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Howell 1

Dani Howell
Cheryl Hoy
ENG 6020
13 January 2014
GSW 1110 Self-Reflective Narrative
Overall, I feel fairly good about this past semester teaching General Studies
Writing 1110. I was able to improve my teaching throughout the semester and change
some of the things that I struggled with at the beginning of the semester. For the most
part, I believe my unit for lesson one went pretty well. I was most pleasantly surprised
by the fact that all of my students have been turning in their papers on time, which
continued throughout the semester. I kept hearing stories from other instructors about
their struggles of getting their students to turn their papers in on time, so I was that
almost all of my students were able to get both their rough draft and final draft submitted
to Canvas on time (not only for the first paper, but throughout the semester). The writing
time for diagnostic essay was very fast, but my students were up to the challenge and
completed everything on time (although there were some complaints throughout the first
two weeks). I was also able to get my students involved in an interesting discussion of
the common reading novel, The Other Wes Moore, which I enjoyed because it was fun
listening to them discuss literature.
That being said, I was surprised by the quality of writing (or lack thereof). I did not
have the highest expectations for my students writing ability, but after going through and
reading both the rough draft and final draft of every students paper, I was a bit shocked
by their lacking writing abilities. Few students were capable of writing a clear and
arguable thesis, which made class challenging at the beginning of the semester.
Teaching my students to write a proper thesis was one of the biggest struggles, but
once they were able to do so, the rest of their papers seemed to come together.
In all honestly, I do not think my students were successful in writing the first
paper. I was surprised by the poor quality of work that they submitted to me. I had
expected at least four or five of them to turn in passing quality work, however, this was
not the case. There were maybe two papers that I would have possibly passed had it
been a graded assignment, and even that would have been pushing it. The problem
seemed to be the topic. Even though they tried concentrating on a specific aspect of
identity, most of them were unable to understand what identity is. The papers talked
about the word identity, but the content of the paper made it clear they did not really
know what it is. If I ever used the prompt again, I would need to spend class time talking
about what identity is. I made the mistake of thinking that they would know what identity
is, but this was an oversight on my par. Had they understood the topic and prompt, the
quality of the papers would have gone up significantly. Other than that, though, I think
the unit well.
During the unit for essay one, I had some technological problems. On the first
and second day of teaching, after I turned the AV equipment, the computer pulled up
properly, but almost immediately after it turned on it did not work. I am still not sure why
this happened, but thankfully, it worked properly for the rest of the semester.
It definitely took my students awhile to start feeling comfortable enough in the
classroom to be engaged and participate (although this was a constant struggle
throughout the entire semester). I have a few students who are particularly engaged in

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class, and they often raise their hands to answer questions, and I am grateful to the
students who are willing to participate because it makes the rest of the class open up,
and then more people will also participate. My students were successful in utilizing
classroom time. They usually worked diligently during workshop and peer review time,
and when I walked around the room they were usually on task and would ask me
questions.
After teaching the units for essays two and three there are some things that I
believe went well, and other areas where I can improve. I think I did a good job of
illustrating the setup and format of each essay. It took a long time for my students to
understand how to properly organize the essays (especially essay three), but I kept
going over it with them, until most of them seemed to grasp it. They seemed to have a
particular problem with including a well-developed counterargument and refutation (a
constant struggle). I tried teaching these first with short lectures and then through inclass activities where my students were able to get together and check one anothers
work and organization. This seemed to help because they were more willing to listen to
advice when came from another student. By the end of each essay unit, most of the
papers included all of the required elements. Peer review also went well. I tailored the
peer review sheets to ensure they would promote constructive feedback and discussion
about the essay, and my students seemed receptive to this. I even had several tell me
that they really liked the way they did peer review in class because it helped them more
than the line editing and proofreading peer review that they did in high school.
While there were several aspects of my unit two and three that went well, there
were still some struggles. Class participation was my biggest issue. I have tried many
approaches to get my students talking in class, but little worked. I tried putting them in
pairs and then having a class discussion. I tried putting them in small groups and having
them discuss. I tried full class discussions with guided questions, and just trying to get
students to participate by reading aloud in class. Little I tried worked. Most discussions
ends with my students staring at me and only one or two offering to participate. I even
make sure to wait a long time to allow them time to think of an answer, and even that
did not work. For essay four, I had them all write their names on note cards, and they
seemed content to just have me randomly draw their names from the pile for
participation; therefore, I just ended up doing this for the remaining part of the semester
when students would not volunteer to speak in class.
Another issue I dealt with was making students do the assigned reading. Their
lack of participation makes it difficult to discuss the readings in class, and even when I
tell them to bring their books to class, the majority of them still do not, which was a
constant frustration throughout the semester. I did not want to give in-class time to read
because that seemed like a reward for not doing the homework (and there is rarely time
in class to do so anyway), but my encouraging and reminding them to read did not
seem to be doing any good.
Essay four and five were definitely the most successful. They enjoyed writing
essay four the most and found five to be the easiest to compose. We had a few good
discussions for essay four when I had them analyzing posters, which I found to be
exciting. Most of them really got into analyzing the movie and television show posters,
and some students who had yet to volunteer to participate actually wanted to contribute

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to class discussion. I thought this was a turn in class discussion, but when we started
essay five, they went back to minimal participation.
The last two essays also proved to be the strongest for most students. The rough
drafts for essay four were lacking in quality, which was concerning, but my students
worked hard on their final drafts (and in some cases their revisions), and it ended up
being most of their strongest papers. After some struggles with analyzing a visual
argument, justifying an evaluation seemed like an easy task for most of them. The class
discussions for this paper did not go as well as they did for essay four, but the quality of
the rough drafts was definitely an improvement. This may be due to the knowledge they
would not be able to revise this essay if they did not do well.
By the end of the semester, I was definitely happy with how much all of my
students writing had improved. Looking at their portfolios demonstrated how their writing
abilities increased, and I even had several students tell me that they could not believe
how much better their last two papers were in comparison to their diagnostic essay. It
was really fulfilling to have my students recognize how far they had come throughout
the semester. I have some of my students who improved the most in my GSW 1120
class next semester, so I look forward to seeing how much they will be able to improve
with another semester of hard work.

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