Category: essays about teaching and writing

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Annotated Bibliographies In The #fakenews Era by Tech Fellow Chris Ayala

As teachers, we often wonder how we can make our students more discernible citizens while adhering to a syllabus. Citizenry in our current moment is of the utmost importance and, as ENG112 instructors, we have a tool that can help us stay with the goals of our syllabus while helping our students become more discerning.

I’m talking about that Annotated Bibliography unit with a slight re-branding.

Reformatting Annotated Bibliography For News Summary:

This assignment came as a way to make my students read more. They started the semester joking about fake news and I used their humor as a way to pose the question: What is fake news?

None had an answer.

I told my students that, for extra credit, they should read one news article a day and talk about it with me. I had no idea how to track their progress, but I knew reading and about the news would make them more discerning with the right assignment. I remembered our Annotated Bibliography unit plan and reformatted that idea as a trackable assignment to help my students with this project.

Here were my terms:

  1. News link appears at the top (Dated).
  2. 20-25 words stating the links credibility and how they came to that conclusion.
  3. 20-25 words summarizing the article (NPR News summary was my example).
  4. A brief sentence or two saying what this article taught them.

This was the easiest way to make an assignment as far as format was concerned. Once these terms were laid out, my students went at it with a surprising vigor. On semester’s end, I was given an average of sixteen news summary pages, each entry more succinct than the last.

News Round Up And How To Make It Better:

The students who actively participated in this project made tremendous strides in their classroom participation and how they analyzed texts assigned. I noticed, too, the research paper and annotated bibliography lessons (from where the project format came) were easier to go over.

As far as critique and implementing this as a full on project, checking progress and unpacking where the information was coming from as well as how they were interacting with the material would be paramount to further success. For an extra credit assignment, I am happy with the work my students have done and the strides made toward being more discerning citizens.

 

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Opening Doors

This semester I’m teaching College Writing, and I’m about to begin our second unit – “Interacting with Texts.” Seems like a typical academic type assignment—students read one-two essays from our reader and then develop a critical response. Developing a critical response—meaning a response that moves beyond pure summary and agreeing or disagreeing with the author’s main point—may be challenging for students. As a writing teacher, this is a challenge that I feel a bit more comfortable with—developing ways through writing that enable students to develop their own ideas and responses to a text.

But what I really struggle with as a teacher is not so much with the writing process, but more with the reading process.  The essays in our reader have been selected to challenge first-year students and they do so for a variety of reasons. Many of the ideas raised by the authors included in Opening Conversations are complicated and complex, and combined with being unfamiliar with the different kinds of rhetorical choices these writers make in terms of form/ genre, our students may misread or misunderstand the content.

So here are a few things I try to keep in mind when I work through this unit.

What is an essay?

Many of our students may have traditional expectations when it comes to what constitutes an essay. They may expect to see a very clear and well defined thesis statement announced very early in the text. They may expect the author to be arguing either for a specific point or against it. Many of the essays we ask them to read don’t fit neatly into these expectations. These essays are meant to challenge our students’ notions of form and genre as a way to broaden their knowledge of texts. Since the audiences for most of these essays were not written directly for first-year college students, some of the essays will contain references (cultural and academic) that will be unfamiliar to our students. Our students may also bring a cultural frame of reference that differs from the author’s and our own. For example, I have to keep reminding myself that our students have grown up post 9/11. As a result, their relationship to the events surrounding 9/11 differs from those of us who are older and remember life before these events occurred. These differences can provide points of discussion as well as an introduction to research since students can research events and/or cultural references that they find unfamiliar.

Context – Mine and the Students.

One of the reasons why I wanted to go to graduate school was to have the space to continue reading challenging texts and discussing them with people who also loved discussing ideas and concepts. Many of the readings in Opening Conversations raises issues that many of us engaged in the exploration of these ideas want to discuss. However what I try to remember is that although these are ideas that I have been thinking, reading, and writing about for several years, this may be the first time our first-year students have come into contact with these ideas. Understanding white privilege, the fluidity of gender, systems of power are not learned in one 50 minute class period, or a week or even one semester.  Through our own reading and writing, this is what we work through most of our academic lives. College Writing provides our students with the space to be introduced to these ideas, a space that enables them to become aware of these different perspectives and to begin the questioning process.

