National Day on Writing

Thanks to my MA thesis writers for kicking off our English Department’s informal and public annual celebration of writing-in-our-lives. I appreciate your energy and thoughtfulness in jump-starting this tribute to writing in/as a community. ❤️☺️

Michael’s thesis-in-progress discussion

Thank you Michael for the second installment in our MA Thesis Presentation Series, and for sharing your early-stage thesis project. I am glad we had this chance to think together about where it might go. The classroom observations protocol offer a promising starting point for exploring how writing is taught in college composition courses. The next step is to get a clearer sense of the central question driving the project and what you hope to learn from your data.

A few related questions seem to be emerging: Is the project about effective writing instruction? Or is this more about the teaching practices of college composition instructors? Is it about what students need to know and be able to do in order to succeed as college writers? Or is it primarily about what we learn when we apply two different teaching-observation frameworks to the same classrooms? (You seem to suggest this was NOT the direction you were interested in). These are all possible directions, but they would lead to different kinds of analysis and findings. Clarifying which question is at the heart of the project will help bring this MA thesis into sharper view.

One direction worth exploring is college-ready writing, and the transition from secondary school to higher education. There is a substantial body of scholarship that could help ground this inquiry, including the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, developed collaboratively by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project. This framework looks beyond writing skills alone to include habits of mind, rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking, and experiences that support students’ development as college writers. These kinds of resources could offer a useful starting point for asking what college-ready writing actually means and how college composition instructors help students develop the knowledge and practices they need. A possible research question might be: What teaching practices are observable in college composition classrooms, and how do these practices align with established understandings of the knowledge and practices students need to develop as college writers?

Perhaps this direction would give the observations a clearer purpose. Rather than simply evaluating four professors’ teaching, you might identify particular writing-related practices such as modeling, scaffolding, feedback, revision, rhetorical awareness, or opportunities for critical inquiry. You might examine how these appear across the classrooms. The two observation frameworks could then be used to consider what they capture about these practices, what they leave out, and whether they offer a sufficiently detailed picture of writing instruction.

You still have some important work to do in connecting your data collection to your eventual findings. What patterns will you look for across the four classrooms? How will you distinguish the difference between your completed observation forms (both Danielson & York), and your interpretation/analysis of your observations, and what the patterns that emerge actually mean? What will your study allow you to say about college writing readiness, given that the data comes from college classrooms rather than secondary schools? This is where my thought about your autoethnographic writing (from a secondary school teaching perspective) might come in handy in further developing your study.

These are all natural questions to work through at this stage, and they are an opportunity to make the project more focused and manageable.

Remember, the goal is not to know the findings in advance, but to establish a clear reason for collecting the data and a thoughtful plan for analyzing them. I really look forward to seeing how this continues to develop. Getting the central question and the analytical approach working together will help your thesis take shape.

A note to everyone in our thesis class

Our discussions are an important part of the learning we do together. Each presentation is an opportunity not only to support the presenter, but also to practice the questions, insights, and generous critical engagement that help each of us grow as developing scholars. Your participation matters, and I encourage everyone to contribute to these conversations as part of our shared learning.

Next up! Cj…

Looking forward to it,

Dr. Z