What I've Read

Reading through Teaching Argument Writing by George Hillocks, there was a distinct sense of movement through the stages of proper argument writing. While being packed full of educational tips and methods, the format of the book did a wonderful job of guiding through the process of teaching students what argument writing consists of and not just how to create an essay using arguments. In order to show the parts that I found beneficial, I picked the quotes from each section that stood out the most.

On providing clear feedback:

“The complexity of the problem, the clarity of the objectives, and the expertise of participants are all related to useful feedback. Experts and experienced participants will understand and respond to feedback better than neophytes still learning what feedback is. …working with neophytes, we need to focus our feedback on no more than two or three related dimensions of the task at a time and emphasize what the learners have done well.” 

Feedback has such an impact on students, not providing them with appropriate feedback is a large disservice. From this quote, I took away the idea that it is important to treat students almost like I teach my own children: they are new to concepts, even if they are something that they should know at that point, and simply reiterating the same thing to them won’t work. Educators have to be the feedback they need to show them that, even when they aren’t grasping the material, their progress has been noticed.

On pretesting:

“Before we teach students how to do something new, we need to know what students already know how to do in relationship to the task.”

My education was a bit hectic as I moved from school to school. One thing that would have been a huge benefit would have been if more teachers utilized pretesting. Many times, certain subjects (I’m looking at you, Math) require a great deal of background knowledge in order to even complete simple tasks later on. If a teacher isn’t ready to provide a pretest, students who are falling behind will only continue to fall further. The pretest should be something that proceeds every lesson, even if it only consists of a discussion or no-grade quiz to check for understanding.

On using small-group discussions:

“Small-group discussions make for powerful learning environments when they are carefully planned and monitored. … Demonstrate how to do the task in a whole-class discussion before assigning small-group work on similar tasks. Be sure that the tasks for small-group work are at the same level of difficulty as the task that you demonstrated with the whole class.”

Small-group discussions have become one of my favorite things to explore in the classroom. I was fortunate enough to be in an internship where the teacher holds the same beliefs as Hillocks in reference to small-group discussion. Simply telling a classroom to have a small-group discussion is an open invitation for them to shirk the responsibility of the problem if they aren’t informed. To model the task and keep it on the appropriate level as the students is a remarkable method as it can be utilized in pretests, assignments, projects, etc.

On teaching students to make inferences:

“The interpretation of literature is all about the reader making judgements. … Students who have learned to develop criteria to define a concept are able to bring the understanding, those criteria, to bear in the reading of a literary text and make inferences based on this understanding.”

Even when we are dealing in Honors courses or with older students, it is crucial to further define their understanding of interpretation. As Hillocks has said, a student who is prepared to complete these interpretations (i.e. knowledge of developing the criteria to define a concept) will be more efficient in their personal interpretations.