When I was about to enter my first year of college, my mother told me that one of the reasons she and my father were sending me to the university was to expose me to new ideas, new concepts, new experiences that growing up in our small, rural New Hampshire town could not do. A part of being exposed to new ideas means having our assumptions and understanding of the world challenged in ways they would not be if we had stayed in our “comfort zones.” Sometimes this makes us uncomfortable and resistant. Sometimes this makes us confused and unsure what to say or think. Sometimes we may say things that may appear inappropriate.

As a teacher I try to practice what Judith Johnson, my mentor in graduate school, called a poetics of generosity—the assumption that everyone is writing and speaking from a good place, from a place where everyone is open to learning.  I try to keep reminding myself that our first-year students are beginning the process of understanding, and it is through the interaction of reading, discussing, and writing about these essays that will enable them to begin working through these ideas.

Building a Classroom Community

Since this may be the first time many students have interacted with the ideas raised in Opening Conversations, they may not only be unsure what to say, but unsure how to articulate what they are thinking. This may result in many uncomfortable silences in the classroom and students may make mistakes—they may say things that sound offensive.  Building a classroom community based on generosity, the assumption that we are all trying to figure these ideas out, and are all speaking from a place of learning enables students to work through these complex and complicated ideas without the fear of getting it “wrong.” Many teachers find it useful to work with the class to set up guidelines for discussions. Together as a class you can develop guidelines as to what kinds of statements would be useful, what kinds of questions would be useful, and the importance of clarification. “Class Discussions Suggestions” by Amber Engelson in the Writing Program’s Resource Database is an excellent example of how to establish a classroom based on generosity.

Opening Doors

I think the most important thing that I try to keep in mind is that in my first-year writing class, I’m opening a door to these ideas. Some students may have already taken the steps through the door, some may be willing to take a step or two through it, and some may be resistant right now to go through it. That’s all okay. They are just beginning. The important thing is that the door has been opened.

 

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Permission to Continue Building a Writing Community

Sean Bates is a first-year MFA candidate in Poetry at UMass  Amherst where he also teaches College Writing. He hails from the Finger Lakes Region in Upstate New York, and completed his undergraduate studies at Oberlin College in Ohio.

It occurred to me into my second week that I had done ice breakers for two days and still my class felt stagnant when it came to sharing or even speaking in class. When I solicited for their anonymous feedback, the majority said they were enjoying the class. The breakdown appeared to be my assumption that the ice breakers of interviews and names  had been enough to foster a writing community with this particular class.

I was concerned about “giving up a day” to do more community building. I brought this to the table during our course director group meeting, and our director wrote on the board a simple idea that felt like a revelation. She wrote: “Give yourself permission to give your class what they need.”

Our Resource Center mentor followed up by asking me about the classroom space. I explained that although I am thankful for the seminar style table, the room is quite small. He, maybe jokingly, suggested that I have them sit under the tables. In my own experience as a student, I recognized the power of psychology of space and I knew that this would catch my class off guard.

As I walked in, I asked them all to pack up their stuff and move the tables to the side (making sure to not block the door.) We all sat on the floor and I had them rip their papers in half. For the rest of the class, we did one line story exquisite corpse exercise. They were more comfortable in cautious silence, and easily fell back on it. But I forced them to share and we actually had some low stakes fun.

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A Semester of Conversations on Technology

Along with being the Technology Coordinator for the UMass Amherst Writing Program, guest blogger Shastri Akella teaches first-year writing. He has most recently received his MFA degree and is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature.

As technology coordinator, I worked with teachers to expand the meaning of what a text means—it is an essay in Other Words or Student Anthology, and it is also a song, a movie clip, a blog post, a videogame, or a list of curated tweets, as long they’re each read in the context of an audience and unit goal. Together we expanded the possibilities for portfolio collection: all student writing for a given unit can live in a single Google Doc, making it easy for the instructor to check off activities as they’re grading, and more importantly, to see, with a single doc, how a student’s writing has grown over the course of the unit. We spoke about Moodle and conference scheduling, Unit IV activities and final portfolios.

