Watch and Learn: how lecturers can learn from each other

How it came about

I watched a colleague teacher yesterday. We are supposed to peer review our teaching but this wasn’t what I was doing yesterday.  Now that I’m in charge of a programme on which I don’t teach, and a programme on which I do teach has a side totally unknown to me, I thought one of the most efficient ways to find out what goes on would be simply to go and see a class in action.

What I saw

I watched a second year Drama and Creative Writing students in their The Method class. I arrived half way through the session. I found a large group of young people sitting in a circle totally absorbed watching a couple of their peers rehearse a scene. Later another group of three was chosen for another scene. The lecturer prompted them to think of various aspects of their performance. Next came a set of questions related to what had been happening in the class so far. The students were then assigned roles. Some were to rehearse the first scene we had studied. Just two groups will rehearse the scene with three: there are only two males in the class and this scene involves a male character. They had a short time to start on this in class.

They will spend another two weeks on this. Then they will rehearse another scene from another play, finally completing one on which they will be assessed. The class starts with warm-up exercises that are also very educational. They look at various ways of getting into these characters.

Expectations are high. They have quite a bit of homework. Not only must they come to class next week able to put the books down, they must make notes in their journal and they need to produce a one-page autobiography of their character.

The familiar

This lesson was not actually so very different from some of our creative writing ones on character. Before I arrived the class had completed an exercise involving looking in the mirror and trying to make themselves look like the character they were representing. I have been known to do this when working on characters in my fiction. Charles Dickens did it too.

Some observations

I now know a little more about what happens in our Drama classes. But there were some general points to ponder anyway. I saw:

A well-structured course

A firm but relaxed manner with the students

High expectations of student engagement

High expectations of independent and collaborative work by students       

Were there any negatives? I couldn’t see any though no doubt if I’d had a checklist I could have found something.

Could I see any room for improvement? We talked briefly at the end about rehearsal space for the students. As I’m our Technology Enhanced learning champion I did wonder whether we could make use of the electronic journal supplied by Blackboard 9, our Virtual Learning Environment.

What did I see that I could use? The warm-up, the gradually letting go that leads to independence. I guess I do that but not so smoothly.

Some more thoughts about peer reviewing

This visit wasn’t quite about that but it does make some suggestions for peer review. I used to be a Head of Modern Languages in a secondary school. Peer observation was high on the agenda.  It can feel threatening. It is very easy to dwell on the negatives.

Maybe it is less threatening and in fact more useful if we simply ask ourselves these three questions:

What is working really well here?

What else might this teacher do?

Is there anything I can adapt for my classes? 

Writing Teacher

Writing Teacher

The beginning of the new semester approaches rapidly. This academic year I am programme leader and actually have four programmes to look after. That’s not quite as much as it sounds: one is brand new this year and is replacing another, which therefore only has two cohorts on it and one programme is only in its second year, so in fact my four are only actually 2.66.

These are what are now being referred to as the Creative Suite within the School of HuLSS (Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences) and include Drama and Creative Writing (DRAW), English and Drama (that’s the new one!), English, Drama and Performance Studies (EDPS)  and English and Creative Writing (WREN).

So far, I’m enjoying the role. There are a lot of new initiatives at the moment and its exciting overseeing those changes. We have a new version of our VLE, Blackboard 9, and though there are teething troubles with it and we all need to get used to it, it will eventually be so much better than our old one, Blackboard 8.

What does make me nervous is Induction week. This is when we meet our first year students. I have to address the whole cohort twice. That could be as many as 70 students, though is more likely to be around 50. We never know the exact number by the beginning of the first week and this year has been a particularly tricky one with the massive rise in tuition fees and several students who had been offered places not getting the desired results. These first meetings are all important, though. The students get their first impressions of the university from these.

I am very much looking forward to the breakfast we give them on the second day. Here they can meet all of their teachers informally. Then they meet me more formally and I go through some of the practical, technical things; how important the VLE is, the difference between a lecture and a seminar, how to approach staff, expectation of attendance, electronic submission, feed-back, how university is different from school, how assessment works and about the exchange they might do in their second year.  

