As many universities are creating contingency plans in the face of COVID-19, Assay is collecting lesson plans and best practices to help our colleagues make the shift from face-to-face to online teaching as the need arises. While this compiling of resources is in response to COVID-19, there are many reasons why face-to-face classes might need to move online on short notice––hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, etc. These resources might be more broadly useful in online teaching, but we are currently working to support our colleagues who might be working to rethink their pedagogy and methods on very short notice.
While many classes are utilizing synchronous tools, I’ve moved my creative writing classes to an asynchronous environment for a lot of reasons (many of which include my students’ access to reliable internet). Instead of having a real-time discussion about the texts we’re reading, I’m asking them to transfer these ideas to a discussion board. I was influenced by Cult of Pedagogy’s “Meet the Single Point Rubric” and have been working in the recent past to simplify my rubrics in ways that offer my students the most helpful feedback.
I’ve found the key to discussion boards is being incredibly specific. Here’s the assignment for my creative nonfiction students’ first discussion board post (which took their existing reading response assignment and shifted it online):
We’re taking our Think Pieces into an online discussion format and because we’re shifting things up, they’ll be worth more points. Here’s what I want you to do:
- For instance, you could apply Jennifer Sinor’s “Crafting Voice” or Dinty Moore’s “Rivering” to Winter and Spring, but you could go back to Lopate or Smith if you like. What does that application do to how you’re understanding his essays? What can we, as writers, learn from this?
- 750 words due by Monday 3/23. You must include at least one textual reference to the craft essay and one textual reference from each of the two Gruchow essays. Because of the short space, do not use block quotes (what I mean is that you should not use block quotes to reach your word count requirement)–we all want to know what you think.
- Respond to two classmates (3-5 sentences) by Friday 3/27. Any response that includes “I agree” or phrasings like it will receive no credit. Your job is to continue the conversation. If you think your classmate is on the right track, take it one step further that will allow somebody else to pick up the thread. What surprised, intrigued, or challenged you about their original post?
The other half of this discussion board assignment is the rubric I use to grade it. The students’ initial contributions are graded for quality, but my standards are Exceeds Expectations, Meets Expectations, and Below Expectations. I don’t give specific written feedback on their discussion posts. They can see from the rubric itself if they didn’t quite get where they should have been. Their contributions to their peers are graded on a complete/incomplete basis.
I’ve learned to keep the discussion assignment and its accompanying rubrics simple and clear. Especially in a time of crisis like we’re in now, we can all do with a bit more clarity.
Karen Babine is Assay’s editor and the author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for memoir/creative nonfiction. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.
Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies 