One thing I’ve been working on this year is how to maximize the benefits of collaboration and group discussion. The goal is that the classroom become a place where students create meaning and knowledge themselves, and thereby increase feelings of ownership over their learning.

It’s essential to reevaluate, to rethink, to re-envision courses every semester, and all good teachers do this already. Over the years, one thing I’ve focused on increasing in my classes is a sense of student ownership over their critical thinking, in order to increase the likelihood of knowledge retention and transfer beyond my sixteen weeks with them.

To that end, I’m really interested in this idea of “student ownership” in general lately, that is, of allowing students to feel as if the class and the work belong to them, individually. I have experimented in the past with assignments that were totally open-ended, in hopes of increasing investment on students’ parts, but pendulum has swung the other way this term. I gave assignments that were fairly prescriptive in nature, in the hopes of guiding intellectual processes more efficiently. Sometimes the open-ended projects can yield brilliant results, but with the OER texts I have been developing, I was afraid of too much chaos for them to handle in my English 111 classes.

In Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice , George Hillocks, Jr. says that teachers ought to focus on getting students to interact with one another (collaboration and student-centered learning), as well as allowing them to direct class discussions. While he is focused on writing instruction, I think his advice applies to most subject areas.

Hillock explains that we should allow students’ “ideas and opinions [to] become the focus of attention [as opposed to our own] and [to] substantially control the direction of classroom talk” (65). Hillocks goes on to explain that when we do so, the quality of the “interaction gives students the necessary stake in what is happening” (65). So, to encourage students to feel more engaged, assignments can be prescriptive, and indeed need to be sometimes, so long as classroom interactions focus on areas of student interest and are student-led.

In our “like” prone and conflict averse society, it’s sometimes hard to get students to move past “I like this” or “I don’t like this and that’s my opinion so don’t challenge me,” when we have class discussions or when we ask them to share their work with each other. However, disagreements are key to learning and developing critical thinking skills. When someone we admire says something with which we disagree, it’s a chance for us to flex our intellectual muscle. Students in  my classes this semester have chafed at the  writing assignments I’ve given, especially one relatively difficult task, but in the end, I think the structure of the learning has given them some real world experiences to draw from.

I asked them to write about the rhetoric that politicians use in campaign speeches. The task was twofold: analyze rhetorical situation and appeals and argue a point about why this rhetorical analysis matters. In retrospect, I have a few changes for this assignment, but I am, overall, happy with how it came out.

Hillock said, “Making choices of topics and texts…is not essential to students’ having a stake in their own learning…What is essential is structuring the learning environment so students can gain entry to the ideas and materials and can contribute to the group’s and their own understanding of whatever is at issue” (66). In the future, I’d like to offer more of a chance for them to contribute to their own and to the group’s understanding of how rhetoric and bias are at work in our world. The assignment built nicely from one about advertising and rhetorical appeals, but it had room for more follow-through, in the end.

First, I plan to give this as the last assignment next term. I’m going to flip my assignment sequence so it goes: Argument in a style, Rhetorical Analysis of an artifact, Rhetorical Analysis and Argument about Rhetoric. Second, I plan to open up this assignment from campaign stump speeches to any two speeches on a current event. Third, I plan to make the page limit higher. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly for my goals, I plan to have students present their thesis and have discussions about their ideas at the end of the project.

So, how did my students feel about this project–did they take ownership? Did the knowledge transfer? I think they hated the project, because it was a series of difficult intellectual tasks. But, I do think they took ownership, and that they walked away looking at the world in a way that is changed. So, I hope it transferred–only time can tell.

I recommend this book to anyone who teaches writing assignments in their classes. It’s becoming one of the classic writing instruction pedagogy texts, and it’s stuck with me for over ten years.