This process of knowledge-expansion took place in one-on-one conversations and also in classrooms; teachers invited me to their classes and together we had conversations with students on the forms of technology they would be using in the class and why it was helpful—why it made sense, for instance, to do peer review on a shared Google Doc. We spoke about hurdles students might face in facilitating a technology-driven, paperless classroom, and some possible solutions. I will be collating and sharing these solutions with teachers during the Spring symposium.

As a teacher I found that technology, by channeling the external into the classroom, facilitated the opposite: it placed the skills learned in 112 classrooms in the context of the social reality students interact with. In reframing a Facebook post for a non-native speaker of English, or for a high school teacher, students understood the meaning of audience. In watching a foreign language film without subtitles and “guessing” what was happening in the scene, and then seeing what was actually happening, they appreciated the meaning of context. And in setting a section of a videogame in dialogue with a film, they understood what it meant to get resources to interact. It was a pleasure sharing these ideas with fellow-teachers and hearing their perspectives.

I enjoy talking about technology in the context of teaching writing, and I hope, in the upcoming semester, to have conversations with more teachers on how they can bring in technology that works well with their teaching personality, and in the process help more students learn that the skills they learn in our classes have contextual applications in spaces beyond our classrooms.

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Multimedia Resources for a Digital Age

Along with being the Technology Coordinator for the UMass Amherst Writing Program, guest blogger  Shastri Akella teaches first-year writing. He has most recently received his MFA degree  and is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature.

“Use a multimedia source as one of your resources,” I told my students as I was describing to them my expectations for the “Adding to the Conversation” paper.

“So we can use a YouTube video?” asked a student, her interest clearly piqued.

“And a tweet too?” went another student.

To engage their curiosity, I had them discuss, in groups of three, possible multimedia sources that can be used to support their assertions. Together we had a laundry list of, astonishingly, sixteen different kind of multimedia resources. My students never fail to astonish me with their resourcefulness. Getting them engaged is what it begins with.

“Let’s switch roles,” I said. “You are the audience. Assume you see an article in the Daily Collegian that says your favorite band plagiarized all their tracks. And as evidence they cite a YouTube video which has some anonymous UMass students stating this opinion. Will you believe them?”

“Of course we would not,” they said.

“But what if you listened to a YouTube video which showed you album covers from which the tracks were plagiarized and gives you links where you can verify that their release date preceded the release date of your favorite band’s song?”

“Then we would have to believe the video,” they said, albeit reluctantly.

Sources may change form, I went on to explain, but the essential need, what we look for in a resource, does not change. We still need a resource to be credible in its support – or dispute – of a claim. We need our resources to be unbiased, to have no motivation other than to interact with the nature of an idea’s truth and arrive at a conclusion in a clear, logical fashion.

“So what is the point of using a web resource?” I asked my students. “Why look for a new form of a resource if the requirements are just the same? Remember how excited you all got when I asked you to use a multimedia resource? It is because the digital form is vital to our social interactions. It has become a critical part of public discourse, how information is circulated to a target audience. And you want to set your essay in dialogue with this digital space, not only because it interests you, but also because it is the space your audience draws their information from.”

If we do have our students use multimedia resources, given their interest in the medium then, along with asking them to verify the resource for credibility and bias, we may want to consider talking to them about how the resource we use is ultimately a function of audience: moving beyond the essential goal of wanting to convince our audience, we want them to believe that the topic which the resource supports is of interest to them because of the digital space they’re engaged with.

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Office Concert

Wednesday afternoon I was sitting in my office when Abby and Miguel from my last semester’s College Writing class burst in.

“We wanted to show you this,” they said, giving me a copy of Monday’s Daily Collegian. And there they were in a feature article about the Indi-folk duo called Commonwealth  they have formed.

“Wow,” I said. In the article they talked about how after meeting in my section of College Writing they formed a duo—Miguel on guitar, Abby on violin, both on vocals.

“We want to play for you,” Miguel said as he unzipped his guitar case and Abby unpacked her violin. So they did. I sat at my table where I have student conferences and Miguel and Abby played three of their original songs. They were great! I was amazed! I was proud!

“Make sure you read the end,” Abby said. “We gave you a shout out.” I’m the English teacher they thank at the end.

I’ll admit it.  I was pleased they thanked me. But, really, as their writing teacher, I had nothing to do with any of this.  I can’t even take credit for their song writing ability because College Writing focuses on academic writing.

