Assistant Clinical Professor Pat Wiese wants her students to understand the power of writing well.

Pat Wiese, assistant clinical professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture, knows that teachers can have a lasting impact on their students—and in terms of their writing advice, that’s not always a good thing.

Wiese, whose students are education majors preparing to teach reading and writing to children in elementary and middle schools, is surprised by the misinformation her students have accumulated.

“I’ve had students say, ‘Well, my high school English teacher said that you put a comma every time you breathe,” Wiese recalls with a smile. “So I ask them, ‘Does that mean if you’re an Olympic swimmer, you need fewer commas?’”

Wiese gives her students, who will soon be running their own classrooms, mini-lessons on grammar to correct such misconceptions. But the biggest weakness Wiese sees in her students’ approach to writing is their failure to recognize the importance of revision.

“Too many times they’re just pulling the paper out of the printer and turning it in. Instructors end up getting what students think is a final product, but it’s really a rough draft,” she explains. “I’ve had students tell me that, before coming to college, whenever they were required to turn in a first draft, they would write their paper and then just mess it up a little to create a ‘rough draft.’”

Wiese’s students, however, learn that revision is about more than appearances. Her W courses are structured to take students through each stage of the writing process: thinking, drafting, getting feedback, and revising. She routinely assigns low-stakes writing that allows students to practice in a low-stress way.

That’s key for Wiese, who believes students’ fears about writing really hinder their ability to write well: “They haven’t done enough writing before they get to the university level to calm their fears. What writing they have done has often been centered on the [state-mandated] TAKS test or some other test, so it’s very much a writing-for-the-test mentality and a very formulaic type of writing. These students think of writing as they think of taking tests.”

Wiese instead encourages her students to see writing as a way to clarify their thinking. In one course, she assigns journal dialogues, in which students reflect on readings from their text. They then share the dialogues with Wiese or other students before the whole group discusses the material in class. The result has been better writing and more thoughtful discussions.

Wiese also uses Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) in her classes and was surprised at first by how much her students like the process of peer response. It’s a critical step for them in learning to assess writing, a skill they’ll need in their own classrooms. The CPR exercises help them understand what kind of feedback actually helps a writer improve.

For the past two years, Wiese has served as the College of Education’s representative on the W Course Advisory Committee. When Wiese proposed her first W course, she didn’t think it would have to change much, since it was, after all, a course about teaching writing. But, she acknowledges, the course originally didn’t give students a structured way to revise. She had always invited students to bring their papers by during office hours, but the ones who needed the most help were often the least likely to seek it out.

Now that her students are required to submit multiple drafts and conduct peer reviews, their writing has improved.

Wiese’s advice for other instructors? “I’d say to anyone who’s proposing a W course that the rewards are substantial. It’s a lot easier to grade a good paper than a bad one.”

Wiese herself has come full circle. She began her career as a junior high English and social studies teacher, but left education to work in risk management, eventually becoming a company senior officer. She missed the classroom, though, and decided to pursue her doctorate.

Reflecting on her own career path has made Wiese even more convinced of the importance of writing. “The success I have had is due, more than anything else, to my ability to write,” she observes, adding, “Writing is powerful.”

And so, she might add, are writing teachers.