Thank you for this; I teach first year academic writing (often online) at a school that seems determined to sit on the fence about how to handle AI, and I feel like I’m getting no direction from my department or the university on what I should be doing. (And as an adjunct, my own time and resources are limited; I also don’t want to come …
Thank you for this; I teach first year academic writing (often online) at a school that seems determined to sit on the fence about how to handle AI, and I feel like I’m getting no direction from my department or the university on what I should be doing. (And as an adjunct, my own time and resources are limited; I also don’t want to come up with a system that won’t be supported by the administration.) This has been really helpful in starting to think through how I might change the course.
I'm glad this was helpful! About departments and universities: While some of these seem to be doing good things in this area and providing help to faculty that is actually helpful -- most are not, and in most cases it seems like a losing proposition to wait for (or even to ask for) help from "above". The smart thing to do, it seems, is to fend for ourselves by learning and banding together with other individuals. Hopefully this blog can be one place where you and I can do that.
Hi Rhiannon, fellow college writing teacher here! This is definitely hard, especially in online classes. A couple of things that I have found helpful:
- Giving students space to make decisions about what they want to write about and how they want to write about it, and encouraging them to write about things that they genuinely want to learn more about in a way that is meaningful for them. This helps a lot with student engagement, and my experience has been that it significantly reduces problematic AI use. At the same time, it reflects my belief that writing is fundamentally about decision-making and problem-solving and making these kinds of decisions is essential for our development as writers.
- Emphasizing the value of imperfection, uncertainty, groundedness, and connectedness in writing and in creative and intellectual work generally. These are things that are generally lacking in AI-generated text, but they're also things that are not appreciated as much as they should be in a lot of academic writing. Many of my students come in with the expectation that writing for school is about correctness, both with respect to rules of composition and with respect to the mastery of textbook knowledge. My belief is that writing for college should be about genuinely trying to figure things out.
- Giving students a lot of what I call "earned credit" for their work in progress - about 75% of the overall grade. Students earn this credit as long as they are doing useful work, even if it's unfinished, drafty, a scribbly mess, etc. (In fact, even if it's a conversation with me about where they've gotten stuck.) This also helps to reduce problematic AI use: basically, handing in AI-generated stuff won't get you any more credit, and may expose you to significant hassle/risk. But it also reflects my belief that college writing classes are first and foremost about helping students to develop their creative and intellectual practice: we *should* get credit for messy scribbles because messy scribbles can be a valuable part of how we learn and how we develop a project.
- With in-person classes, giving students a significant amount of time to work on their projects in class while I check in with students individually or in small groups. In a sense, making it more like a studio art class or an athletic practice. Most students get a lot of work done in this time, and it makes it possible for me to give them a lot of formative feedback and personal support without making my own workload unmanageable. (I typically have upward of 100 students a semester.)
I do still see stuff that looks like evidence of problematic AI use, but I don't see a lot of it - probably about the same as I would see evidence of plagiarism in the past. And importantly, these are all things that I would believe in doing even if AI didn't exist, and they seem to be resulting in better student experiences and better student work. (Of course, this is not to say that it doesn't get pretty messy in practice.)
Yes! This is great—thank you. I’ve switched to a lot more in-class work on their scaffolded term paper in my Writing About Music class. It is a section of the class specifically for Masters level L2/ELL students and I’ve found that it has slowly helped some become more comfortable asking questions because I’m there (rather than on the other end of the email) and I’m there for that purpose (rather than feeling they are “interrupting” my “teaching”).
These are awesome! Love the formative component during class time. What does a typical writing assignment look like in your class? Do you give specific prompts and/or a range of options?
Thanks, Elliot! For context, I teach primarily English Comp 1 and 2 at a technical community college. The main assignment for both is a semester-long writing project. The basic parameters are:
- Students decide what they want to write about. I encourage them to choose something that they're genuinely interested in learning more about. For some people that might be something that's connected with academic interests or career goals, for others it might be something that comes out of more of a personal interest or experience, or it might be a combination. (For example, one student who was interested in radiology but also a big football fan did her project on the use of MRIs to diagnose football injuries.) We spend a significant amount of time walking through strategies for finding and developing a subject. I'd say this is really the focus of the first three weeks (though it often continues to evolve over the course of the term).
- Students are encouraged to explore their subjects from multiple perspectives, using different kinds of thinking and writing. More specifically, I want to push them to do work that's conceptually engaged while at the same time being contextually grounded. I provide them with a pretty detailed menu of suggested approaches, and we spend a significant amount of time walking through some of these together. (For example, to model defining key terms and concepts, we might spend a class arguing about what constitutes a sandwich or using the OED to explore how word usage shifts over time.) But it's up to the students to decide which specific approaches they want to use and how they want to combine them, and they're encouraged to come up with approaches of their own. (In fact, a number of the suggested options grew out things that students have done in the past.)
So, it's kind of a combination: I want them to be making meaningful decisions about what they do and how they do it, but I've also found that it's helpful to support and inform those decisions by giving them a menu of options that they can draw on.
Gotcha, that's a great approach! The "What constitutes a sandwich?" class argument sounds like a blast, I certainly do not lack opinion on that subject...
