The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.

Daniel Coyle, 2009

Discussion by George Pullman

This is a readily digestible rendition of some of the findings of psychologists who study expertise and its acquisition. Coyle's presentation of that information is wrapped in a personal travelogue. He went to various places in the world, he calls them "hotspots", which have produced a remarkable number of people talented in a specific endeavor --Soccer in Brazil, golf in South Korea, tennis is Russia, music in The Catskills. He then argues that these places have been successful because of how they teach, breaking the skill set down into component parts or "chunks" and practicing them slowly and repeatedly, focused always on detecting and correcting errors and striving always, endlessly for perfection. Someone who is on the path to becoming great at something notices even small errors and feels them deeply, often even developing a private language to describe them. The would-be expert doesn't blame others or make excuses. He or she slows down; locates the cause of the error; repeats the correct move; fixes the error and moves on. Would-be experts also push themselves always just beyond their comfort zones (Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development) so that new imperfections are bound to arise; thus they can fix those too. Coyle observes that most people try to avoid errors and to mitigate their psychological impact when they happen, two tactics which are counter-productive of expertise.

From a writing teacher's perspective, one of Coyle's more interesting examples is the Brontës sisters, three girls from a not terribly learned family raised in the middle of nowhere special who grew up to write remarkably good novels. Why? Because they played at writing novels with serious intensity from the time they were children.

Barker's work conclusively establishes two facts about the Brontës' little books. First, they wrote a great deal in a variety of forms—twenty-two little books averaging eighty pages each in one fifteen-month period—and second, their writing, while complicated and fantastical, wasn't very good. As Barker put it, “Their slap-dash writing, appalling spelling, and non-existent punctuation well into their late teenage years is usually glossed over [by Brontë biographers], as is the frequent immaturity of thought and characterization.

 The unskilled quality of their early writing isn't a contradiction of the literary heights they eventually achieved—it's a prerequisite to it. They became great writers not in spite of the fact that they started out immature and imitative but because they were willing to spend vast amounts of time and energy being immature and imitative, building myelin in the confined, safe space of their little books.

 “The fact that the creative activity of writing about an invented world was a joint exercise contributed enormously to the authors' enjoyment. It was a marvelous game, in which each participant eagerly ingested and responded to their sibling's latest installment.”

As writing coaches, when we focus on the surface level of our students' work, "appalling spelling, and non-existent punctuation", we teach at cross purposes. We make them think that grammar and punctuation are all we care about and thus that we are superficial nit picking simple minded souls when in fact we agree that such matters are trivial but nevertheless prerequisite. We want our students to feel a spelling mistake or a punctuation error or a subject verb agreement error the way a skilled musician hears a bad note or an ill-tuned instrument. We want them to wince and fix it before they turn it in so that we can then focus on the ideas, which is what we too would rather focus on. If we ignore the superficial errors, as we do when we give one grade for content and one for form, we reinforce the idea that basic conventions don't matter, but if we line item edit, we either overwhelm them with corrections after the fact, and thus they don't learn to wince, or they discount our efforts as those of superficial elitists, ignore the marks and learn to shrug instead of wince.  So we have to engage their interests, get them to question their ideas, interrogate their thinking, and then oh by the way this sentence is fused ... you need to punctuate it like this... because... Targeted practice means fitting the advice to the recipient's ways of learning and sense of what is important but with the goal that they should learn to wince at what makes us wince. So the feedback has to come quickly. Students need to write short pieces frequently and get near as possible instant feedback.

Key to the effort required for this kind of deep or targeted practice is desire, he calls it "ignition",  that comes from personal identity. The people who succeed at becoming truly outstanding at something can become so because they see themselves as the sort of person who is supposed to become an expert. To slack off, to lose focus, are alienating experiences that the would-be expert instinctively rejects. Greatness is derived from a sense of destiny, but it has to do with psychology rather than fate. Novices destined for greatness have a "vision of their ideal self" and that vision is what keeps them focused. It helps a great deal if they can readily conjure a concrete example who resembles them in many ways. That's why when Se Ri Pak won the McDonald's Master's golf tournament, South Korean girls saw a possibility they hadn't seen before. I can't help but remember the Michael Jordan Wheaties ad, "Just like Mike".