The second meeting will be more fun. We’ll be giving the students a taster of  how classes might work. This is a challenge as I will have there some students who are less interested in performance and some who are less interested in writing, but I’m intending to do an ice-breaker, a creative writing exercise and a performance exercise. It is so essential to get this right.

Wish me luck.                 

Reading Lists – how they grow

We have a delightful system at the University of Salford, called LaSu, where we can add books to our reading lists as we find them. This makes a great deal of sense – as proactive researchers we should always be on the lookout for suitable material for our students. These, though, should be books mainly for background reading and not what we would expect students to buy. We need to establish which books students must have and read towards the end of the academic year before. We can’t expect them suddenly to purchase the one we read yesterday.  Or can we? Perhaps we can if it’s absolutely brilliant? I’ll come back to that.

A student contacted me recently because she could only find the 2011-212 lists. Technically, we are still in 2011-2012. Semester 3 is not yet finished. Naturally, though, she wanted to know what she was expected to read in 2012-2013. We had been asked not to add any new books into our essential lists after March 2012, as that was when the students were presented with module options. However, they weren’t aware of this.  

The books and other materials on our lists are divided into “essential”, “core” and “further reading”. Essential are the ones that students are expected to buy. Core works are stocked in multiple copies in the library and are referred to in our courses. Further reading texts are for those students who have a deep interest in the course and some spare time. The library will stock fewer copies of these.       

I’m teaching a course on the young adult novel in Semester 2 next academic year. I’ve just finished reading a novel that gets the balance of fast pace and emotional closeness exactly right. These are two qualities required in young adult novels but it’s often difficult to do both at once. Later today I’m going to blog about it, do a review on Amazon, add it to my reading list and put a mention of it into the week where I tackle the tension between pace and emotional closeness. I don’t think I dare ask my student to buy it though now. Maybe it can be promoted to essential for 2013-2014.

However I have to remember my own MA days. Okay, we were all mature students and probably had better cash flow than the 18-22-year-old undergraduate. Robert McKee’s Story came out just a few days before the second year started. It was the must-have, must-read book for anyone involved with stories. There is now quite a lot of ambivalence about McKee. Story was written for the film world. Expensive seminars are now delivered and some in the film world are cynical about their content let alone their cost; they are not cheap. Yet McKee has a lot to tell us about how stories work and he certainly appears on a few of my reading lists. I’m really quite glad our course convenor got us to buy it.

So, our reading lists grow. They reflect the proactive research of the teachers who offer their wisdom to their students. I’d actually be rather worried about a reading list that didn’t change for several years.   

While the students are away their teachers play. Really?

Usually around early June someone will say “I expect you’ve got a lot of time on your hands now that the students have gone home.” At his point I have to bite my tongue. The activity at the end of the semester actually steps up: that’s when we do all the marking, moderating, sending work to external examiners and attending exam boards to ratify coursework and exam marks and to decide which students may progress to the next year or graduate.

This is not a light load – in one semester next year I’ll have to mark 118 scripts. They take about an hour a time. We have to turn them round in three weeks and the earliest ones come in while we’re still teaching. There is also a perception amongst our non-teaching colleagues – I don’t mean the office staff – they really do understand – that we now have plenty of time so all sorts of meetings and training courses take place. 118 hours is about 3.4 working weeks. Fine. Almost. But the other work doesn’t go away – emails from students and colleagues need to be answered – plus there are all those meetings and training courses.

At this time also we are doing some end-of-module administration. Students fill in Module Evaluation Questionnaires. We have to summarise them and respond to both positive and negative points. It’s a good idea at this point to have a good look at the module, while it’s fresh in the mind, and think how you’d like to improve it next time round.

Then, once the exam boards are over, we need to chase up students who have failed a module or even the whole year, whether it be for personal mitigating circumstances, poor performance or lack of organisation, and make sure they know what to do to catch up. We tend to repeat this activity around the beginning of August when the resubmissions are due in. Just before that there is often a flurry of panic emails and phone calls as students worry about what they are submitting or what they need to learn for an exam.

