Like a lot of other courses at Columbia University, the Academic Writing for International Students course I teach at the American Language Program was taught completely online in spring 2021. The goal of this course is to make students better writers of academic text. In order to achieve this, the course is organized in thematic units, and the culmination of each unit is an argumentative essay in which students demonstrate their critical thinking skills, integrate source texts studied, and use complex grammar and sophisticated vocabulary.
In addition to their academic success, there was a very palpable sense of community despite our physical distance.
Unlike the prevailing belief that students struggle to stay engaged in the learning process due to the online environment, this particular class was a very successful learning experience for all the stakeholders. Most importantly, students succeeded academically. Everyone passed the course, which is not always the case, and one student even got a piece published in the Wall Street Journal based on a class assignment. In addition to their academic success (they are all better writers than they were when they started the course), there was a very palpable sense of community despite our physical distance. As the instructor, I pondered why this happened. Here are a few thoughts looking back on the writing class taught during the pandemic.
People crave community. Desperately.
Because of the feeling of isolation caused by the pandemic, students were in even more need of a community. As the class instructor, I took it upon myself to provide opportunities for students to develop a sense of belonging to this community of learners. Among others, here are two strategies that I instinctively developed that served both to advance their writing skills and to create a sense of community.
Providing peer feedback
Every two weeks, students wrote several drafts of an essay on a certain topic studied in class. After they had written their first draft, they sent it to one or two peers who then provided in-person and written feedback on the essay, based on a rubric provided by the teacher. In class, they would work with their partners in a breakout room and talk to each other about the comments they had made based on the rubric. By meeting without me, the teacher, present, students developed relationships and began to trust their peers. As a result of this, they had an audience who would read what they had to say, and felt less intimidated to craft their presence on the page. This practice encouraged them to become more independent and critical thinkers. In addition, they did start noticing elements of writing in their peers’ essays that they could learn from. In short, they began to see themselves as a community of writers, and not as a group of students who write formulaic essays to pass an exam.
Finding “hidden gems” in texts
In texts we read, either written by the students or by established writers, they had to choose one word, one sentence, or one paragraph that they found worked really well in that text, post it on a Google Doc, and then tell the class why they had chosen that particular piece. In addition to encouraging students to notice a particular word, sentence structure, or stylistic technique another writer had used, it helped students to focus on the positive aspects of a text. They very often incorporated some of what they had noticed in their own future texts.
I want to end, writing about how the course was seen from the students’ perspective:
“Besides technical skills this course help[ed] me to form my thoughts, transfer them into words on paper.”
“Not only do peer reviews benefit writers, but it lets the reader learn.”
“Reading and analyzing text enable me to understand how good writers build their paragraphs with facts, opinion, and evidence, and to learn the skills such as using metaphors, parallel structure, etc.”
“Analyzing and deconstructing someone's writing is a great way to learn."
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of any other person or entity.
