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174 T EAC H In G WI T H ST U D EnT T ExT S Working with semantic maps helps make visible and concrete that not all composition courses are the same and not all institutions have the same kinds of students. Graduate students need practice in seeing how institutional documents can help identify the type of course they are being asked to teach and how the documents fit together, contradict, or complicate each other. These initial activities establish the context for specific assignments and the work with student writing that follows. Without setting such a context, work with student writing becomes an abstraction rather than a response that exists in a rhetorical and cultural/institutional setting. Although we could just talk about the documents they’ve been assigned to read, the semantic map demonstrates another way of using collaboration to generate knowledge, tests individual understandings in the safety of small groups, contributes to the building of community through a shared task, and illustrates how reading materials can be used and not just talked about in the writing class. Creating the map is a different kind of writing task for most graduate students, a task that makes them consider both form and content simultaneously in much the same way that Dennis Barron’s description (2009) of having students write on clay tablets shifts writing away from being an invisible technology so it can be considered as a particular literate practice. i denT i fyi ng whaT ST uden T S can and can’T ye T do A small set of undergraduate papers written in response to the same assignment are provided, and graduate students are asked to read the set to identify (1) what the students can do; (2) what they haven’t done that would make the papers more successful; and (3) what they’ve started to do but haven’t managed successfully. The graduate students are asked to mark the papers in any way they wish in preparation for discussion at the next class meeting. When we begin the discussion, I put the three categories on the board and we generate a list of features in each. The list for what students already know how to do is often unexpectedly long. First-year students at our institution usually know, for example, how to write complete sentences and spell most words correctly . They structure paragraphs, introduce, develop, and conclude. They usually respond to the assignment, or at least parts of it, and often know how to take a position or develop an argument with examples and generalizations. Listing such features on the board, and pointing Writing to Learn, Reading to Teach 175 the graduate students back to the work they’ve done earlier with course objectives, typical student profiles, cognitive development, and literacy helps move the discussion away from counting errors or complaining about logical fallacies or formulaic writing. The second category—“what students could have done to make the writing more successful”—though grounded in the common language of course expectations, usually reveals the variety of interpretations readers have of student work and generates debate about what the assignment expects. Multiple interpretations force discussion of the specifics on the page, engage participants in the question of what leads one reader to see what others had not considered or had interpreted very differently, and generates talk about why some readers are more bothered by particular moves than are others. My objective in encouraging such discussion is not to come up with a single interpretation, but rather to have these young teachers begin to take responsibility for articulating their judgments and substantiating them with the evidence on the page. I also hope they begin to recognize personal peeves and develop expectations for academic writing that are broader than what they personally like or find disagreeable. When we look at a collection of undergraduate end-of-term portfolios later in the course, graduate students are almost always better able to articulate a pedagogical judgment and support it with evidence in student texts, suggesting they have learned to think like a teacher. The last category—what students have started to do but not really mastered—is the most important and usually requires comparison across the student papers being discussed. It is this last category that leads directly to designing whole-class instruction; we teach in the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky 1978) where careful instruction can serve to scaffold learning and foster new abilities. We also teach within a particular...

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