I personally like to make point also of attending graduation. The hat makes me uncomfortable, you sit with the speaker’s back to you throughout the ceremony and you are under some hot lights. But it seems important and it’s all a bit of good old British pomp and circumstance. It’s good to see the students, anyway, and meeting them before or after the ceremony is a great joy.  

The MA dissertation students and Ph.D students are with us all through the summer, requiring detailed feedback on their work and one-to-one meetings. The Masters students also bring us a new pot of marking just as the new academic year begins.     

Naturally, we are also expected to attend conferences, write research papers, conduct research, apply for funding and write books.

Round about now we are preparing for next year and although we can recycle material from other years a little, we constantly have to change how we present it as the university improves its systems. For instance, this year we have new-style programme handbooks and we must populate a new version of our Virtual Leaning Environment is a specific way. We also have new modules to design, extra teaching hours to fill and new lectures to write.

Towards the end of August we have clearing. It’s mainly the territory of the admissions’ tutors, but it’s useful for others to be around. Anyway, you want to know how admissions are going.    

It can actually be difficult to take the 32 days to which we’re entitled. At Christmas there is marking around and then you may not be able to get anywhere because of the weather. Easter might be better, but it’s already conference season and there may be some early marking. Graduation is in July and in August there are resits and clearing. This year, I took most of mine in late June early July so that my husband could centre his around Independence Day, I could be back for graduation, resits and clearing and could avoid the school holidays. Sadly it meant I missed the Manchester Children’s Literature Festival. And whilst away, I wrote several blog posts, edited two books, wrote a couple of chapters of a text book and read twenty books to do with my work. It was still relaxing because of the sunshine and at least I got away from the email in-box for a while. You still come back, though, feeling that you have missed something vital.

This isn’t a rant. I love everything I do – even the admin in small doses.  And yes I often work from home or somewhere other than the office and yes I can be very flexible with my time. But one of the main points of working from home is that I get up to two hours’ more work done.  As I tend to work until about 9.00 p.m. most days and usually do at least four hours on the weekend I see no problem in occasionally leaving the office early –to catch a train to a conference or similar event, attend a community event or go to a book reading.

So, no, while the students are away we don’t play. We work very hard. We are very lucky, though, because for the main part we enjoy our work.     

Writers as readers

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: writers must read. Writers are probably writers because they read. They’ve picked up a rhythm for writing and a love for words and language via a sort of osmosis.

I’ve recently read Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, Union Books. This is an academic book really and even the Kindle price is not cheap. However, Prose makes several valid points. Naturally she agrees with me, and probably every other creative writing teacher, that reading is extremely important for the writer and also that reading as a writer is slightly different from reading as a reader, though writers are also allowed to be readers.

Prose also makes the point that clearly many of the writers she quotes break several of the rules that creative writing teachers offer, though it is the study of other writing that suggests that these rules exist. She discusses reading generally then looks how we find help with our words, sentences, paragraphs, narration, character, dialogue, details and gesture by reading others. She cites Chekhov as a great master and further suggests that we might turn to the work of others when we feel discouraged; perhaps if we have a particular scene that does not work we might look to see how others have handled this type of problem – and we can often be pleasantly surprised.

Reading is never quite the same again for the writer who reads critically aware of how other writers have used their skill and crafts to engage and enthral their readers. Yet they’re in no worse position than the literature scholar who reads just as critically but against a different framework, though the writer’s one is remarkably similar to what Prose calls the New Criticism and involves closer reading.

Just occasionally we may meet a text that takes us out of our editor’s brain – hence my other blog, Recommended Reads. Here’s the rub however: even though we are spurred to leave our editing head behind, we still try to work out how the writer did it.        

