I developed this activity for my Freshman English class at Ferris State University.
In the course, students are assigned essays that are written in various modes: narrative, descriptive, compare/contrast, process, etc.
Constraints:
One thing I struggle with is helping students find topics that 1) work for the assignment and 2) doesn’t bore the student. For some reason, students fail to utilize their creativity when selecting essay topics. It may have something to do with preconceived notions of English class being boring. I’m not sure.
In addition to this concern, I am very interested in making my essay assignments difficult to plagiarize. This means I usually have to tweak my assignments as well as allow time for prewriting and process writing. Whenever possible, I try to have students develop their topic when they first receive the assignment, so they leave knowing what they will write about (and so do I).
I try to do this, however, without dictating what my students write. I still want the actual topic to be open to student interpretation.
Goals:
With these constraints in mind, I developed the process essay assignment. I wanted to emphasize credibility and audience. That is, I wanted the student to realize that in order to write a how-to essay, the student should be something of an “expert” on the topic. They needed to do something within the paper that clearly established their credibility. I also wanted the student writer to be aware of the audience they were writing for. Would the audience know specialized terms?
The Activity
When students arrived to class, I had them pull out a piece of paper and a writing utensil. I did not explain what I was doing, and I didn’t introduce the process essay assignment. I didn’t want to have anything influence the student’s thinking.
Instead, I asked the students to write “Expert” on one side of the paper and “Learner” on the other.
Beginning with the expert side, I asked students to answer a series of questions. I read the questions out loud and allowed the students time to write short answers no longer than a paragraph in length.
When we finished, I asked the students to flip over the paper, and I asked the “Learner” questions.
The Explanation
Once students were done answering the questions, I introduced the process essay assignment. I reminded students about modes we had already studied and discussed some key features of the process essay. I explained that the questions the students had just answered would help them identify the topic of their process essay assignment. The explanation did not touch on the details of the assignment (as in word count, due dates, etc.) Instead, the explanation described features of a process essay and mentioned where students might have read process essays outside of the classroom.
Experts and Learners
After the explanation, I divided the class into two. I asked the students to stand up and bring their papers with the expert and learner information with them. On one side of the class, I grouped the learners. I gave them a yellow 8×10 paper to carry, which helped identify them as “learners.” On the other side of the classroom, I grouped the experts. I handed them a purple 8×10 paper to carry with them to help identify them as “experts.”
I then asked the experts to refer to the “expert” side of their answers, and I asked the “learners” to refer to the “learner” side of their answers. The two groups then mingled to find an “expert-learner” match. Once a match was made, I had the students sit together at a table. I then went to each pair and explained the match was now the expert’s topic for the process essay. The learner was a potential audience member. I asked the learner to describe what they wanted to know while the expert took notes.
Halfway through the class, I had the experts and learners switch places, and the matches were made again.
By the end of the class, every student had a topic and had interviewed a potential audience member.
When a match was made, I asked the expert to write their topic on the expert/learner paper. At the end of the class, I collected all of the expert/learner papers.
Glitches
The first time I attempted this activity, I didn’t have a way of distinguishing the experts from the learners when they began to mingle.
After the first time, I fixed this problem by handing out one of two colors of 8×11 paper. Without colored paper, my quick fix was to require experts to assume a certain pose as they mingled — the notebook in their left arm and a writing utensil in their right hand hovering over the notebook. There wasn’t any actual writing being done, so whether a student was left or right handed didn’t matter.
There wasn’t always a good match up between experts and learners. As people paired up, the available options dwindled. I was active in helping students pair up.
In the first pair-up, I was able to help matches by making a learner an expert and the expert a learner.
This didn’t work in the second match-up, however, because the learners in the second group already had their “expert” topics. To pair up the last few learner/expert matches, I read off the expert’s topics. Learners interested in the topic (but maybe they didn’t write it down) volunteered. For instance, one girl’s expertise was cooking, and a student was very interested in learning about cooking, but it hadn’t been addressed in the questions I asked of learners.
Benefits
This exercise gave the “expert” real insight to what their audience might be like. They were able to keep that perspective in mind as they wrote their paper. This was invaluable, and I found students referring to it over and over as they wrote and revised their paper.
Many of the experts had been doing their thing so long that they had forgotten what it was like to be a beginner. By talking to someone who wanted to learn but didn’t know anything, the expert was reminded that specialized terms and complicated moves would have to be carefully explained or not used at all.
The students left with a pretty specialized topic, which made the assignment pretty plagiarism-proof. I had collected a copy of the expert/learner lists, so I knew what topic each student would be writing about.
The Questions
I found that I needed to restrict a few answers, and I also needed to encourage students to write more than just a word or two. This helped students give the most valuable answers.
Here are the questions I used to find an expertise:
- What have you accomplished that makes your family/parents very proud? (Be specific, and it can’t be “graduate high school or accepted to college.”)
- What have you accomplished/can you do that makes your family/friends roll their eyes?
- What have you accomplished that makes you proud? (It should be different than the first answer, and it should be specific.)
- What have you learned on your own only because you wanted to learn?
- What do your friends and family always ask you to help them with?
- What is the biggest recognition you have ever received — the kind you would get dressed up to accept?
- What do you do well?
- What could you teach someone to do?
- If I were on Cash Cab, and I needed to do a shout out to answer the question, what types of things should I call you about?
Here are the questions I used to find a learner:
- What is your biggest failure?
- What would you like to accomplish? Be specific.
- What did you really want to do, and you tried, but you don’t do it well?
- Using just one or two words, write down five things that you are struggling to learn now. This needs to be more specific than “English” or “math.”
- What do you always need to ask friends or family to help you with?
- What is the biggest recognition you could hope to receive? The kind that would make you get dressed up to accept it.
- What do you do badly?
- What do you want to learn to do?
- If you were on Cash Cab, what kinds of questions would you need to call someone about because you couldn’t answer them?
After answering all of the questions, I asked the students to look over their answers and see if they spotted a trend. For instance, one student had answered most of the expert questions with things that had to do with art.
There wasn’t always a trend, which was OK. But if there was a trend, I wanted students to try to find a learner for that topic first. I also had the students do the same thing with the “learner” side, but there was rarely anyone with strong trends on that side.
One Great Example
One of the pair-ups was a student who was expert on football and another student who wanted to learn about football. The student interested in learning didn’t want to learn how to play. Rather the student just wanted to be able to understand the game when it was on television.
The football expert was able to narrow the focus of the paper based on what the learner was interested in knowing. Instead of writing a paper about how to play football, the paper was going to be about what you need to know when watching a football game. The expert had already identified key categories about the topic, but after talking to the learner, the expert started crossing off categories because they were irrelevant to what the learner wanted to know.
Before the writer had even started writing, the expert was able to tailor the paper to the potential audience. The expert realized it wasn’t necessary to explain certain plays or training. By focusing on the audience/learner, the expert was able to identify three out of a possible 9 things to focus on. The expert realized scoring would be important to explain.
Witnessing that exchange, I realized this activity really did help the writers develop audience awareness, and it was happening before a single word was even written.
