Best Practices for Graded Reflective Writing

In a 2013 study of the reflective writing produced in our department, we found that the best graded reflective projects did the following:

  • Gave space for a project of genuine “dialogic inquiry,” allowing students to create new knowledge about academic writing, about the course theme, etc.
  • Facilitated a discussion in opposition to that of skills-based mastery
    • Required critical engagement with materials (e.g., ask students how their writing problematizes or complicates institutional standards, not measures up to them)
    • Engaged with opinionated or provocative texts (e.g., Bartholomae, Freire, Sommers, Elbow) as opposed to prescriptive ones (e.g., handbooks, course descriptions)
    • Avoided questions about strengths/weaknesses, telos, skills mastery, etc.
    • Did not ask for künstleromans (developmental narratives)
    • Did not posit the First-Year Writing course as a requirement to be skipped, or required students to muster a “defense” of their own work
  • Asked students to characterize their work rather than simply recount it, deemphasizing process and emphasizing language use
  • Provided contexts for the work of the assignment
    • Indicated how students can put their own writing in dialogue with other texts (as in “normal” papers, students can default to talking about each text in its own isolated paragraph)
    • Maintained an intellectual connection with the course theme
    • Indicated audience and discourse community
  • Defamiliarized students’ own work by putting them in a discourse they might otherwise be familiar with (e.g., taking the texts out of chronological order, treating texts as objects instead of experiences, shifting into a new genre)
    • Modeled generic shifts (e.g., when asking students to write reviews or their own assignment prompts, have students read instances and discuss them as a class)
  • Gave a clear route for the process of the assignment
  • Required precision (i.e., quotation or paraphrasing of very specific moments in both student writing and assigned texts). No First-Year Writing paper should be without citations
    • Didn’t ask students to talk about themselves “as writers,” but to talk about their writing
    • Didn’t ask students to perform disparate tasks (e.g., talk about both your experience as a writer and what you thought of the course texts)
  • Were mindful of the relationship between task and page length