But this has made me realize something.  I think as teachers we become so focused on getting through the curriculum that we forget that there is more than just writing happening in our classes. College is about being exposed to new things, meeting new people, trying things you may never have the courage or confidence to do. Since all our sections of College Writing are small and activity based, the students have the opportunity to engage with one another.  Sometimes this leads to students developing friendships, sometimes this leads to students being exposed to another way of seeing things, sometimes it leads to the formation of a musical duo.

So although I can’t take credit for the beginning of Abby and Miguel’s musical career, I am pleased that they got to know one another in my class. And I am pleased that I have gotten to know them beyond the academic writing they did.

So I would like to return the favor and give Commonwealth a shout out. They are great! And if you hear about them performing on campus or somewhere in the Pioneer Valley, go see them! You won’t regret it!

And if you hear of an EP called “Other Words” and think it’s a coincidence that it’s the same name as our reader, it isn’t.

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Celebrating Writing

This time of year I sometimes find it hard not to be crabby. Although it’s almost the middle of April, it’s still cold in the morning, there is still snow in my yard, and the lake still has ice on it. And this time of the semester I also seem focused on what the students aren’t doing—they aren’t coming to class, they aren’t turning their essays in on time, they aren’t doing their Works Cited pages correctly, they aren’t doing their in-text citations correctly, they don’t “get” the essays we are reading from our reader.

And this past week, I’m afraid to admit, I was crabby about organizing the Writing Program’s Celebration of Writing that was held on Sunday—an event where we recognized the undergraduate students who are completing our year-long tutoring course, the winners of our annual Best Text Contest for Basic Writing, College Writing, and Junior-Year Writing, and the students selected to be published in our Student Writing Anthology.  I know. I know. The Celebration of Writing is a good event and this is something that I should not be crabby about, but anyone who has ever organized large events knows that the details that go into the planning of these kinds of events can make anyone cranky.

One of my tasks for the Celebration was to present the Best Text Awards for the College Writing category. Now although as one of the judges I had read all the entries, I decided to re-read the winning essays so I could say something specific about each piece. Once again, I was impressed with these pieces. Not only were they well written, each essay had a strong sense of voice and was truly a pleasure to read. I learned something from each essay I read, and I was moved by each writer’s use of language. As I read, my crabbiness began to fade.

For this year’s Celebration our program consisted of a keynote speaker, Nick McBride from the Department of Journalism, and several students speakers/readers. As I listened to each of our speakers, I realized a theme was emerging. (And since I was one of the organizers I can tell you the theme was unplanned!) Each speaker talked about how through writing they realized that they had a voice and that they had something to say. And, even more importantly, for each of these writers somewhere along the way there was someone who wanted to hear what they had to say.

Currently, I think, there is a lot of discussion and focus on assessment, outcomes, goals, and objectives. Of course, I’m not against all this. But listening to all our speakers discuss the power of finding their voices, the confidence they gained from someone validating what they had to say, and, as Nick told us, that writing can enable us to discover the truth within ourselves, makes me realize that the most important thing that we do in our writing classes is to provide a space for writers to discover themselves.

Our students have fascinating things to say and our writing classrooms provide them with the space to say these things.

And this is what excites me the most as a teacher.

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Seize the Teaching Moment

This week the conversation around campus and the whole Pioneer Valley is the “Blarney Blowout” and its aftermath.  Everyone is talking about it—some are claiming the police are too brutal, some are wondering why the students think it is okay to gather in a large crowd and drink, some are embarrassed by the negative attention this has drawn to our campus, some think everyone is over reacting, some are discussing what the University should have done, should not have done and what the University should do now. Everyone has something to say about this.

As teachers, and especially as teachers of first-year students, this seems like something that we should talk to our students about. But I’m afraid if I bring this up in class the conversation may start out okay, but would take a bad turn, and I would gradually end up sounding like my mother.

Me: “Did any of you go to the Blarney Blowout?”

The students: “It was fun.”

Me: “Fun? What are you talking about? People were arrested.”

The students: “It was fun until the police came and sprayed tear gas and beat people.”

Me: “People were throwing beer cans and ice balls at the police. What did you expect?”

The students: “It was really the police who started everything. It was really about police brutality.”

Me: “You shouldn’t have even been there. With that many people together drinking that early in the day there is bound to be trouble.”

