does not necessarily improve learning. Teachers resort to short, formulaic writing to help students get through material more quickly as well as data and assessment compliance. This serves to not only create product-oriented instruction, but a false dichotomy between process and product, ignoring the complex thinking and design that goes into writing.

    As a result of such a narrow view of and limited focus on writing process and purpose, formulas have been shown to constrain thinking and limit creativity by prioritizing product over the composing process. The five-paragraph essay, specifically, is a structure that hinders authentic composing because it doesn’t allow for the “associative leaps” between ideas that come about in less constrained writing. Formulas undermine student agency by limiting writers’ abilities to express their unique voices because of over-reliance on rigid structures (Campbell, 2014; Lannin & Fox, 2010; Rico, 1988).

    An objective process lens: A wicked solution

    The use of writing formulas grew from a well-intentioned desire to improve student writing, but ultimately creates a system that is out of balance, lacking the flexibility to respond to a system that is constantly evolving. To address this, we advocate for shifting away from rigid formulas and towards a design framework that emphasizes the individual needs and strategies of student composers, which allows for a more differentiated approach to teaching acts of writing.

    The proposed framework is an objective process lens that is informed by design principles. It focuses on the needs and strategies that drive the composing process (Sharples, 1999). This approach includes two types of needs and two types of strategies:

    • Formal needs: The assigned task itself
    • Informal needs: How a composer wishes to execute the task
    • “What” strategies: The concrete resources and available tools
    • “How” strategies: The ability to use the tools

    An objective process lens acknowledges that composing is influenced by the unique experiences composers bring to the task. It allows teachers to view the funds of knowledge composers bring to a task and create entry points for support.

    The objective process lens encourages teachers to ask key questions when designing instruction:

    • Do students have a clear idea of how to execute the formal need?
    • Do they have access to the tools necessary to be successful?
    • What instruction and/or supports do they need to make shifts in ideas when strategies are not available?
    • What instruction in strategies is necessary to help students communicate their desired message effectively?

    Now how do we do that?

    Working within a design framework that balances needs and strategies starts with understanding the type of composers you are working with. Composers bring different needs and strategies to each new composing task, and it is important for instructors to be aware of those differences. While individual composers are, of course, individuals with individual proclivities and approaches, we propose that there are (at least) four common types of student composers who bring certain combinations of strategies and needs to the composition process: the experience-limited, the irresolute, the flexible, and the perfectionist composers. By recognizing these common composer types, composition instructors can develop a flexible design for their instruction.

    An experience-limited composer lacks experience in applying both needs and strategies to a composition, so they are entirely reliant on the formal needs of the assigned task and any what-strategies that are assigned by the instructor. These students gravitate towards formulaic writing because of their lack of experience with other types of writing. Relatedly, an irresolute composer may have a better understanding of the formal and informal needs, but they struggle with the application of what and how strategies for the composition. They can become overwhelmed with options of what without a clear how and become stalled during the composing process. Where the irresolute composer becomes stalled, the flexible composer is more comfortable adapting their composition. This type of composer has a solid grasp on both the formal and informal needs and is willing to adapt the informal needs as necessary to meet the formal needs of the task. As with the flexible composer, the perfectionist composer is also needs-driven, with clear expectations for the formal task and their own goals for the informal tasks. Rather than adjusting the informal needs as the composition develops, a perfectionist composer will focus intensely on ensuring that their final product exactly meets their formal and informal needs.

    Teaching writing requires embracing its complexity and moving beyond formulaic approaches prioritizing product over process. Writing is a dynamic and individualized task that takes place within a complex system, where composers bring diverse needs, strategies, and experiences. By adopting a design framework, teachers of writing and composing can support students in navigating this complexity, fostering creativity, agency, and authentic expression. It is an approach that values funds of knowledge students bring to the writing process, recognizing the interplay of formal and informal needs, as well as their “what” and “how” strategies; those they have and those that need growth via instruction and experience. Through thoughtful design, we can grow flexible, reflective, and skilled communicators who are prepared to navigate the wicked challenges of composing in all its various forms.

    These ideas and more can be found in When Teaching Writing Gets Tough: Challenges and Possibilities in Secondary Writing Instruction.

    References

    Campbell, K. H. (2014). Beyond the five-paragraph essay. Educational Leadership, 71(7), 60-65.

    Lannin, A. A., & Fox, R. F. (2010). Chained and confused: Teacher perceptions of formulaic writing. Writing & Pedagogy, 2(1), 39-64.