I'm not sure I've captured Coyle's point here, but I have a doubt or two about what I've just said. I'm not sure every expert grows up dreaming of playing Carnegie Hall or hoisting trophy.  Some people just love the actions involved in something to the extent that that's all they want to do. Moe Norman was a Canadian golfer who loved to stand on a range and hit golf balls all day long. And he hit them really really well, so well that he could play professionally, but professional golf didn't appeal to him. He hated the professional part. He was a bit of a savant I suppose, awkward around people and impatient with social activities. It was as if his being needed the sensation of hitting a golf ball and nothing else. Moe's vision was inward focused. Maybe this is why Tiger Woods keeps tearing down his swing. It's the sensations created by the pursuit of perfection that appeal to his being. Not the achievement, but the pursuit. At any rate, 

Expertise is also affected by great coaching. Coyle observes that "master coaches" are great intuitionists of character. They can tell what kind of work ethic a prospective student has, what kind of analogies will make sense to each one, how each student needs to be encouraged and in exactly what ways--harsh with some, gentle with others but also cerebral with some and kinesthetic with others. Great coaches don't say a great deal or spend a lot of time in inspirational talk. They watch and provide feedback on specific chunks in a sequence. They are, in effect, an extra pair of eyes and a different vantage point  for the would-be to use to refine his or her inner sense of the activity they are trying to perfect.

Practice and feedback, overseen by Shiloff's gentle but tough-minded coaching, correcting any inaccurate perceptions and pushing them to try harder, once more.

Linger in the discomfort a little longer each time.

 The Shyness Clinic. “When I thought I was born this way, then I thought, what's the use,” Andre said. “But when it's a skill, everything changes.”

 Practice staves off cognitive decline.  

Pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort.

It's Not Tv, It's Social Tv

It's Not Tv, It's Social Tv

http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7799

 

Participants:

Chloe Sladden (Twitter)

Fred Graver (The Travel Channel)

Gavin Purcell (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon)

Lila King (CNN.com)

Timothy Shey (Next New Networks)

 

Summary

"How is social media changing the TV experience for good? Over the past ten years, we've seen television become truly interactive, from SMS voting on American Idol to real-time audience feedback via Twitter and Facebook becoming a part of everything from CNN to Oprah to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. At the same time, web series have built millions of viewers on places like YouTube, iTunes, and XBox Live. Now a new wave of always-connected mobile apps, set-top boxes, and gaming platforms are making entertainment more social, location-aware, and connected than ever. Our panel of producers of hit TV shows and top web platforms will talk about how they're enabling social viewing and collaboration between producers, stars, and audiences in real time to create new kinds of TV experiences."

 

While I am not particularly interested in TV experiences connected to education, I did find this panel to be one of the most useful and interesting (and I'm not just saying this because my wife was on the panel or because they handed out Krispy Creme donuts).  The panel focused on how communities can be created using Twitter or other social media tools to create brand loyalty, drive larger audiences to live TV shows, gather user feedback data, and use audiences to create content.  Much of the discussion seems easily transferable to the University.

 

GSU has various Twitter and Facebook accounts (Arts & Sciences, Parking Services, Bill Curry, School of Music, Campus Events, etc.), and from what I can tell they serve as a place to announce events and information.  The GSU social media page is at www.gsu.edu/social.html .  I'm wondering in what ways the university, departments, or individual faculty members could use/are using social media beyond just the one-way dissemination of information.  I just signed up for Twitter, so I'm no expert, but just listening to this discussion, hashtags are the easiest way to do this. Gavin Purcell showed an example from Jimmy Fallon that makes it clear how hashtags can be used: http://www.hulu.com/watch/192364/late-night-with-jimmy-fallon-hashtags-aw-hell-no .  Most of the sessions I went to at SXSW had a hashtag where the audience could tweet questions for the panel throughout the session.  Robinson College of Business is creating something similar to this with Test Question System: http://www.youtube.com/georgiastateu#p/u/30/hRUd0Sc3ve4  (why not just use Twitter?).  The in-class application seems useful and easy, but I'm wondering how it could be used to create GSU communities outside of the classroom.  Could Political Science create a GSU hashtag for the next presidential debates and give students a place for discussing the debates as they happen with their peers?  What about a pop culture class asking students to analyze a TV show as it happens?  Music students a concert?  All these types of communities already exist elsewhere (and for all I know this is happening here), but having GSU communities could be an exciting way to see what students are thinking, to get feedback about how we are doing as eachers or as a university, and to make students feel more a part of GSU.

