ELEMENTS OF LEARNING
SEQUENCE
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Principle
Models
Practice (as readers, editors, writers)
Feedback (instructor, self, peer)
Refine both principle and practice
Workshop Elements
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Set goals & give directions
Students' analysis, discussion,
consensus building
Report-out
Workshop Variables
Size:
Whole Group: All students workshop the same document
+ Everyone learns the same lesson (good when goal is to refine principle)
+ Simplest logistics
+ Useful way to make sure everyone is on the same page
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Quiet students can hide from discussion
Can be hard to keep workshop focused, complicating discussion & take-away
Small Groups:
+ Class can cover more ground (can assign range of deliverables to groups, to be covered
during report-out phase)
+ Smaller groups encourage more students to engage and contribute
+ Need for coherent report-out requires group members to be goal-driven
+ More flexible
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Require more instructor forethought
Difficult to monitor more than one or two groups at a time
Since report-out is selective, students in different groups don't share all learning
"Strong but Wrong" (dominant personality can lead group, or lead group astray)
ENWR 380 STAFF MEETING
Focus:
Shared Focus (Everyone has the same task):
+ Good for initial work with principle and variations (that is, for tasks that don't yet feel
internalized and automatic)
+ Relatively easy for instructor to set up and manage
+ Students can check their responses against classmates'
Plurally Focused (individual students or groups perform different analyses or review different
documents):
+ Can cover more ground
+ Reinforces predictability of on-the-page analysis
+ Emphasizes need for all students/groups to be engaged & productive
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Different tasks won't always take same amount of time
Some Special Forms of Group Analysis:
One-Word Whips: In turn, students report-out responses to tightly defined task in 5-10 seconds.
Example prompts:
(REPORTS OF READER RESPONSE)
"On a scale of 1-5, how convincing did you find the evidence in paragraph 6?"
"On a scale of 1-5, how complex did the syntax feel in sentence 1? 2? 3? etc."
(STRUCTURAL ANALYSES)
"Which sentence or clause seems to contain the main claim in ¶ 1? 2? 3? etc."
"Raise a counterclaim that this paragraph should have anticipated but didn't."
“Which sentences in ¶ 3 provide a chained Topic string?”
Learning Stations: Students are placed in small groups. Then each group sends one or two members to
different learning stations set up around the room, with each learning station
emphasizing a different aspect of the day's lesson.
For example, a week 2 workshop on style might have learning stations asking students to
consider (1) which characters can serve as the center of a particular paragraph's story,
(2) for a given version of that paragraph's story, which actions are passive and which
active, (3) for a given version of that paragraph's story, which actions can be imaged,
(4) which audiences would be best served by the various possible versions of a that
paragraph's story, (5) given a set of circumstances, which versions of the paragraph's
story are more ethical?
ENWR 380 STAFF MEETING
Interim Documents
Students ought to produce some writing each week, but student projects won't always lend
themselves to steady production of text. Below is a selective list of interim documents that
students might produce on weeks when their larger projects are incubating.
Lit review notes. Depending on the stage of the project, these notes can be driven by LRS
considerations--for example, "What cast of characters drives the stories told in the major
essays/books that treat your topic?" or "When claims like yours appear in the literature,
what counter-claims do the arguments typically anticipate?" The lit review notes might also
be designed to address questions that the students don't recognize as related to the 380
curriculum -- for example, "What tangential but unresolved research questions reappear in
the literature?"
Lit review or research notes should be designed for an audience other than the
writer/researcher, so that their effectiveness as documents might be usefully considered.
Review of disciplinary/generic conventions: If, for example, a student plans to create a
brochure for a social services organization, she should review similar brochures provided
by comparable agencies, as well as review other brochures circulated by her client agency.
Glossary of Terms: When students write on topics that will feel technical to their 380 peers, a
layman's glossary of terms can be a useful aid to peer workshopping. Such a glossary can
be produced in an off-week.
Progress Reports: Typically sent to decision makers or funding agencies at regular intervals
during longer projects, these reports can also be useful in your class to make sure that
students aren't simply procrastinating.
Closure Reports: If a project must be abandoned, researchers typically produce a closure report
detailing the reasons for the decision. Such reports are useful for funding agencies, but they
can also guide future research decisions.
Formal Editorial Responses: While students will generally participate in workshopping each
week, you might periodically (2-4 times per semester) have each student produce a formal
written editorial response to a classmate's document.
Treasure Hunts: Two of the end-of-term contests are treasure hunts. Contest entries might take
the place of one weekly assignment.
ENWR 380 STAFF MEETING