    Rico, G. L. (1988). Against formulaic writing. The English Journal, 77(6), 57-58.

    Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.

    Sharples, M. (1999). How we write : writing as creative design (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203019900

    Waltuck, B. A. (2012). Characteristics of complex systems. The Journal for Quality & Participation, 34(4), 13–15.

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  • The Quick Convo All Writing Teams Should Have (opinion)

    The Quick Convo All Writing Teams Should Have (opinion)

    Scenario 1: You’re part of a cross-disciplinary group of faculty members working on the new general education requirement. By the end of the semester, your group has to produce a report for your institution’s administration. As you start to generate content, one member’s primary contributions focus on editing for style and mechanics, while the other members are focused on coming to an agreement on the content and recommendations.

    Scenario 2: When you’re at the stage of drafting content for a grant, one member of a writing team uses strikethrough to delete a large chunk of text, with no annotation or explanation for the decision. The writing stops as individual participants angrily back channel.

    Scenario 3: A team of colleagues decides to draft a vision statement for their unit on campus. They come to the process assuming that everyone has a shared idea about the vision and mission of their department. But when they each contribute a section to the draft, it becomes clear that they are not, in fact, on the same page about how they imagine the future of their unit’s work.

    In the best case scenarios, we choose people to write with. People whom we trust, who we know will pull their weight and might even be fun to work with. However, many situations are thrust upon us rather than carefully selected. We have to complete a report, write an important email, articulate a new policy, compose and submit a grant proposal, author a shared memo, etc., with a bunch of folks we would likely not have chosen on our own.

    Further, teams of employees tasked with writing are rarely selected because of their ability to write well with others, and many don’t have the language to talk through their preferred composing practices. Across professional writing and within higher education, the inability to work collaboratively on a writing product is the cause of endless strife and inefficiency. How can we learn how to collaborate with people we don’t choose to write with?

    Instead of just jumping into the writing task, we argue for a quick conversation about writing before any team authorship even starts. If time is limited, this conversation doesn’t necessarily need to be more than 15 minutes (though devoting 30 minutes might be more effective) depending on the size of the writing team, but it will save you time—and, likely, frustration—in the long run.

    Drawing from knowledge in our discipline—writing studies—we offer the following strategies for a guided conversation before starting any joint writing project. The quick convo should serve to surface assumptions about each member’s beliefs about writing, articulate the project’s goal and genre, align expectations, and plan the logistics.

    Shouldn’t We Just Use AI for This Kind of Writing?

    As generative AI tools increasingly become integrated into the writing process, or even supplant parts of it, why should people write at all? Especially, why should we write together when people can be so troublesome?

    Because writing is thinking. Certainly, the final writing product matters—a lot—but the reason getting to the product can be so hard is that writing requires critical thinking around project alignment. Asking AI to do the writing skips the hard planning, thinking and drafting work that will make the action/project/product that the writing addresses more successful.

    Further, we do more than just complete a product/document when we write (either alone or together)—we surface shared assumptions, we come together through conversation and we build relationships. A final written product that has a real audience and purpose can be a powerful way to build community, and not just in the sense that it might make writers feel good. An engaged community is important, not just for faculty and staff happiness, but for productivity, for effective project completion and for long-term institutional stability.

    Set the Relational Vibe

    To get the conversation started, talk to each other: Do real introductions in which participants talk about how they write and what works for them. Talk to yourself: Do a personal gut check, acknowledging any feelings/biases about group members, and commit to being aware of how these personal relationships/feelings might influence how you perceive and accept their contributions. Ideas about authorship, ownership and credit, including emotional investments in one’s own words, are all factors in how people approach writing with others.

    Articulate the Project Purpose and Genre

    Get on the same page about what the writing should do (purpose) and what form it should take (genre). Often the initial purpose of a writing project is that you’ve been assigned to a task—students may find it funny that so much faculty and staff writing at the university is essentially homework! Just like our students, we have to go beyond the bare minimum of meeting a requirement to find out why that writing product matters, what it responds to and what we want it to accomplish. To help the group come to agreement about form and writing conventions, find some effective examples of the type of project you’re trying to write and talk through what you like about each one.

    Align Your Approach

    Work to establish a sense of shared authorship—a “we” approach to the work. This is not easy, but it’s important to the success of the product and for the sake of your sanity. Confront style differences and try to come to agreement about not making changes to each other’s writing that don’t necessarily improve the content. There’s always that one person who wants to add “nevertheless” for every transition or write “next” instead of “then”—make peace with not being too picky. Or, agree to let AI come in at the end and talk about the proofreading recommendations from the nonperson writer.