B

Death of the textbook, Emergence of games

Death of the textbook, Emergence of games

Participants:
Alan Gershenfeld (E-Line Media)
James Bower (Numedeon/Whyville)
Sara DeWitt (PBS)

Provided Summary
"Textbooks published on trees are on the way out in Texas, California and the rest of the country and world. The Textbook industry is hoping they will be replaced with on-line versions spruced up with animated graphics. However, it is likely that on-line textbooks will be no more successful than magazine advertising that morphed into banner ads. Linear content with multiple choice answers at the end of each chapter, won't work. And as with banner ads, on the Internet you can measure that they don't work. What does work? Socially networked GAMES. The question for this panel is whether games will replace traditional educational media, and what those games look like. What will the teachers manual look like? How will learning be assessed? What happens to the classroom, or the school itself, when on-line learning is available 24/7? What does the PTA look like if parents can play along with their kids? What happens to the distinction between vocational and instructional if playing games is equivalent to performing a virtual job or service? And what happens to the college admission process, if instead of taking a standardized aptitude test, students have been playing a complex game for years. In fact, what happens to colleges and universities where lecture halls still reign supreme? There is a revolution underway, driven by kids and the games they play. Will the educational system adapt or die? We will see (and discuss)."

Got in late on this one, but was immediately interested. This panel was focused more on k-12 kids (as are the majority of education panels), but Bower was discussing how the technology of the printing press has dominated the structure of education for hundreds of years. Books, he argued, are the driving force behind having distinct disciplines, departments, and prerequisites. Because books are a fixed medium, textbooks are most efficient when they deal with one topic. Classes develop around the textbooks and a student has to master one issue before they can move to the next. Kids in classes have different skills and experience levels, so many likely know much of the content and have to sit there while others are behind. The teacher has to move through the textbook in a linear way because that is the nature of the book. This is at least how I understood his basic argument. Could be off a bit.

If his explanation is correct, what does this mean for the university? We are certainly more fixed in our disciplines than elementary school teachers. We are rewarded for focus on 1 area and while there's a buzz about interdisciplinary work, there is little reason to work with faculty in other departments and the tenure process actually discourages it. WAC is all about bringing folks in from across the disciplines, but our focus is pedagogy. While most profs are very interested in having discussions about what happens in their classrooms, everybody knows that good teaching is not highly rewarded from the top.

The focus of the panel was how online games can challenge the textbook paradigm. The speakers were involved with the PBS website and Whyville, which are two of the major online educational sites for kids. Whyville sounds particularly interesting. It is the longest running virtual world for kids. They form online communities and can explore the world on their own (heavily guarded and monitored though). There is an economy based on "clams" and "pearls". They earn this money through playing educational games. There is a newspaper that is produced by the kids in the community and many of them create products and set up stores. There is also a government. Because the world has existed for a long time there are a lot of kids who have been there for years and some participate in structured mentor programs for younger kids.

Some of the major issues the panel discussed:

1. How to create a curriculum partially based on games. Part of the power of these sites is that it is relatively not structured. Kids learn at their own pace and can move on when they are ready. They are less likely to get either bored or discouraged. But in a school setting how would this work if games played a major role instead of just a small part. Who would develop this curriculum? How would it be paid for?

2. What role the teacher will play. Teacher training would have to be drastically restructured. One of the panelists argued that the curriculum should be free and all of the money saved should go into professional development.

3. "Assesment should not be episodic but continuous." games are excellent tools for assessment. On the back end teachers, developers, administrators can see when kids are struggling with material or when the work is too easy. This is essential to creating games because kids get either bored or frustrated and will stop trying. This is true for standard education too, but games are much easier to fix than creating a new textbook

Brennan at SXSW

SXSW is not an academic conference. All the panels I've attended have at least 50 people. I am learning this the hard way. 3 of the 6 sessions I've attended so far I had to wait to get in and then had to sit on the floor. Most of the sessions I've been to have over 100 attendees and a couple had a good many more.

