Wednesday, September 16

Tonight we talked through the reading from McAndrew and Reigstad; as we talked we made connections between writing process, tutoring process(es) and language/conversational moves you might actually use in a writing session.

We started by talking about writing process as consisting of three parts: pre-writing, drafting, and revising - and we talked about how you could tell where a writer was in his/her process, and what you might work on with writers in different parts of their process. We also noted that writing process is recursive - in that writers cycle through gathering information in the pre-writing stage, getting information on the page in the drafting stage, and getting the forus, organization, development + language right in the revising stage.

We also talked about what goes on in writers heads, decided that chaos is OK, observed that language meanings depend on who is talking and under what circumstances, and discussed student centered, collaborative, & teacher centered approaches to coaching writing (with the observation that student centered is the preferred method in our text book).

We checked out methods and conventions for summaries (handout listed as a link to the right), and you did some role playing coaching students who are having trouble getting the meainings from texts. You came up with a great set of strategies for helping students see the text in new ways. After making sure they could state the "what happened" of the text, strategies to move them to think about ideas include: chunking the matierial into sections; asking students to state the purpose, themes, or what the author was doing; asking them to state one idea that says what a reading is about; getting them to look at the title + headings, introduction/conclusion, topic sentences, itialicized words, terms that are defined or repeated; listening to students questions and providing them with resources to find their own answers, and so on. I am thinking you don't really need me to teach this class!

For Monday:
Blog 2: list Lunsford’s main points
Read: Barnett and Blumer, "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center" by Andrea Lunsford

In class, we will talk over writing center philosophies, do some more thinking about how to write summaries for different rhetorical purposes.

Have a great weekend and see you Monday.