    This raises another question: With people increasingly integrating ChatGPT and its ilk into their processes (and Word/Google documents offering AI-assisted authorship tools), how comfortable is each member of the writing team with integrating AI-generated text into a final product?

    Where will collaboration occur? In person, online? Synchronously or asynchronously? In a Google doc, on Zoom, in the office, in a coffee shop? Technologies and timing both influence process, and writers might have different ideas about how and when to write (ideas that might vary based on the tools that your team is going to use).

    When will collaboration occur? Set deadlines and agree to stick with them. Be transparent about expectations from and for each member.

    How will collaboration occur? In smaller groups/pairs, all together, or completely individually? How will issues be discussed and resolved?

    Finally, Some Recommendations on What Not to Do

    Don’t:

    • Just divvy up the jobs and call it a day. This will often result in a disconnected, confusing and lower-quality final product.
    • Take on everything because you’re the only one who can do it. This is almost never true and is a missed opportunity to build capacity among colleagues. Developing new skills is an investment.
    • Overextend yourself and then resent your colleagues. This is a surefire path to burnout.
    • Sit back and let other folks take over. Don’t be that person.

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  • How Students Use Generative AI Beyond Writing – Faculty Focus

    How Students Use Generative AI Beyond Writing – Faculty Focus

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  • Five Science-Backed Ways to Improve Academic Writing (opinion)

    Five Science-Backed Ways to Improve Academic Writing (opinion)

    I vividly recall when an editor in chief invited me to publish in a well-known journal. Fresh from defending my dissertation, I still grappled with understanding how publishing worked in academia—like whether I should try to imitate the densely written, abstract sentences that appeared in the journal he edited. I thumbed the latest issue and looked at him. “Do you have a house style I should use?”

    He shuddered and gave a response I’ve since heard echoed by other editors in chief of similarly well-respected journals: “Please don’t! We publish manuscripts despite how they’re written.”

    But this candid advice leaves most graduate students and even seasoned faculty members with another dilemma. If you can’t imitate articles published in the best journals, how do you write up your research so it gets published?

    During my early years of teaching writing courses, I discovered that students seldom revised their work significantly, even when they received extensive feedback from both me and their peers. In fact, students failed to revise even when they received feedback and grades from their peers.

    All writing students also struggle with the idea that both feedback and grades on their writing are subjective, a reflection of how a particular instructor prefers students to write in a specific course. In addition, English literature and creative writing courses teach students that writing is a combination of mystery and art.

    In contrast, researchers in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics identified the features that make sentences easy or difficult to read decades ago. As a result, we can teach students how to make their sentences clear—no matter how complex the subject—by teaching science-based writing methods. And as a graduate student or faculty member, you can improve your own academic writing—and your chances for publication—by focusing on the five basic principles that cause readers to perceive sentences as clear.

    1. Active voice makes sentences easier to read.

    In studies, researchers have discovered that readers comprehend sentences more rapidly when sentences reflect cause and effect. We can trace this to two factors. First, our brains naturally perceive cause and effect, which evolved as a survival mechanism. Research shows, for instance, that infants as young as 6 months old may identify cause and effect.

    Second, English sentence structure reflects causes and effects in its ordering of words: subject-verb-object. As researchers discovered, participants read sentences with active voice at speeds one-third faster than they read sentences in passive voice. Moreover, these same participants misunderstood even simple sentences in passive voice about one-quarter of the time. While many writing instructors require students to use active voice, few alert students to the specific benefits of active sentences that make them easier to read. These sentences are shorter, more efficient and more concrete, while sharpening readers’ sense of cause and effect.

    Consider the differences between the first example below, which relies on passive voice, and the second, which uses active voice.

    Passive: It has been reported that satiety may be induced by the distention of the gastric antrum due to the release of dissolved gas from carbonated water, which may improve gastric motility, thereby reducing hunger.

    Active: Cuomo, Savarese, Sarnelli et al. reported that drinking carbonated water distends the gastric antrum through the release of dissolved gas, inducing satiety and improving gastric motility, all of which reduce hunger.

