Creating Postgraduate Collaborations › Forums › CPC Supervision Development Course › Module 3 › Module 3: Writing Development and the Provision of Feedback
Tagged: drafting, imaginary conversation, redrafting
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Share your insights from this week’s sessions on writing development and the provision of feedback here.
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The session on developing student writing is yet another moment of reflection in my work as a postgraduate supervisor. Many a time, in the course of my supervision, I have encountered writing pieces that are fraught with surface level language issues, so much so that I have ended being a language editor! Alas! Now I know wherefrom, these language challenges originate! The notion by Marrow (2009) of epistemological access is telling! My students seem not to have been inaugurated into their disciplines or field of studies in the most appropriate ways! Much as this is the case, the videos provide useful guidance on how I should build my students’ writing!
The questions posed, three, may not generate ready answers but suffice it to note, I take them as a challenge and thus my guidance on how I should strive to assist students develop their writing! More often than not, for me, I always give them sample texts from where I encourage them to approximate their work! At my institution, there is no formal writing support for students, a resource that I find very necessary if at all my work as a supervisor is to be made a little lighter!I am familiar with all the suggested techniques thanks to Sioux. One thing I realised is that I am not doing enough to engage my students with available resources even though they have access to them. I will try to improve in that area.
I use Pomodoros for my own writing. I have recently tried free writing and I found it very useful. I will try it with my students.I am familiar with all the suggested techniques thanks to Sioux. One thing I realised is that I am not doing enough to engage my students with available resources even though they have access to them. I will try to improve in that area.
I use Pomodoros for my own writing. I have recently tried free writing and I found it very useful. I will try it with my students.The PPT on using feedback for learning, yet again, provides useful points for reflection in my work as a supervisor! In particular, I find it useful to be guided that I try as much as possible to remain a guide in my field of study and not necessarily a language editor! Moreso, I found the guidance on how to give feedback in the form of questions as very useful! I must admit that, often times, I have given instructions instead of comments that give the student responsibility to explain what they mean in their texts! All in all, this presentation has enlightened me on what I need to continue to practice in order to use feedback to my students as a platform for authentic learning! After all, these students will have to make their contribution to academia after their graduation, a feature that demands much more than what they would have presented in their dissertations!
These techniques are not really new to me. I use them interchangeably depending on what I am working on. I sometimes write from experience, from field data or knowledge from literature review. The latter is mainly to appraise what exists, and/or show the existing gaps that I would like to fill. I think that I keep developing and sharpening my writing skills through what Sioux refers to as “practise, practise, practise”. If I compare the first journal paper I wrote in 2004 and the pieces that have been as recently as this year, there is way much difference. This comes through practise. I do not keep reflective journal though, something that I think I should try. I keep a notebook for what I am working on and the main reason for this is to keep notes that I am likely to forget, ideas that cross my mind about the topic at hand, but not a journal that gives me a clear chronology of my writing. I sometimes do free writing of concepts, methods, and issues that come through as I think through a piece that I am working on, but this is something that I have to consciously remind myself to practice.
I am familiar with all the techniques covered in the videos, given that my field is academic writing :) I find free writing really useful to get through any blocks I am experiencing. It also helps the daunting feeling of not having anything on a page. I do free writing at the beginning of a text, or even in the middle when I have an idea and need to get it down quickly. Doing the free writing activity allows me to relax (knowing that the idea has been captured) and gives me time to then craft it in a more scholarly way. I also use a version of reading journals, but always make sure to add the following questions to my response task:
– what is the main argument?
– what kind of data does it draw on?
– what theories and methods are used to understand the data?
– what claims are made? (i.e.main findings)
– how is the study limited?
– what is good/useful about the study, in relation to my research?I find that having to address these questions in my own pre/free writing helps me develop my voice when it comes to writing the more ‘scholarly’ account.
In order to develop student writing, I generally provide comments instead of changes to the writing (except for grammatical issues) so that the student sees the reasoning (linked to the academic literacy in my field) and then the student edits the text themselves and submits a new version. This has worked well for many students, but for some weaker students it is not sufficient. I have recommended creating a reading journal and doing pomodoros to my students and more recently, I have asked a weak student to share their reading journal with me so that I can assist if necessary.
Also, in the past I have asked students to create an excel with each paper name (label) that they read in the first column and some keywords that come out of the paper in columns and also where the writing might be useful for their research (e.g. methods, introduction, etc.). This I hope provides an easy guide for the student to go back and revisit the paper at different stages in their writing.
Re. my own writing, I take notes but I don’t do enough free writing or pomodoros as much as I should.
There has been a tremendous increase in the enrollment of post graduate programmes at private and public universities. However, in most instances, attention to capacity building of the post graduate students on accessing appropriate literature and writing skills is not provided adequate attention. Ideally it is the hour to groom the students as versatile individuals, equipped with all the skills, attributes and, updated knowledge to keep pace with the ever changing literature world. It is therefore important to facilitate the post graduate students in all the possible ways by developing strategies to synthesize the characteristics that would align with the mission to develop professionals for a better world. The mission statements of almost all the higher educational institutions claim that universities and colleges seek to provide excellent teaching and a high quality learning environment. However, the rules are not implemented due to certain barriers at various levels especially, administrative, academic and financial.
What kind of feedback do I give to my students, and which feedback in my view is most effective?
