Today, the class centered on students' reading some exemplar essays from their classmates to analyze them and provide feedback. They did this as a full class, which meant some students spoke up more than others, but it also gave me an opportunity to hear what the students noticed in their peers' papers. Though the students had thoughtful observations about the paper, generally very few students shared. I realized that, to me, peer review is one of the most important and highly transferable skills taught in composition classes. I think it builds critical thinking and communication skills in very sophisticated ways. I think I might actually want to build mini lessons on how to give effective feedback and give more opportunities for peer review throughout the whole unit. It is a difficult skill, but I think that being better at reading papers makes students better at writing them. One of the biggest challenges in this exercise was not surprisingly that students read at radically different paces. Professor Gleason addressed this by having students that finished early read another model paper and annotate that.
What really stuck out to me the most this particular class session was ways that Professor Gleason worked on developing the class culture and having students build a rapport with her and their classmates. Professor Gleason started the class through an informal conversation prompt- What was something good that happened over the weekend? This seemed to make students warm up to each other and I was pleased to see how many students were eager to share this personal information about themselves. I liked the effect it had on the class dynamic.
Professor Gleason continued this trend by having students work together with this direction: "Walk across the room and meet someone new." She assisted students in pairing up with someone they hadn't met. This was really simple to do and got a broader variety of students talking to each other. I would like to continue to think about how students can meet each other in my composition classes. Since I will be teaching a freshman course, I serve an important role in helping acclimate students to college life and making them feel like they are part of the CCNY community. I think the best people to get feedback from on how to help students get to know each other in class is simply by asking them. This is going to be an area I specifically try and pay attention to in my first semester of teaching.
I also noticed that Professor Gleason worked to get a broad variety of voices heard in today's classroom discussion. I noticed that she called on frequently absent students the most to make sure that they were fully participating in class while they were present. None of the students seems uncomfortable by this and they all had thoughtful answers to share when they were called on. I think that my inclination might be to let the frequently absent students take a more passive role in class because I would worry about putting them on the spot and making them more uncomfortable in class. I think this had the opposite effect on them though and it seemed to put them at ease to be called on and made them feel more included.
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