Everyone has a laptop, iPad, or iPhone open during the sessions, and all but 2 so far take questions throughout the time of the panel through twitter. I've been surprised that a lot of the panels have had basic technology problems even though there is an army of SXSW technology assistants in all the rooms. It's kind of refreshing actually. All the speakers deal with the problems without skipping a beat.

No one has just read a paper.

My plan is to create an entry for several of the more interesting panels I attend. I will give the title, the participants, and the summary they provided. I will then share what I felt were the most important points. Following is a list of panels I attended and a link to that panel. Some include audio from the panel:

Death of the Textbook, Emergence of Games

The Potential of Augmented Reality for Education

Interactive Comics: Techniques to Enhance Math Education

It's Not Tv, It's Social Tv

Why Visualizing Government Data Makes Taxpayers Happy

Time Traveling: Interfaces for Geotemporal Visualization

Decision Trees: YouTube's New Breed of Interactive Storytellers

Building Fences in the Sky: Geo-Fencing Has Arrived

Keynote Simulcast: Christopher Poole

People-Powered: Technology's Role in the People's Revolution

B

Academically Adrift

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

by Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa

Discussion by George Pullman

This book is getting a great deal of press and it is certainly worth reading and talking about. If fact, we are planning to gather a group of faculty from across campus for a 2 session discussion of the topics and questions raised by Arum and Roksa. If you don't have time to read the book, the authors provide a great summary here. We are particularly gratified to see capstone courses and portfolios mentioned positively. For a sense of what Academically Adrift is about, have a look at the quotations below. Again, apologies for the absence of page numbers. Kindle app glitch.

• "With a large sample of more than 2,300 students, we observe no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study."
• "While they may be acquiring subject-specific knowledge or greater self-awareness on their journeys through college, many students are not improving their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing."
• "Evidence of limited learning and persistent inequality should give pause to the recent emphasis on “college for all” policies."
• "Fifty percent of students in our sample reported that they had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one-third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week."
• "If students are not being asked by their professors to read and write on a regular basis in their coursework, it is hard to imagine how they will improve their capacity to master performance tasks—such as the CLA—that involve critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing."
• "Students are taking courses without significant reading and writing requirements, it is probably unreasonable to expect them to develop skills to improve on performance tasks that require critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication."
• "Having faculty members who are perceived by students as being approachable and having high standards and expectations is associated with greater learning."
• "The combination of reading and writing in coursework was necessary to improve students’ performance on tasks requiring critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in their first two years of college."
• "If we select top-performing institutions—institutions that show much larger gains on the CLA than others, net of individual characteristics— we find, not surprisingly, that their students report higher incidence of behaviors that are beneficial for learning (figure 4.8).61 Students at these institutions report greater course requirements: almost two-thirds (62 percent) of their students reported taking courses that required both reading more than forty pages a week"
• "Among other characteristics, these institutions had an “unshakeable focus on student learning.” Their emphasis on undergraduate learning was manifested in a range of practices, from institutional openness to new and experimental instructional techniques to faculty investing more time in students and taking greater responsibility for them, as well as showing greater commitment to both providing and receiving feedback."
• "When students report that they have taken a class in which they had to read more than forty pages a week and write more than twenty pages over the course of a semester, they also report spending more time studying: more than two additional hours per week than students who do not have to meet such requirements."
• "Faculty throughout the higher-education system have learned that research productivity is rewarded not just with increased salary, but often with reduced course loads—and they have come to believe that to the extent that undergraduate instruction matters at all in these institutions, it is assessed primarily in terms of student satisfaction on course evaluations."
• "Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, for example, urges all institutions to develop “ambitious, specific, and clearly stated goals for student learning” and to “gather evidence about how well students in various programs are achieving learning goals."
• "Association of American Colleges and Universities, for example, has noted that “capstone courses and portfolios provide promising anchors for a meaningful approach to educational accountability."