    1. Actors or concrete objects turn sentences into microstories.

    Academic writing naturally tackles complex content that can prove challenging even to subject matter experts. However, writers can make even challenging content comprehensible to nonexperts by making cause and effect clear in their sentences by using nouns that readers can easily identify as subjects. When the grammatical subjects in sentences are nouns clearly capable of performing actions, readers process sentences with greater speed and less effort. For actors, use people, organizations or publications—any individual, group or item created with intention that generates impact.

    We unconsciously perceive these sentences as easier to read and recall because identifying actors and actions in sentences aids readers in fixing both a word’s meaning and the role it plays in sentence structure. Furthermore, these nouns enhance the efficiency of any sentence by paring down its words. Take these examples below:

    Abstract noun as subject: Virginia Woolf’s examination of the social and economic obstacles female writers faced, due to the presumption that women had no place in literary professions and so were instead relegated to the household, particularly resonated with her audience of young women who had struggled to fight for their right to study at their colleges, even after the political successes of the suffragettes.

    Actor as subject: In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf examined social and economic obstacles female writers faced. Despite the political success of the suffragettes, writers like Woolf battled the perception that women had no place in the literary professions. Thus Woolf’s book resonated with her audience, young women who had to fight for the right to study at their colleges.

    1. Pronouns send readers backward, but readers make sense of sentences by anticipating what comes next.

    If writers imitate the academic writing they see in print, they typically rely on pronouns as the subjects of sentences, especially “this,” “that,” “these,” “those” and “it.” However, pronouns save writers time but cost readers significantly, for two reasons.

    First, readers typically assume that pronouns refer to a single noun rather than a cluster of nouns, a phrase or even an entire sentence. Second, when writers use these pronouns without nouns to anchor their meaning, readers slow down and frequently misidentify the meanings of pronouns. Moreover, readers rated writing samples with higher numbers of pronouns as less well-written than sentences that relied on actors as subjects—or even pronouns like “this” anchored by nouns like “outcome.”

    Pronoun as subject: Due to the potential confounding detrimental effects of sulfonylureas and insulin in the comparator arms of the trials evaluating anticancer effects of metformin/thiazolidinediones, it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions from prior studies.

    Actor as subject: In trials to assess the anticancer effects of metformin/thiazolidinediones, we had difficulty drawing any firm conclusions from prior studies due to potential confounding detrimental effects from sulfonylureas and insulin.

    1. Action verbs make sentences more concrete, efficient and memorable.

    Open any newspaper or magazine and, even in just-the-facts-ma’am hard news stories, you’ll find action verbs, like “argues,” “reinvents,” “writes” and “remakes.” In contrast, most writers overrely on nonaction verbs. These verbs include “is,” “has been,” “seems,” “appears,” “becomes,” “represents” and that evergreen staple of academic writing, “tends.”

    Action verbs enable readers to immediately identify verbs, a process central to comprehending sentence structure and understanding meaning alike. Furthermore, action verbs make sentences more efficient, more concrete and more memorable. In one study of verbs and memory, readers recalled concrete verbs more accurately than nonaction verbs.

    When we read action verbs, our brains recruit the sensory-motor system, generating faster reaction times than with abstract or nonaction verbs, which are processed outside that system. Even in patients with dementia, action verbs remain among words patients with advanced disease can identify due to the semantic richness of connections action verbs recruit in the brain.

    Nonaction verbs: Claiming the promotion of research “excellence” and priding oneself in the record of “excellence” has become commonplace, but what this excellence is concretely about is unclear.

    Action verbs: Research institutions claim to promote faculty on the basis of research “excellence,” but institutions define “excellence” in many ways, with few clear definitions.

    1. Place subjects and verbs close together.

    When we read, we understand sentences’ meaning based on our predictions of how sentences unfold. We unconsciously make these predictions from our encounters with thousands of sentences. Most important, these predictions rely on our ability to identify grammatical subjects and verbs.

    We make these predictions easily when writers place subjects and verbs close together. In contrast, we struggle when writers separate subjects and verbs. With each increase in distance between subjects and verbs, readers exert greater effort, while reading speeds slow down. More strikingly, readers also make more errors in identifying subjects and verbs with increases in the number of words between subjects and verbs—even in relatively short sentences.

    For example, in this sentence, readers must stumble through two adjective clauses, noted in orange below, before encountering the verb “decreases,” paired with the underlined subject, “rule”:

    Specifically, a rule that indicates a reduction in delay that precedes an aversive consequence decreases procrastination in university students.

