Students sometimes comment on course evaluations that they “didn’t know what the instructor wanted” for each assignment. Students can become frustrated when they believe instructors should give them a road map for a certain A on each assignment or should provide them with previously written papers as models. As you know, these approaches erroneously imply that composing successful communication is a matter of following steps or a formula, filling in blanks, or emulating someone else’s already-produced response to the assignment. They deny students the essential learning experience of using their own critical and creative thinking to respond to an assignment.
How can you help your students see the integrity and coherence of the pedagogical process in your ISUComm Foundation course and to understand how their individual course projects will be evaluated?
- Emphasize from the outset that your ISUComm Foundation Courses section will provide them with detailed assignment sheets that include evaluation criteria. These detailed assignment sheets and criteria constitute a sort of road map to understanding what an effective response to the assignment will include. Within these parameters, there are of course several routes students may take to meet the criteria. Return to the assignment sheet and criteria several times before the assignment is due, providing suggestions and taking student questions about various ways the project might be successfully completed.
- Distribute the program’s grading rubric (tailored to each specific project) before the assignment is due, and show students how the rubric corresponds to the criteria on their assignment sheet.
- Use carefully chosen readings from your course texts and point out successful rhetorical strategies those authors use to generate the assigned genre your students are working on. Ask students to identify these as well (a good small-group activity). Connect these authors’ strategies to the assignment sheet’s criteria.
- Fill in a general outline of the assignment genre, guiding students as a class to collaboratively generate appropriate ways to handle the opening, body, and closing of the communication. By discussing several suggestions (different “routes”) for each section of the assignment, students can keep their own thinking open and recognize that successful responses to the assignment do not follow a one-size-fits-all formula to the “one right answer.”
- Focus peer response sessions on the most essential features of each communication assignment (these will be the same as those on the assignment sheet and on the rubric), so students have the opportunity to give and receive feedback on their individual navigation of the assignment requirements.