How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching

Susan A. Ambrose, Michele DiPietro, Michael W. Bridges, Marsha C. Lovett, Marie K. Norman, Jossey-Bass, 2010.


Discussion by George Pullman


This struck me as an extremely useful book. While much of it may seem like common sense to people who have been teaching for years, the authors render this common sense explicit and offer research to back up its validity. While this text is definitely worth reading in its entirety, below are some salient ideas to whet your apatite. Page numbers are absent because I read this book and developed quotations from it via the Kindle App. If you are new to teaching, you definitely want to read this book.

• Because students come to think of writing as a “one size fits all” skill, they misapply conventions and styles from their general writing classes to disciplinary contexts in which they are not appropriate. For example, they might apply the conventions of a personal narrative or an opinion piece to writing an analytical paper or a lab report. 
• Because students learn most effectively when they connect new knowledge to prior knowledge, it can be helpful to begin a lesson by asking students what they already know about the topic in question.    
• Ask Students to Make and Test Predictions 
• Ask Students to Justify Their Reasoning  
• Novice and expert knowledge organizations tend to differ in two key ways: the degree to which knowledge is sparsely versus richly connected, and the extent to which those connections are superficial versus meaningful. 
• A key difference they found was that the good problem solvers were far more likely to monitor their understanding while they studied, that is, to continually stop themselves as they were reading to ask whether they were understanding the concepts just presented      
• Research has shown that good problem solvers will try new strategies if their current strategy is not working, whereas poor problem solvers will continue to use a strategy even after it has failed
• Students who believe intelligence is fixed have no reason to put in the time and effort to improve because they believe their effort will have little or no effect   
• Be More Explicit Than You May Think Necessary    
• Tell Students What You Do Not Want
• Check Students’ Understanding of the Task 
• Provide Performance Criteria with the Assignment   
• Provide students with ample practice and timely feedback to help them develop a more accurate assessment of their strengths and weaknesses     
• Provide Opportunities for Self-Assessment    
• For complex assignments, provide students with a set of interim deadlines or a time line for deliverables that reflects the way that you would plan the stages of work.
• Remember that planning is extremely difficult for novices. 
• Have students create their own plan.    
• Instead of solving or completing a task, students could be asked to plan a solution strategy for a set of problems that involves describing how they would solve each problem.
• Have Students Do Guided Self Assessment 
• Require students to reflect on and annotate their own work   
• What did you learn from doing this project? What skills do you need to work on?    

Bob Broad's What We Really Value

What We Really Value by Bob Broad, 2003

Discussion by George Pullman

This blog is part experiment, part blog entry. I read Broad's book about writing assessment today using the Kindle app on the Ipad and highlighted what I thought was interesting and then copied the highlights from kindle.amazon.com and pasted them below. For some reason there were no page numbers associated with these notes. Perhaps that feature hasn't yet made it into the kindle.amazon website yet. At any rate, what we end up with is a somewhat unreadable gist of the text. Handy as a refresher looking back weeks or months later but not really a useful alternative to reading Broad's book. Given more time I might stitch the more salient quotations together to make a gist.

Broad makes a number of interesting points about the weaknesses of rubrics as writing assessments tools, their lack of context, their idealized assumptions about what we think we value when it comes to writing, among other things.

Interestingly, WAC-CTW did a similarly ethnographic activity to generate one of our early sets of rubrics for critical thinking. We took a list of critical thinking traits and asked faculty to rank them in order of importance and then to rank them in terms of how well they believe their students do them.  You can see the results here.

At any rate, below is a list of direct, verbatim quotations from Broad's book, which I urge you to read..

A prime assumption of my work is that a teacher of writing cannot provide an adequate account of his rhetorical values just by sitting down and reflecting on them; neither can a WPA provide an adequate account of the values of her writing program by thinking about them or even by talking about them in general terms with her writing instructors. 