    But this separation strains working memory, as readers rely on subject-verb-object order to identify sentence structure. Ironically, as academic writers gain sophistication in their subject-matter expertise, they frustrate readers’ mechanisms for comprehension. Your urge to immediately modify the subject of your sentence with phrases and clauses slows reading and increases readers’ sense of conscious effort.

    On the other hand, reading speeds increase while effort decreases when subjects and verbs appear close together. Introduce your main point with a subject and verb, then modify them with clauses or phrases:

    Specifically, university students decrease procrastination when they face aversive consequences immediately for failure to meet deadlines.

    These principles will work in any discipline, enabling writers to control how editors and peer reviewers respond to their manuscripts and proposals. These changes can help make an academic career successful, crucial in today’s competitive environment.

    Yellowlees Douglas is a former professor of English at Holy Names University and was a director of five writing programs at universities including the City University of New York and the University of Florida. She is the author, most recently, of Writing for the Reader’s Brain: A Science-Based Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

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  • New Way to Teach Writing by Incorporating AI – Sovorel

    New Way to Teach Writing by Incorporating AI – Sovorel

    AI is here, and it is here to stay, which means that academia needs to incorporate it so that students learn about AI’s capability and are ready to use it properly. The most complained about issue in writing classes today is that students simply use AI to write their essays for them and, in the process, do not learn anything and use AI improperly. “The Anders 4 Phase AI Method of Writing Instruction,” is able to overcome these issues. This instructional method develops students’ writing skills while teaching AI literacy, which includes critical thinking. Different aspects of this method can also be applied to other courses/assignments. The Anders 4 Phase AI Method of Writing Instruction is a much-needed new way to develop writing in a way that better aligns with the new realities of how many people are already writing with AI.

    Key Components (the four phases):

    1. Foundational Writing Skills Development: instruction and assessment on key aspects of writing such as sentence structure, paragraph structure, transitional sentences, use of personal voice, researching, outlining, thesis statements, and any other needed writing components. Done through: multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short in-class writing.
    2. Understanding of Different Essay Types: instruction and assessment on key aspects of different essay types done through multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short in-class writing
    3. Prompt Engineering Development: instruction and assessment on prompt engineering using an advanced prompt formula, the ability to create effective prompts for AI to generate good essays that have proper formatting, student voice, and accurate information. Evaluated via multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank tests, and in-class writing of prompts and additional drafting.
    4. Use of AI for Writing with Full Personal Accountability: assessment on specific essay creation done via student submission of essays developed through the use and assistance of AI. Additional in-class exams on key contents and periodic student presentations on created essays (to help ensure student accountability of knowledge integration).

    Key Benefits:

    • Develops students’ foundational knowledge of writing and ability to create multiple essay types
    • Eliminates issues with students inappropriately using AI to write essays without fully understanding writing components
    • Reduces instructors’ stress/anxiety in feeling the need to run AI detection tools (no longer needed)
    • Helps to directly develop students’ understanding of effective writing while simultaneously developing their critical thinking, AI literacy, and ethical AI use skills

    A much more detailed description of this method is available through the Sovorel Center for Teaching & Learning YouTube educational Channel:

    For an even more detailed informational article on The Anders 4 Phase AI Method of Writing Instruction, you can go here: https://brentaanders.medium.com/the-new-way-to-teach-writing-1e3b9a14ef64

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  • ‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’: How AI is changing education and writing

    ‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’: How AI is changing education and writing

    • Following HEPI’s recent Policy Note on students’ use of artificial intelligence (AI), HEPI Director Nick Hillman reviews a new book from the United States on what AI means for writing.

    ‘ChatGPT cannot write.’ It’s a bold statement but one near the start of the new book More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI that explains what comes in the following 300 pages.

    The author John Warner’s persuasive argument is that generative AI creates syntax but doesn’t write because ‘writing is thinking.’ (I hope this is the only reason why, when asked to write a higher education policy speech ‘in the style of Nick Hillman’, ChatGPT’s answer is so banal and vacuous…) People are, Warner says, attracted to AI because they’ve not previously been ‘given the chance to explore and play within the world of writing.’

    Although Warner is not as negative about using ChatGPT to retrieve information as he is on using it to write wholly new material, he sees the problems it presents as afflicting the experience of ‘deep reading’ too: ‘Reading and writing are being disrupted by people who do not seem to understand what it means to read and write.’