Thank you for this; I teach first year academic writing (often online) at a school that seems determined to sit on the fence about how to handle AI, and I feel like I’m getting no direction from my department or the university on what I should be doing. (And as an adjunct, my own time and resources are limited; I also don’t want to come up with a system that won’t be supported by the administration.) This has been really helpful in starting to think through how I might change the course.
I'm glad this was helpful! About departments and universities: While some of these seem to be doing good things in this area and providing help to faculty that is actually helpful -- most are not, and in most cases it seems like a losing proposition to wait for (or even to ask for) help from "above". The smart thing to do, it seems, is to fend for ourselves by learning and banding together with other individuals. Hopefully this blog can be one place where you and I can do that.
Hi Rhiannon, fellow college writing teacher here! This is definitely hard, especially in online classes. A couple of things that I have found helpful:
- Giving students space to make decisions about what they want to write about and how they want to write about it, and encouraging them to write about things that they genuinely want to learn more about in a way that is meaningful for them. This helps a lot with student engagement, and my experience has been that it significantly reduces problematic AI use. At the same time, it reflects my belief that writing is fundamentally about decision-making and problem-solving and making these kinds of decisions is essential for our development as writers.
- Emphasizing the value of imperfection, uncertainty, groundedness, and connectedness in writing and in creative and intellectual work generally. These are things that are generally lacking in AI-generated text, but they're also things that are not appreciated as much as they should be in a lot of academic writing. Many of my students come in with the expectation that writing for school is about correctness, both with respect to rules of composition and with respect to the mastery of textbook knowledge. My belief is that writing for college should be about genuinely trying to figure things out.
- Giving students a lot of what I call "earned credit" for their work in progress - about 75% of the overall grade. Students earn this credit as long as they are doing useful work, even if it's unfinished, drafty, a scribbly mess, etc. (In fact, even if it's a conversation with me about where they've gotten stuck.) This also helps to reduce problematic AI use: basically, handing in AI-generated stuff won't get you any more credit, and may expose you to significant hassle/risk. But it also reflects my belief that college writing classes are first and foremost about helping students to develop their creative and intellectual practice: we *should* get credit for messy scribbles because messy scribbles can be a valuable part of how we learn and how we develop a project.
- With in-person classes, giving students a significant amount of time to work on their projects in class while I check in with students individually or in small groups. In a sense, making it more like a studio art class or an athletic practice. Most students get a lot of work done in this time, and it makes it possible for me to give them a lot of formative feedback and personal support without making my own workload unmanageable. (I typically have upward of 100 students a semester.)
I do still see stuff that looks like evidence of problematic AI use, but I don't see a lot of it - probably about the same as I would see evidence of plagiarism in the past. And importantly, these are all things that I would believe in doing even if AI didn't exist, and they seem to be resulting in better student experiences and better student work. (Of course, this is not to say that it doesn't get pretty messy in practice.)
Hope this is helpful!
This is tremendous. Thank you so much.
Happy you found it helpful - we're all in the process of figuring this stuff out!
Yes! This is great—thank you. I’ve switched to a lot more in-class work on their scaffolded term paper in my Writing About Music class. It is a section of the class specifically for Masters level L2/ELL students and I’ve found that it has slowly helped some become more comfortable asking questions because I’m there (rather than on the other end of the email) and I’m there for that purpose (rather than feeling they are “interrupting” my “teaching”).
These are awesome! Love the formative component during class time. What does a typical writing assignment look like in your class? Do you give specific prompts and/or a range of options?
Thanks, Elliot! For context, I teach primarily English Comp 1 and 2 at a technical community college. The main assignment for both is a semester-long writing project. The basic parameters are:
- Students decide what they want to write about. I encourage them to choose something that they're genuinely interested in learning more about. For some people that might be something that's connected with academic interests or career goals, for others it might be something that comes out of more of a personal interest or experience, or it might be a combination. (For example, one student who was interested in radiology but also a big football fan did her project on the use of MRIs to diagnose football injuries.) We spend a significant amount of time walking through strategies for finding and developing a subject. I'd say this is really the focus of the first three weeks (though it often continues to evolve over the course of the term).
- Students are encouraged to explore their subjects from multiple perspectives, using different kinds of thinking and writing. More specifically, I want to push them to do work that's conceptually engaged while at the same time being contextually grounded. I provide them with a pretty detailed menu of suggested approaches, and we spend a significant amount of time walking through some of these together. (For example, to model defining key terms and concepts, we might spend a class arguing about what constitutes a sandwich or using the OED to explore how word usage shifts over time.) But it's up to the students to decide which specific approaches they want to use and how they want to combine them, and they're encouraged to come up with approaches of their own. (In fact, a number of the suggested options grew out things that students have done in the past.)
So, it's kind of a combination: I want them to be making meaningful decisions about what they do and how they do it, but I've also found that it's helpful to support and inform those decisions by giving them a menu of options that they can draw on.
Gotcha, that's a great approach! The "What constitutes a sandwich?" class argument sounds like a blast, I certainly do not lack opinion on that subject...