"What Does My Teacher Want?"
What Students Say About Teacher Expectations and Best Practices
"Sometimes professors vary so much in what they expect that getting that first paper back is a sigh of relief. It’s done, and I’ll have the feedback and I’ll learn whether I’m meeting the professor’s expectations and how to improve. I feel confident that I can do well when I write for my classes. It’s just getting those parameters set." --Robyn, a psychology major
How do students figure out what we teachers want in response to a writing assignment? For a student-focused chapter in their book Engaged Writers & Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life, Chris Thaiss and Terry Zawacki report their findings on this and other questions based on data collected from focus group interviews with undergraduate students from a range of majors and essays written by upper-division students from 22 majors as part of a portfolio process for proficiency credit for English 302. Here are some of those findings.
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Most focus group students saw their professors as idiosyncratic in their expectations. One piece of advice they would give other students is to expect that even teachers in the same discipline will be different in what they want and how they grade.
Perhaps as a result of this perception, they placed most emphasis on feedback they received on the first paper of a course as an index of the teacher's expectations.
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When students can't pick up cues from their teachers, they tend to fall back on prior experience and on stereotypes about what different disciplines expect.
"I had a professor who didn’t have any writing assignments all semester and then we had a nine-page term paper to do. It was weird because once again you didn't talk to him about writing in general, so you didn’t know how he wanted it to be written. I didn’t expect him to grade it like an English teacher. I just wanted him to see that I had found a lot of information and that I was able to get the word count. That's what I expect from those who aren’t English teachers because it’s not their job to critique my writing, it’s their job to critique what I learn." – Engineering student
Focus-group students tended to express discomfort and/or suspicion when teachers gave assignments or listed criteria they considered unconventional, like "Be aggressive towards the topic."
"I’d like to be original but I have no idea what my professor's ideas of originality are."– Communication student
Yet a surprising number also said they tried to write in ways that wouldn't bore their teachers and would somehow make their papers stand out.
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Focus group and proficiency exam students stressed the importance of having a teacher point out their strengths as writers, as well as what needed to be improved.
"It's not just a good grade; you can get the highest grade. But for me what matters is that a professor mentions my strengths and then says what I should work on. Then the next time I write a paper I have a sense of my strengths and know that he's going to be noticing those too and that increases my confidence.” – Finance student
Students found it very helpful when teachers explained what constituted an "A" paper, a "B" paper, etc. either on the syllabus or the assignment itself; when teachers showed student examples and explained strong and weak points; when they included grading rubrics and discussed these in class.
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Students who reported having lots of opportunities to write for different teachers and in many different courses were most confident about their writing and what it means to be original.
"The more you write, the more you see that all the rules you worried about following when you were just beginning sort of fade into the background and become the foundation from which you work. I guess that’s how you feel like you have more freedom to say what you want to say." – Psychology student
A teacher's passion for her own work and/or the student's academic project was a significant factor in engagement in the topic.
"My professor had never heard of my topic and she was extremely interested in it, so I took the extra steps of doing more research. She wrote 'Wow, you taught me so much' on the paper, and I felt like I really could be an expert." – Health Recreation Tourism student
Some Implications for Teaching
- Feedback to students on their writing, especially on the first paper, is crucial to student understanding of the discipline and the discourse.
- Students benefit from models, rubrics, and disciplinary examples of terms like "clear thesis": or "concise sentences."
- When we ask for "original thinking" or "your own conclusions," we should show students what this might mean--especially in writing based on the research of others.
- We should help students find and express their own passions for learning within the assignments we give. How will they benefit from doing our assignments?
- We should give students opportunities to write reflectively on their growth as writers.
by Terry Zawacki |
