In my writing-intensive class last week, I gave a five minute teach on professional writing. I honestly thought this mini-lesson fell on deaf ears. I asked the students if they understood what I was saying and even had a group activity placed at the end to be sure everyone was on the same page, but through the entire presentation, I looked at my class and saw blank stares and a lack of participation that was extremely uncommon with this group. I had failed. While professionalism wasn’t going to make or break their final assignment, I believe it to be skill that could carry them forward in their future careers. However, it appeared to be a skill they were not going to learn from me on this particular day.
Looking back, there were a few fatal flaws to my mini-lesson:
I packed too much in. Even though the points were small, there were a lot of them.
I needed to ask more specific questions than “Does this make sense?” between the slides. Some interspersed activities that they could write or discuss together would likely have had greater impact and helped make each point more impactful.
My final participation activity was too dense. I asked students to tell me what was wrong with a series of sentences I had written and then to give suggestions for corrections. I strung together some truly horrible sentences thinking it would give them ample opportunity to correct them, but it ended up being overwhelmingly bad to the point that students weren’t even sure where to start.
I learned a hard lesson that day. I can’t expect students to learn a lot of information in such a short amount of time. In the future, I will need to dedicate more time to teaching one or two things well and incorporating some in-class practice, rather than trying to have an entire lesson of tips and tricks to professional writing in only 5 minutes.
While I had one student comment that this lesson did in fact help her/him in her/his revisions of their final research paper, I had another say that her/his notes were too chaotic and he/she was unable to remember what exactly I said during the presentation. I haven’t read the revised version of their research drafts yet, so it is still unclear as to whether or not this 5 minute teach helped at all, but I think it is safe to say that this particular presentation will undergo some major revisions before I pull it out again. Hopefully the next version will prove to be truly engaging and beneficial to all the students in the room.
I will definitely leave time and space for in-class writing and revising practice.
This lesson-learned also speaks more broadly to how I would like to engage with writing in my class regularly. If we used writing on a daily basis, it would be easy for students to apply concepts from a 5 minute teach to one of their own writing assignments from a previous class period. I would like to always value writing highly in my class, and I think that by instituting more 5 minute teaches with less content and more interactive practice, it will give students the practice and personal connection they need to remember some of these writing skills for the future. In creating my own class and organizing my own course, I will definitely leave time and space for in-class writing and revising practice so I don’t run into another situation of over-teaching in too-little time.