    The book starts by reminding the reader how generative AI based on Large Language Models actually works. ChatGPT and the like operate as machines predicting the next word in a sentence (called a ‘token’). To me, it is reminiscent of Gromit placing the next piece of train track in front of him as he goes. It’s all a bit like a more sophisticated version of how the iPhone Notes app on which I’m typing this keeps suggesting the next word for me. (If you click on the suggestions, it tends to end up as nonsense though – I’ve just done it and got, ‘the app doesn’t even make a sentence in a single note’, which sounds like gibberish while also being factually untrue.)

    ‘The result’, we are told of students playing with ChatGPT and the like, ‘is a kind of academic cosplay where you’ve dressed up a product in the trappings of an academic output, but the underlying process is entirely divorced from the genuine article.’

    Writing, Warner says, is a process in which ‘the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it.’ That is certainly my experience: there have been times when I’ve started to bash out a piece not quite knowing if it will end up as a short blog based on one scatty thought or flower into a more polished full-length HEPI paper. Academics accustomed to peer review and the slow (tortuous?) procedures of academic journals surely know better than most that writing is a process.

    The most interesting and persuasive part of the book (and Warner’s specialist subject) is the bit on how formulae make writing mundane rather than creative. Many parents will recognise this. It seems to me that children are being put off English in particular by being forced to follow the sort of overweening instructions that no great author ever considered (‘write your essay like a burger’, ‘include four paragraphs in each answer’, ‘follow PEE in each paragraph’ [point / evidence / explain]). Warner sees AI taking this trend to its logical and absurd conclusion where machines are doing the writing and the assessment – and ruining both.

    Because writing is a process, Warner rejects even the popular idea that generative AI may be especially useful in crafting a first draft. He accepts it can produce ‘grammatically and syntactically sound writing … ahead of what most students can produce.’ But he also argues that the first draft is the most important draft ‘as it establishes the intention behind the expression.’ Again, I have sympathy with this. Full-length HEPI publications tend to go through multiple drafts, while also being subjected to peer review by HEPI’s Advisory Board and Trustees, yet the final published version invariably still closely resembles the first draft because that remains the original snapshot of the author’s take on the issue at hand. Warner concludes that AI ‘dazzles on first impression but … has significantly less utility than it may seem at first blush.’

    One of the most interesting chapters compares and contrasts the rollout of ChatGPT with the old debates about the rise of calculators in schools. While calculators might mean mental arithmetic skills decline, they are generally empowering; similarly, ChatGPT appears to remove the need to undertake routine tasks oneself. But Warner condemns such analogies: for calculators ‘the labor of the machine is identical to the labor of a human’, whereas ‘Fetching tokens based on weighted probabilities is not the same process as what happens when humans write.’

    At all the many events I go to on AI in higher education, three areas always comes up: students’ AI use; what AI might mean for professional services; and how AI could change assessment and evaluation. The general outcome across all three issues is that no one knows for sure what AI will mean, but Warner is as big a sceptic on AI and grading as he is on so much else. Because it is formulaic and based on algorithms, Warner argues:

    Generative AI being able to give that “good” feedback means that the feedback isn’t actually good. We should instead value that which is uniquely human. … Writing is meant to be read. Having something that cannot read generate responses to writing is wrong.

    The argument that so many problems are coursing through education as a result of new tech reminds me a little of the argument common in the 1980s that lead pipes brought down the Roman Empire. Information is said to become corrupted by AI in the way that the water supposedly became infected by the lead channels. But the theory about lead pipes is no longer taken seriously and I remain uncertain whether Warner’s take will survive the passage of time in its entirety either.

    Moreover, Warner’s criticisms of the real-world impact of ChatGPT are scattergun in their approach. They include the ‘literal army of precarious workers doing soul-killing tasks’ to support the new technology as well as the weighty environmental impact. This critique calls to mind middle-class drug-takers in the developed world enjoying their highs while dodging the real-world impact on developing countries of their habit.

    In the end, Warner’s multifarious criticisms tot up to resemble an attack on technology that comes perhaps just a little too close for comfort to the attacks in the early 1980s by the Musicians’ Union’s on synthesisers and drum machines. In other words, the downsides may be exaggerated while the upsides might be downplayed.

    Nonetheless, I was partially persuaded. The process of writing is exactly that: a process. Writing is not just mechanical. (The best young historian I taught in my first career as a school teacher, who is now an academic at UCL, had the worst handwriting imaginable as his brain moved faster than his hand / pen could manage.) So AI is unlikely to replace those who pen words for a living just yet.

