Teaching Writing in College Tom Skeen

For a while now, I've thought of metacognition as something that can and should be taught as a skill. (I was reminded of this by a podcast episode from The Happiness Lab.) In this episode, I share a reflective exercise based on some of the 8 subcomponents of metacognition that were developed by Gwen Gorzelsky, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Joe Paszek, Ed Jones, and Carol Hayes in Chris Anson and Jessie Moore's edited collection titled _Critical Transitions_ and published by the WAC Clearinghouse. In short, naming skills, defining them, finding examples of them in their own writing, and writing narratives about their experiences with those skills can help students gather evidence and examples they can use to think about their own writing and their identity as a writer. They can be applied to (and probably will reflect) various subcomponents of metacognition to enrich students' (and our) understanding of writing and what it means to be a writer.Resources:The WAC Clearinghouse's page for Anson and Moore's _Critical Transitions_: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/ansonmoore/The link to the chapter on Metacognition by Gorzelsky, Driscoll, Paszek, Jones, and Hayes: https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/ansonmoore/chapter8.pdfThe Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos: Simple Ways to Feel Great Every Day -- with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/simple-ways-to-feel-great-every-day-with-dr-rangan-chatterjee

In this episode, I depart briefly from my series on ROCSS (to which I will return in the next episode) to share a fun experience I had with students today. We used David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon's "detect / elect / connect" framework to find opportunities to use skills from our writing class to assignments in their other classes. Writing courses, really, should be thought of as support for other contexts--they're not an end in themselves. What better way to use the material we have learned about writing than as a means to help students be successful with work they are doing in their other classes? This episode talks through an activity I did with students around "detect / elect / connect" and includes some new insights I gained about their work elsewhere. I'm finding it helpful, as a writing instructor, to know more about what students are actually doing in their classes.

In the fourth episode of this multi-part series, I provide a classroom exercise I recently used to demonstrate how additional knowledge about writing can support students' use of ROCSS. In particular, I introduced students to causal arguments (from stasis theory) as a way to generate content for their current projects. Stasis theory can be particularly helpful for students because it is, to my mind, first and foremost a tool for invention. Elements of stasis theory can be found across a wide range of genres--everyday conversations with friends, movie reviews, presidential debates, academic writing, and more. In the podcast, I discuss how I helped students see causal arguments at work in a grant proposal and a press release before offering them an opportunity to use it for invention in their own upcoming projects. 

In the third episode in this series, I share a paragraph from Carolyn Miller's influential article titled "Genre as Social Action." It's a passage that has stuck with me for some time and informs my use of various genres--long and short, large and small--in my writing classes. I also go through various genre samples that I have collected over the years and can draw from as I match them up to student needs and interests. Toward the end, I compose a brief 5 or 10 minute class activity to help students practice a ROCSS analysis--to give them a chance to practice using ROCSS, which will help them when they encounter new genres later.Teaching Writing in College is also available for viewing on on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUWbbrcygqkZvxqdPCqhuzu0yyx5trJUw

In this second episode on a series about ROCSS, I use a page from the Merriam-Webster Children's Dictionary on my son's bookshelf to talk through the components of the acronym: Recurring Occasion, Content, Structure, and Style. ROCSS offers a powerful and memorable way to describe genres in the classroom, and varied practice with what I call a "ROCSS Analysis"--a brief genre analysis--can help learners understand writing in terms of genre. This episode uses the dictionary entry to describe how ROCSS works, and future episodes will provide further examples of how I use it with my students, how I came up with ROCSS in the first place, and the theories of genre that inform my use of ROCSS.

In scholarship on teaching for transfer from writing studies, a strong emphasis has been placed on knowledge about genre. Arguably, it can be seen as a threshold concept that helps students (or any of us) gain access to knowledge about writing. In this episode, I offer some reasons why genre should be a dominant concept in most writing classes. I also introduce an acronym (ROCSS) that I developed and use in my classes to help students remember how genres work. In future episodes, I'll discuss how and why I settled on that acronym and provide examples of how I use it with students.