For all its achievements and successes over the past half century (see Yancey), the field of writing assessment has no adequate method for answering one of its most urgent and important questions: What do we value in our students’ writing? What we have instead are rubrics and scoring guides that “over-emphasize formal, format, or superficial-trait characteristics” of composition (Wiggins 132) and that present “generalized, synthetic representations of [rhetorical] performances … too generic for describing, analyzing, and explaining individual performances” (Delandshere and Petrosky 21).  

within the world of positivist psychometrics, the world in which ETS and other commercial testing corporations still operate, precise agreement among judges is taken as the preeminent measure of the validity of an assessment. 

understand and carefully map out the swampy, rocky, densely forested terrain of writing assessment that they found lying before them, they quickly moved to simplify and standardize it thus:

ETS researchers eventually derived from those seven main headings a list of five “factors” that seemed to capture the values of their readers: Ideas: relevance, clarity, quantity, development, persuasiveness Form: organization and analysis Flavor: style, interest, sincerity Mechanics: specific errors in punctuation, grammar, etc. Wording: choice and arrangement of words And thus was born what became the standard, traditional, five-point rubric

Confronted with an apparent wilderness of rhetorical values, they retreated to a simplified, ordered, well-controlled representation that would keep future writing assessment efforts clean of such disturbing features as dissent, diversity, context-sensitivity, and ambiguity. 

The historical context of U.S. culture in 1961 and the following decades, rubrics may have done more good for writing assessment and the teaching of writing than any other concept or technology. During a time when educators were under constant pressure to judge “writing” ability using multiple-choice tests of grammar knowledge, the work of Diederich, French, and Carlton (and other researchers at ETS and elsewhere) legitimized direct assessment of writing (assessment that took actual writing as the object of judgment). 

Rubrics provide badly needed relief and enable faculty to assign and judge actual writing from large numbers of students with relative speed and ease. 

Scoring guides yielded yet another set of advantages: documentation of the process of evaluating writing. 

Students, instructors, and the general public could hold in their hands a clear framework for discussing, teaching, and assessing writing.

Assessments should improve performance (and insight into authentic performance), not just audit it. (129) 

For the assessment to be relevant, valid, and fair, however, it must judge students according to the same skills and values by which they have been taught. 

Very rarely do rubrics emerge from an open and systematic inquiry into a writing program’s values. 

By predetermining criteria for evaluation, such a process shuts down the open discussion and debate among professional teachers of writing that communal writing assessment should provide. 

a rigorous inquiry into what we really value and a detailed document recording the results of that inquiry. 

“Dynamic Criteria Mapping.” 

Huot foresees that the new generation of assessment programs will be
 1. Site-based
2. Locally controlled
3.Context-sensitive 4. Rhetorically based 5. Accessible 

metamorphosing from the psycho-metric paradigm to a hermeneutic one 

The long-term outcome should be better learning for students of composition, enhanced professional development for writing instructors, and increased leverage with the public for writing programs that can publicize a complex and compelling portrait of 

Precisely because they lacked the teacher’s rich knowledge about a particular student, outside 

evaluators wielded their own distinctive authority in deciding which students passed 

participants volunteered to explain their pass/fail votes. Along with evaluative issues that bore directly upon the decision to pass or fail a particular text, related topics often arose that posed substantial and complex questions or problems for the FYE Program as a whole, such as “How do we define ‘competency’ in English 1?” “How important is it for a writer to ‘fulfill the assignment’?” 

First, I systematically, comprehensively, and recursively analyzed more than seven hundred pages of observational notes, transcripts of group discussions and interviews, and program documents to develop an emic map of City University’s terrain of rhetorical values. Working from my best understanding of their experiences, I then brought that conceptual map into dialogue with critiques of traditional writing assessment—and especially of rubrics and scoring guides—current in the literature of evaluation. Extending grounded theory in this way, I found participants’ complex criteria for evaluation cast in a new light, suggesting new possibilities for improving communal writing assessment, professional development, and student learning in the classroom. Dynamic Criteria Mapping seizes on those new possibilities. 

Using QSR Nvivo software for computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, I coded every passage mentioning criteria for evaluation, defined as “any factor that an instructor said shaped or influenced the pass/fail decision on a student’s text.” 