    Although, paradoxically, I also wished the author had run his text through an AI programme and asked it to knock out around 40% of his text. Perhaps current iterations of generative AI can’t write like a smart human or think like a smart human, but they might be able to edit like a smart human? Perhaps AI’s biggest contribution could come at the end of the writing process rather than the beginning? Technology speeds up all our lives, leaving less time for a leisurely read, and it seems to me that all those ‘one-idea’ books that the US floods the market with, including this one, could nearly always be significantly shorter without losing anything of substance.

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  • Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

    Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

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  • Peter Elbow was right about teaching writing

    Peter Elbow was right about teaching writing

    In the New York Times obituary of Peter Elbow, the giant of composition studies, he is said to have “transformed freshman comp,” which he definitely did, but also, maybe not?

    Even as someone who has done his fair share of thinking and writing about teaching writing, I did not realize that his landmark book, Writing Without Teachers, was first published all the way back in 1973. For sure, the approach to writing he advocated for in Writing Without Teachers and subsequent books challenged the prevailing dogma of academic writing by emphasizing freedom, student agency and audience above correctness and authority, but to consider the full import of Elbow’s message and compare it to what happens in writing classrooms, it’s tough to see a full “transformation” at work.

    At the time I started teaching freshman composition as a graduate TA (1994), I had never heard of Peter Elbow, and none of the people tasked with preparing me for the job introduced me to his work. In fact, I would not encounter Elbow until 2001, when I expressed frustration with teaching through the lens of rhetorical “modes” and how I wished that I could get students writing more freely and authentically because I was tired of reading performative B.S. written for a grade.

    “You should try Peter Elbow,” I was told. I did, and it was like the clouds suddenly parted and I could see the sun for the first time. Anyone who teaches writing as a process, who uses peer review and reflection, is working from Elbow-ian DNA. This surely fits any definition of transformation, doesn’t it?

    But also, why was I not introduced to Peter Elbow as a beginning writing teacher? Why, at the time I did discover him, were departments still teaching rhetorical modes, or composition as (essentially) essays responding to literature?

    In hindsight, I can tell that Elbow’s views on writing must have had a significant impact on the kind of writing I was asked to do in school and how I did it. I’ve written extensively how my grade school teachers of the 1970s privileged creativity and writing problem solving over correctness, engendering a lifelong curiosity about how writing works.

    But by the time I was a teacher, it seems as though whatever transformation Elbow had caused had been beaten back, at least to some degree. Focus on process and revision remained, but this process was deployed in the making of very standard, significantly prescriptive artifacts that were easy to explain, straightforward to grade—as they fit established rubrics—and (at least in my experience) largely uninteresting to read and (in the experience of many students) uninteresting to write.

    It isn’t surprising that attempts at giving students room to maneuver, which make it difficult to compare them to each other or standards of sufficiency, are resisted by those who prefer order to exploration. The most popular composition textbook of recent years is They Say/I Say (well over a million copies sold) a book that literally coaches students to write using Mad Libs–style templates to imitate forms of academic writing, under the theory students will learn academic expression through osmosis.

    Having tried this book for half a semester, I understand its appeal. It’s really just a more refined version of the prescriptive process I used in the 1990s teaching rhetorical modes. If your primary goal is to have students turn in an artifact that resembles the kind of writing that would be produced through a scholarly process, it is very handy.

    If the goal is to get students to think like scholars or go through a process that requires them to wrestle with the genuine challenges of academic inquiry and expression, it is a lousy choice. These are simulations of academic artifacts, predating the simulations now easily created by large language models like ChatGPT.

    The orderly logic of “schooling” seems to repeatedly win over the mess and chaos of learning. Elbow argued that discovery and differentiation was the highest calling of the learning process, and that writing was an excellent vehicle for fulfilling this calling. This requires one to get comfortable with discomfort. For some reason this is serially viewed as a kind of threat to school, rather than what it should be, the focus of the whole enterprise.

    The New York Times obituary calls Elbow’s approach a “more reflective and touchy-feely process,” which I read a signal as to the lack of rigor of the approach, but in truth, it’s the opposite. There’s nothing particularly rigorous about compliance, particularly when enforced by an authority above with all the power, like a teacher wielding their grade book.

    As I’ve found over and over in my career, including weekly in this space for the last 13 years, there is nothing more demanding than being asked to deliver a thought that could only come from your unique intelligence. There is also nothing more interesting for both the writer and the reader.

