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Moving From Lectures and Exams To Discussion and Writing Assignments

By Lara Putnam, History

Photo by Mary Jane Bent, CIDDE

“The course design we put in place ensured that students knew where to direct their energies by providing them with feedback on what they were doing right and wrong and providing the chance to put that knowledge to use.”

Shortly after arriving at the University of Pittsburgh, I had the experience of teaching Women in Latin American History, an upper-level course, in radically different settings in back-to-back semesters: first to 40 students as a lecture course in the spring term, and then to 18 students as an intensive six-week course in the summer. With only 18 students in class, I restructured the summer course into a seminar/discussion format, and found it worked beautifully. I couldn’t imagine going back to the lecture format, when the subject matter of the course—the domestic and political struggles of women from Rio de Janeiro shanty-towns to Argentina’s presidential palace to the barrios of New York—lent itself so perfectly to student involvement and debate. I wanted to find a way to teach the 40-student course as a discussion seminar, with multiple writing assignments rather than quizzes or exams, and with group discussion rather than lecture as the classroom modality. With this goal in mind, I signed up for the Communication Across the Curriculum (CXC) faculty seminar.

I had always thought that composing writing assignments was simply a matter of matching interesting questions to the readings assigned to students. However, in my work with a CIDDE instructional designer, in conjunction with ideas presented in the CXC seminar, I began to think of writing assignments in terms of tasks and skills. How is it that this perspective had never occurred to me before?

Sequencing Assignments
The instructional designer helped me to break each writing assignment down into the component tasks that I had previously assumed students would “already know” they needed to perform to complete it. Key questions we asked users:

What concepts would students need to comprehend in order to employ them in their written responses?
What kind of notes would students need to take while reading?
Would students know what I meant when I asked them to use “evidence” from the readings to support their claims?
How would students decide which of their ideas or observations to include when they reached the stage of drafting their written response?

Providing Practice & Feedback
First the writing assignments were broken into their component tasks, and the skills that students would need to complete the assignments were defined. Then the designer pointed out that students would need a chance to practice each skill in advance, and, most importantly, to get feedback on how well they had performed. For example, did students know how to summarize, paraphrase, and quote? If not, I needed to devise an in-class exercise in which students would summarize, paraphrase, and quote from a common text, and hear from me how well they had done. Did I expect students to use terms like “gendered division of labor,” “kinship practice,” “household economies,” and “macroeconomic shifts” in a final essay on patterns of change in women’s lives in twentieth century Latin America? If so, I needed to make sure to introduce these concepts in our in-class discussions and then include them in my short weekly writing assignments in ways that would require students to rehearse their understanding of this terminology and to get feedback on the results.

Designing the syllabus became a sort of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, in which each class meeting needed not only to “cover” the portion of the historical content I was committed to presenting, but it also needed to do so through exercises that pushed students to build the skills that they would need for each upcoming assignment.

The result of all this was a demanding course. The students worked hard all semester long, but Office of Measurement and Evaluation (OMET) evaluations were the most positive I had ever received. Students felt like they had really learned something in the course. And I had the pleasure of reading and responding to written work whose quality ranged from reasonable to stellar. The intellectual work students were putting into their writing was reflected in classroom discussions as well, which were active, encompassing, and insightful. Ultimate credit goes to the students, of course, whose hard work and preparation made all the difference. The course design we had put in place simply ensured that students knew where to direct their energies by providing them with feedback on what they were doing right and wrong and providing the chance to put that knowledge to use. That made all the difference in the world.

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