My experience is that students work well with both face-to-face and electronic feedback. There is much that can be said and explained on face-to-face interactions, but these again are likely to be forgotten. What I do is that I insist on a soft copy of the document where I can track changes and give as detailed feed back as possible, mostly by raising questions on what I feel is half-way, poorly or erroneously presented/addressed. I would then email this back to the student and ask them to go through the comments, and ask for a meeting if the comments on the draft need clarification. This has mostly worked well, but there are times when students will not ask for clarification even when you can clearly see from their responses to your comments that they needed a face-to-face or phone call session with you. I have made it a habit to understand the diverse personalities, strengths and weaknesses of my students, and use this as a guide on how to give them feedback. I will insist on meeting some and not others, the latter being those that can work with electronic comments well.This said, I feel that there is a lot that students need to learn about the writing process and sometimes given the stubbornness of some of them, I provide guidelines like referencing styles, samples of well written documents, and demand that the student has to get to a level that we can now start progressing. For instance, we have to agree that referencing has to be done in a certain way, and if this is not done, then we just don’t progress. I have also learned to work with them chapter by chapter in place of waiting for them to write the whole document. This ensures that the objectives are coherently addressed and that we do not move to a new chapter when we still have questions and gaps to respond to in a previous chapter. I also try not to correct grammar and in place ask them to edit their documents or engage a professional editor, who will not change the content but will ensure the grammar, spellings, tenses, and other grammar issues are in place.
This said, I must admit that over the years, I have realised that the writing process is not easy and takes a lot of practise for one to become a prolific author, even for us supervisors.
These informative videos have enhanced my knowledge and confirmed some of the techniques I now use out of supervision experience.
In my Linguistics discipline, there is a great temptation to think and want to see only good; writing. The spelling, grammar and coherence could easily take forefront and blinding the real important ideas the student could be trying to express. Over the years I have outgrown that temptation and encourage the student to just write and at an appropriate stage be able to clean the work once they understand the discipline’s academic communication. I allow my students to go through the various stages of writing. I do encourage them to just bring out their ideas at the thesis proposal infancy. The focus is in the possibility of expressing a knowledge that requires exploring. I advise the students to read a lot and putting their ideas down with minding it being perfect. I advise not to think to write like a PhD scholar.
Scholarly reading and academic writing are clearly in the heart of own text development Reading is undoubtedly a central activity throughout any postgraduate degree pursuit. Students must create a lot of time for this activity and carefully record the relevant information. The way we use language, to represent the acquired knowledge from reading, should be distinct and in harmony with the discipline involved. Therefore, writing must be carefully structured so that our voices do not get lost along the way. From these videos, I would now encourage my students to own a reading journal where they could write anytime any idea in their study area crops up in their minds. They can also try the Pomodoro and Shut up and Write techniques to encourage their own voices!
I am more informed after going through the “Developing Student Writing” session? Many Science oriented writing is more hinged on the “second” Abstract example. Many a time, this puts off students, and instead of summarising they tend to quote or simply copy. Hence, the supervisor keeps re-writing the texts for students.
Now I see why students need to be trained/encouraged to have free writing. This would help in practicing how to write thoughts/impressions on paper.These writing techniques are a boon to both supervisors and students. I use them in my writing albeit not in the same stride. I encourage my students to adopt them. For instance we do a lot of brainstorming (herein referred to as Generative – free writing) to collate ideas discussed in meetings and lab sessions. Like Sioux, encouraging them to keep writing throughout the research process and not regard writing as “last element before submission”.
Linguistic issues can make a supervisory experience become challenging and frustrating. The difficulties can impact negatively on the supervisory relationship. This is exacerbated by the differing assumptions and expectations of the stakeholders. What is regarded as ‘acceptable’ English at most institutions faces the risk of not having been sufficiently interrogated. There is room though to make for student writing. Overall, the supervisor needs to take the improvement of the post graduate student’s writing as own responsibility. The basis for this is that writing is an essential tool for learning a discipline and helping students improve their writing skills is not a responsibility of the English department alone. The supervisor has to ensure that the students knows that the supervisor values good writing by stressing on the importance of clear, thoughtful writing. The supervisor has to therefore provide apt guidance throughout the post graduate studies writing process, constantly reminding the students that the writing is an essential process to help clarify ideas. Cognizance has to be embraced and shared with the student that writing is a way of learning, not an end in itself. As such, the student needs to be given opportunities to talk about their writing so that they can formulate their thoughts, generate ideas, and focus their topics. Encouragement should be given to students to revise own work with the supervisor providing formal steps for revision by asking students to submit drafts for review or for peer critique. The importance of grammar and sentence structure, as well as content need to be explained by the supervisor. This will contribute towards making the students knowing that the supervisor is keen on the writing style and, looking at both the quality and content.
The writing techniques shared in this forum are very much close to what I use. For instance many students make a lot of grammatical mistakes but what I do is to give them several feedbacks and also encourage the students to read their work several times before submitting. I have noted that their engaging in several reading minimizes grammatical mistakes in their write-ups.
On journal reading, I encourage a draft on the key issues of interest and then read with specific reference to focusing on the issues to be researched on. I encourage keeping a list of reference materials and highlights on what each references focuses on. A folder of relevant journal papers assists to clarify issues on the listed focus areas during writing time.
So, what is presented in this section is very closely related to what I do and advise student to do. Great videos and presentations indeed. -
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