Episode 43 – Dr. Claude Gibson discusses his W course and assessment on student writing
March 2008
Episode 43 – Dr. Claude Gibson discusses his W course and assessment on student writing.
Howdy, I’m Gabriel and welcome to Write Away, the faculty podcast of the Texas A&M University Writing Center, bringing you news, tips, and ideas for making your students better, more innovative writers. Today we’re talking to Dr. Claude Gibson, director of undergraduate studies here at Texas A&M University, where he’s worked and taught for 32 years.
Dr. Gibson completed his graduate work at the University of Arkansas. A few years after being hired at Texas A&M, he was appointed the director of freshman English. He has conducted surveys on the teaching of writing and is deeply involved in assessment activities nationwide and here at Texas A&M. Dr. Gibson teaches a W course on the English novel from 1870 to the present.
Dr. Gibson – Yes I turned that course into a W course because the university says that all majors must have at least two W courses now as part of their development in their major and being a program director I wanted to set a good example. So I immediately began working on my course and took it to the next level. I’d always had writing as a component of that course and I had instructed writing as a component of that course, but I wanted to be able to encourage other faculty to declare their courses as writing courses or W courses. I wanted to have lots of handouts and explications that they could read, look at and use themselves if they wanted to.
Writing has been extremely important to me. And that’s where I let the students take ownership. I do not restrict the topics, other than the fact that I have to approve the topic to make sure it’s something appropriate for the course, but they actually are able to get in there and demonstrate their knowledge of the subject matter and their thinking about it, so that’s what I want them to take away from my course — a confidence that they actually know something about the period that I’m teaching and that they can demonstrate it in writing. In addition I have them do a scholarly review. They write a review of a scholarly article on one of the novels we have read and I say since they read the novel and we’ve discussed it in class they should be able to assess the effectiveness of the materials being presented. And I have very specific things that have to show up in that review.
This gives the students quite a bit of confidence. First they’re intimidated, “Well wait a minute I don’t have a Ph.D. and you’re asking me to go read works by a Ph.D. And I say, “No you don’t have a Ph.D. But you’ve thoroughly understood this novel in certain ways and you can look at the evidence presented, think of contrary evidence and then make an assessment. You’re going to present a case here for interpretation.” I think this really bucks them up for doing a research paper. As long as they support their assessments of other writing, that’s what I am asking them to do and they begin to see that this body of information and argument out there is always in flux and they can use, modify and change it.
Gabe – How do you conduct peer review?
Dr. Gibson – Initially I did the peer review in class. I found out that what came out of those wasn’t always what I hoped would come out of them. There was some reticence. People were face-to-face, things like that. But when I put it on TurnItIn.com where students could be given 48 hours to go in and look at a piece of writing and I gave them ten questions, very specific questions, I wanted them to answer about that writing. And the essay could be posted anonymously or with their name, it was their choice and the reviewers were all anonymous, except to me. I could go into the system and see who’s reviewing whom. And all of a sudden the commentary became much franker and much more developed. Everybody reviewed two other papers in the class. And the people who went through that process actually benefitted greatly. But doing it out of class at a time that was convenient to the students was the key to making that thing work for me.
Gabe – Last, Dr. Gibson talked about his survey and assessment work on writing and the educational process.
Dr. Gibson – The first survey I ever did on writing was in the 1970s and it was on this idea of ‘why Johnny can’t write,’ it was a national frenzy at that time of: “well, why are students not writing better, since communication was becoming so important in government and business.” We’re still asking the same question. I think that we know that Johnny can write or Sue can write, but I think we have to know that is it something that we can say we solved at a particular period of time? We have young people coming up and we have to engage with them and we have to make this teaching of writing relevant to them. There is so many other ways that they are expressing themselves or they’re showing expertise, and I think that teachers have a challenge to show them that maybe the most powerful and enduring will be the written word. But if we don’t handle it correctly they will shift to other modes of communication, I’m convinced of it. I see people that I have to convince every semester that ‘Oh, got a paper’ you hear a few groans in the class but then to get them excited about that and show them the power that can arise from that is a real challenge. We had assessed the writing and research abilities of our students in our capstone course as they left the program. And our students actually do rather well overall but they were weaker in certain areas, like using credible, authoritative, scholarly sources. Sometimes they have a tendency to believe that anything they can find on the web is somehow or other been vetted and is appropriate for use in advance writing. So I have a session on how to get to the scholarly sources in our field and once the students know that that’s the avenue I want them to take they do use those things and I notice the quality of writing started going up at the 300 level instead of waiting till the end and trying to do it as they go out the door. Sometimes we get the idea that we’re accomplishing much more than we are and having developed the instrument for measuring research writing in my classes and for the program–eight items we really were accomplishing something but two or three areas we were not. We assumed that students knew how to do A, that students knew how to do B, and we would find out that there were areas where we were missing things at the lower levels. And so we’re applying that same rubric now to the 300 level courses. Next year we’re going to do it in 200 level courses and 100 level courses to see, well, if this is the way we want them to come out of the program, how early are they picking up on the things we think are important.
We have to report out to SACS. We’re doing interim things which we can report out to like the assessment conference. Throwing things out and saying we’re trying this and getting reactions from an audience who’s trying it in Georgia or something similar in New Jersey or something totally different on Long Island is very helpful. I really try to educate my colleagues and have them buy into participating more actively in this process. Over 25 percent of our faculty have participated in the assessment projects. We’re a large department and I’m happy that at least 25 percent have come out of the ivory tower and is working at various levels with program development in the educational process. Because of my early involvement in writing, writing became a pedagogical tool that I’ve put into every course I taught. I’ve been at A&M for 32 years and I really have perfected and worked and learned from my attempts to teach students writing and some things I know are better today than when I came 32 years ago and some things are still in a process of ever evolving because the students do change over time. It never stops.
Thank you for joining us today. Write Away is a production of the Writing Center at Texas A&M University. This podcast promotes the mission of the Writing Center by highlighting effective writing instruction. For resources to improve communication and writing ability, please visit our website at writingcenter.tamu.edu.
We’d like to thank Dr. Gibson for his time today, and for his dedication to writing instruction at Texas A&M. I’m your host Gabriel, please join us next time. Have a great day, write away.
