Prompt: What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing, and how do you go about teaching that?

My teaching experience is practically non-existent. As such, there are two ways to approach this question: as a fledgling grader for the Texas Tech First Year Composition program, or as a student of writing who’s watched her skills (and her peers’ skills) develop from the construction of sentences into investigated, audience-driven text.

One common thread among these experiences (although certainly not the only) is the difficulty in developing critical thinking. Among the 27 student papers I graded this last week, only a handful were able to identify choices made by the author and consider a deeper purpose behind these choices. Many papers summarized rather than analyzed. Of those that analyzed rhetorical choices within the text, nearly all pointed back at the author’s text as a purpose within itself, i.e. “The author used informal language because she wanted to write an informal text.” Some of these same students said they had received a foundation in rhetorical analysis in high school (and on that note, some of the students who successfully investigated a purpose recalled minimal writing experiences). Not a single paper that I graded critiqued how effective the author was in achieving their purpose.

But how does one teach critical thinking? Again we encounter that daunting gap from high school to college writing: shouldn’t the students already know this?

The difficulty in teaching critical thinking is not restricted to “inexperienced” writers. I saw students struggle with critical thinking in my upper-level undergraduate writing courses. To me, critical thinking is not only about examining the unseen in the text, but engaging in this process without prompt. (How many students would even think to question the authors of their assigned reading without first being told that there was something worth examining there?)

My favorite and ultimately most valuable courses were those with little guidance. How long should an assignment be? As long as it needs to be. What kind of analysis are we applying to this text? Whichever kind you think applies. The wonderful thing about this kind of teaching is that it forces students to engage with what THEY think, rather than what they think the instructor thinks.

When do we take off the training wheels and encourage students to do their own investigation? How do we get students to the point where they’re ready to address their own thoughts in a text – no prompt required? The obvious answer is “When they enter college/university,” but this answer becomes a lot less obvious when you see the work of First Year Composition writers.  

So I’ll be frank: I don’t have the answers. If anyone did, we’d have a standardized First Year Composition course across the discipline. Perhaps a collaboration between teachers of K-12 and college professors would shrink the gap. Perhaps there’s an alternative to First Year Composition – a two-semester course where the first semester is really there to gauge where students’ writing skills are at and give them feedback to encourage mature writing. (And I think at some universities, FYC serves as this kind of mediator.)

I think what it comes down to is that students are terrified to get “bad” grades. (Product versus Process, right?) They’ve been taught that the best way to receive “good” grades is to follow directions to a tee – but, I would argue, this isn’t the best way to encourage students’ unprompted critical thinking. Perhaps at the end of this semester (and my first semester of grading) I’ll have more answers.