Without a method for placing side by side statements from program documents and candid statements from various norming and trio sessions—some privileging revision and others privileging unrevised prose—a writing program would lack the ability to identify a serious pedagogical and theoretical fissure 

Interesting criterion comes from Grant Wiggins, who complains in several of his publications that he encounters great difficulty trying to persuade groups of English instructors to place Interesting on their rubrics and scoring guides. 

Researching what we really value when teaching and reading rhetoric, as opposed to placing in a rubric only what we think we are supposed to value (typically “objective” and “formal” features) in large-scale assessment settings.

Cliché can be another’s Subtlety suggests that a writing program’s Dynamic Criteria Map might contain potentially hidden links among criteria depending on different readers’ literary or stylistic orientations. 

Dynamic Criteria Mapping can document and bring to light evaluative systems of which composition faculty might otherwise remain unaware (or about which they prefer to remain silent), 

A key observation at the outset of this section is that Constructing Writers is a widespread and perhaps inescapable feature of reading. We always construct an ethos behind a text as a means of interpreting and evaluating that text. What is new is our awareness that we need to document such evaluative dynamics so we can hold them up to critical scrutiny and make programmatic decisions about how to handle them. 

Ethos as a Textual Criterion consists of inferences drawn by readers on the basis of clues observable in the text. 

Constructing Writers is a Contextual Criterion precisely because the clues from which readers construct these portraits or narratives of authors come from outside of the student-authored text. 

Ted felt that the teacher’s wider knowledge of the student’s work gave the teacher the ability to make a better judgment than outside instructors’ “cold readings” alone could provide. 


 Imagined Details was the dominant mode of Constructing Writers in norming sessions, where (with one or two exceptions) the authors of sample texts were complete strangers to every reader present. 

They frequently inferred, imagined, or simply assumed “facts” about a student-author and her composition processes. 


Portfolios are, in and of themselves, powerful contexts for rhetorical judgment. The discourse of participants in this study lays out several specific ways in which evaluation of portfolios differs from evaluations of single texts. 

Which is not to say that a single essay might not tip the scales one way or another on a borderline portfolio, 

Instructors sometimes attempted to project imaginatively into the English 2 classroom, to imagine a particular student there and especially to imagine themselves or one of their colleagues teaching that student. 

Depending on their deeply felt sense of what were the core goals of English 1, instructors might pass or fail an essay 

Right or wrong, many instructors held an almost magical faith in the capacity of the Writing Center to cure student-authors of their rhetorical ills. 

The common evaluative implication of this faith in the Writing Center was that borderline texts failed because instructors believed authors could have gone the Writing Center to get help with their problems. If texts that came before them for evaluation showed difficulties of various kinds (most often with Mechanics), students were assumed to have neglected to make use of the Writing Center as a resource. 

how the professional growth and awareness (or mood or level of exhaustion) of the instructor-evaluator shapes evaluation. 

DCM transforms the way we understand not only writing assessment but the nature of composition itself. 

Communal writing assessment, and especially Dynamic Criteria Mapping, require more of faculty than do teaching and grading in isolation. 

Instructors become more aware of their own evaluative landscapes; they learn how others often evaluate and interpret texts very differently; and they work together to forge pedagogical policy on such sticky issues as revision policies, how to value in-class timed writing in a portfolio, and plagiarism. 

The purpose of DCM is to discover, negotiate, and publish the truth about the evaluative topography of any given writing program, not to turn away from complexity and dissent 

Sample texts for DCM should be selected because they feature as many kinds of rhetorical successes and failures as possible. 

Tape recordings and transcriptions of norming sessions, trio meetings, and solo interviews. 

scribes should write down the specific criteria to which readers refer when they explain why they passed or failed a particular sample text. Scribes should also note the specific passage in the specific sample text to which a participant refers when invoking one or more criteria. 

Now that they know, perhaps for the first time, how they do value students’ writing, they need to undertake high-powered professional discussions regarding how they should value that writing. In other words, their focus shifts at this point from the descriptive to the normative. 

Electrifying Your Scholarship

Discussion by George Pullman


The Kindle App may have just come of age. As of the most recent version it is possible to cite from the electronic text using page numbers. You can also view all of your highlights and notes at kindle.amazon.com, making it possible to export and copy and paste. All of this means that you can now use the kindle app for scholarly reading.