    Ultimately, I evolved in ways that make me not quite a full Elbow-ian. The experiences in The Writer’s Practice are structured in ways that do not quite square entirely with Writing With Teachers, though even as I write this sentence, I cannot help but note that calling the assignments in the book experiences, and the fact that I wrote the book in such a way that it could be engaged in the absence of a teacher, suggests that maybe the gap isn’t as wide as I perceive.

    While I was working on the manuscript of what would come to be called More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, I would play around with possible titles, as the title on the proposal—“Writing With Robots”—was used for the purpose of getting attention for a book proposal, not something that genuinely reflected the sentiments of the book I planned to write.

    One of the titles I considered was “Everyone Should Write,” a reference to one of Elbow’s later collected volumes, Everyone Can Write.

    One of the gifts of the existence of large language models has been to demonstrate the gap between machine prose and that which can be produced by a unique human intelligence. In a way, this only revalidates Elbow’s original insights of Writing Without Teachers, that we, as humans, have a higher purpose than producing school artifacts for a grade.

    I’m not giving up hope that we can accept this gift.

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  • Engaging Students in Collaborative Research and Writing Through Positive Psychology, Student Wellness, and Generative AI Integration – Faculty Focus

    Engaging Students in Collaborative Research and Writing Through Positive Psychology, Student Wellness, and Generative AI Integration – Faculty Focus

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  • Crafting technology-driven IEPs

    Crafting technology-driven IEPs

    Key points:

    Individualized Education Plans (IEP) have been the foundation of special education for decades, and the process in which these documents are written has evolved over the years.

    As technology has evolved, writing documents has also evolved. Before programs existed to streamline the IEP writing process, creating IEPs was once a daunting task of paper and pencil. Not only has the process of writing the IEP evolved, but IEPs are becoming technology-driven.

    Enhancing IEP goal progress with data-driven insights using technology: There are a variety of learning platforms that can monitor a student’s performance in real-time, tailoring to their individual needs and intervening areas for improvement. Data from these programs can be used to create students’ annual IEP goals. This study mentions that the ReadWorks program, used for progress monitoring IEP goals, has 1.2 million teachers and 17 million students using its resources, which provide content, curricular support, and digital tools. ReadWorks is free and provides all its resources free of charge and has both printed and digital versions of the material available to teachers and students (Education Technology Nonprofit, 2021).

    Student engagement and involvement with technology-driven IEPs: Technology-driven IEPs can also empower students to take an active role in their education plan. According to this study, research shows that special education students benefit from educational technology, especially in concept teaching and in practice-feedback type instructional activities (Carter & Center, 2005; Hall, Hughes & Filbert, 2000; Hasselbring & Glaser, 2000). It is vital for students to take ownership in their learning. When students on an IEP reach a certain age, it is important for them to be the active lead in their plan. Digital tools that are used for technology-driven IEPs can provide students with visual representations of their progress, such as dashboards or graphs. When students are given a visual representation of their progress, their engagement and motivation increases.

    Technology-driven IEPs make learning fun: This study discusses technology-enhanced and game based learning for children with special needs. Gamified programs, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) change the learning experience from traditional to transformative. Gamified programs are intended to motivate students with rewards, personalized feedback, and competition with leaderboards and challenges to make learning feel like play. Virtual reality gives students an immersive experience that they would otherwise only be able to experience outside of the classroom. It allows for deep engagement and experiential learning via virtual field trips and simulations, without the risk of visiting dangerous places or costly field trip fees that not all districts or students can afford. Augmented reality allows students to visualize abstract concepts such as anatomy or 3D shapes in context. All these technologies align with technology-driven IEPs by providing personalized, accessible, and measurable learning experiences that address diverse needs. These technologies can adapt to a student’s individual skill level, pace, and goals, supporting their IEP.

    Challenges with technology-driven IEPs: Although there are many benefits to
    technology-driven IEPs, it is important to address the potential challenges to ensure equity across school districts. Access to technology in underfunded school districts can be challenging without proper investment in infrastructures, devices, and network connection. Student privacy and data must also be properly addressed. With the use of technologies for technology-driven IEPs, school districts must take into consideration laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

    The integration of technology into the IEP process to create technology-driven IEPs represents a shift from a traditional process to a transformative process. Technology-driven IEPs create more student-centered learning experiences by implementing digital tools, enhancing collaboration, and personalized learning experiences. These learning experiences will enhance student engagement and motivation and allow students to take control of their own learning, making them leaders in their IEP process. However, as technology continues to evolve, it is important to address the equity gap that may arise in underfunded school districts.

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