                  

Writing Novels for Young Adults – a practical guide for undergraduate creative writers

I’m currently putting together a proposal for the following book. It is meant to be an essential book for my second year undergraduate module Writing Novels for Young People. I did send a proposal to one publisher some time ago but never heard back. I actually suspect something went wrong with the post. Now I’ve prepared it for another and it’s almost ready to send off. I just want to check it once more and then it will be on its way. You can’t just recycle book proposals. You have to adapt them slightly to the requirements of each publisher.

The one I’m currently sending to suggests that your try it out on colleagues and students.  In a sense I have tried it on students: it follows my module very closely. Now, though it occurs to me that I should write it anyway. It will be useful to next year’s students and as I don’t teach them until semester two I have plenty of time to get ahead. The text book will probably take on a life of its own as I do this and hopefully develop organically. Even if the book hasn’t found a publisher by then it still stands the chance of being a valuable resource.

Below is a very rough outline. Let me know what you think.

Chapter 1 The Young Adult Protagonist

Chapter 2 Story Theory

Chapter 3 The Story of Adolescence

Chapter 4 Pushing Boundaries

Chapter 5 Achieving Pace

Chapter 6 Writing Synopses

Chapter 7 No Happy Ever-After and No Author Control

Chapter 8 The Multi-genred and Multi-themed Young Adult Novels

Chapter 9 Developing Character Closeness in the Young Adult Novel

Chapter 10 Creating a Sense of Space and Time

Chapter 11 Showing, not telling

Chapter 12 Dialogue

Chapter 13 Editing work

 Appendix 1 Reading as a Writer

Appendix 2 The Writer’s Journal

Appendix 3 Point of View

Appendix 4 Writing advice, critique groups, workshops and writing buddies

Appendix 5 Networking and submitting

           

Marking within the academy

We’re well into the marking season now. This serves to remind me that marking creative writing, within the academy, is about more than raw talent. Some with raw talent are still only getting mediocre marks. Some who are willing to learn but whose work has some way to go are getting better marks.

At my institution, within my subject area, we look at a variety of areas:

Task  Has the student completed everything and in the way we expected? We pose a five mark (out of a hundred) penalty for any missing element and pro rata for only partially completed elements. Students can then fail to gain marks in areas that deal with the missing element. So, for example, a missing bibliography may lose them five marks and make their score in Writerly Reading and Research about 35%.

Expression This is an area where a student might have some talent and may not be relying on what we have taught them. Does their prose / poetry / dialogue flow? However, it can be improved: through more practice and through extensive reading.               

Technical skills A good mark in this area may come from the student being able to apply what they’ve learn n a particular module. For example, in my Writing Novels for Young People module, I’m delighted to see people getting pace into their novel extracts, drawing characters that look like young adults and maybe pushing a few boundaries.  Plus much more. However, I also expect to see evidence of skills they’ve learnt elsewhere – like how to show instead of tell.

Writerly reading and research This is usually about the annotated bibliography. Students are expected to supply a bibliography and make comments about the books they have read. I expect at least the set books on the course to appear, a good mixture of primary and secondary resources and meaningful comments on what they have learnt about writing from the books they have read. However, they don’t have to agree with them but if they don’t, they should produce convincing arguments against them.       

Style This, like expression, is less teachable and rather must be learnt. Exposure to good writing and continued practice again help. There is something here, also, about, appropriateness for the content and consistency. We are approaching voice, which is actually very hard to get right. Still practice makes perfect.

Reflection This usually refers to a self-assessment students produce and the drafts they submit alongside their final piece. In the self-assessment I look for deep insights into how this particular genre works and a writer’s understanding of their own process. I look for evidence of a sound drafting process.

Writing skills We expect good grammar, good spelling and good punctuation. We expect effective use of words and well constructed sentences. We expect controlled language and tight writing UNLESS an aspect of style calls for something else.

Presentation We expect correctly formatted work (industry standard) and correctly completed references (academic standard). Dialogue must be set out correctly and paragraphing must be appropriate. How does one achieve “excellent”? Maybe by supplying extra bits of thoughtfulness, starting with an industry standard cover sheet.        

So no, raw talent isn’t the only thing. And anyway, talent that is still raw needs to be honed, in or out of the academy.