The students: “We have a right to party.”

Me: “Right to party? What are you talking about?”

The students: “We have a right to have fun.”

Me: “What??  You aren’t here for fun. You’re supposed to be studying.  Do you know how much it costs to send you there?”

Okay—maybe not so gradually turning into my mother.

The other day I went to observe Zoe Mungin’s class as she was beginning our “Adding to the Conversation.” This unit asks students to select a conversation (topic), do some research to narrow the topic in order to develop a purpose to communicate to a specific audience.  Zoe began by asking the students about the “Blarney Blowout.” She asked the students what they thought about the weekend and then she let them talk. Her students said the things I’ve heard other students say this week—it wasn’t as bad as the media made it out to be, the police were too violent, if the University hadn’t “warned” students they, as first-year students, never would known about it, etc. She asked questions and more importantly she didn’t turn into my mother. She didn’t judge.

And then Zoe asked the students to think about the “Blarney Blowout” as a conversation.

“What have you read about the blowout?” She asked. “Where did you read it? What was it about? What perspective was it from?”

Again the students talked, but now drawing from a range of online sources. As the students talked, Zoe kept asking questions. She kept pushing. “Remember how we have been talking about credibility? Remember how we have talked about logical and emotional appeals? Is this a logical appeal? How so? Is this credible? How so?”

Soon the class wasn’t just talking about the “Blarney Blowout,” but rather how it was a conversation, a conversation consisting of a range of perspectives, all with different purposes for voicing their opinions.

“There seems to be a lot of different ways of looking at this,” Zoe said. “There also seems to be different issues to focus on here. What’s one issue we can focus on?” Now she was getting the students to narrow the topic.

“Police brutality,” someone said.

“Let’s imagine we would be writing an open letter about ‘Blarney’ focusing on police brutality to a news outlet. Name a news outlet.”

“Fox News,” someone called out.

“Okay, who is the audience for Fox News? What tone would you use? What would this audience expect to hear?”

After the students worked through these questions, Zoe said, “Give me another news outlet. One different from Fox News.”

“Her Campus,” someone else called.

“Okay,” Zoe said. “Who is the audience? How is this audience different from Fox News? What about tone? How would the tone here be different from Fox News?”

In other words, Zoe used the “Blarney Blowout” as a teaching moment. She was able to take something that all the students had an opinion about and turned it into a lesson about narrowing a research topic and the rhetorical situation.

And she also did something else.  By gradually moving “Blarney” from the main topic of discussion to an example to illustrate audience and purpose, Zoe enabled the students to begin seeing the “Blarney Blowout” from different perspectives.

The conversation about “Blarney” seems to be continuing. The University announced yesterday that they have hired former Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis to conduct a review of the University’s and the town of Amherst’s handling of the event.  I also heard this morning on New England Public Radio a very interesting report about “celebratory rioting” that not only broadens the conversation, but puts it into a different context.  It seems that “Blarney” may provide us with even more teaching moments as we move through the rest of the semester.

Please share how you are using this as a teaching moment in your class.

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Putting Students in Motion

“My class seems really quiet this semester. Is there something I can do to get them talking more? Anything I can do to get more energy in my classroom?”

This is a question I’ve been asked frequently this semester. I can understand why the students don’t seem as lively as they did during the fall semester. It’s cold. It’s snowing. And when it hasn’t been snowing, it’s cloudy. This is the perfect weather for staying in, reading a book, watching a movie, watching t.v. Who really wants to bundle up and trudge around campus?  And once our students actually get to our overheated classrooms, it does seem time for a nap.

My answer to this question is simple. Get the students moving. Don’t just let them sit there. Get them up. Get them walking around. This will wake them up and get their blood moving. Put them in groups and make them talk to one another early on. Don’t just let them settle into their chairs. Half-way through class have them get up again and move around. The more active they are the more energy (hopefully) will be in the classroom.

This does seem simple, but I’m going to have to admit something. As a teacher it took me a long time to take my own advice. I used to tell myself that it would take up too much time to ask the students to form groups with students across the room rather than with the people sitting next to them. I used to tell myself that it would be too chaotic to have all these people walking around a small space. It would take too much time to bring the class back together once they had been moving around. In other words, I was afraid of losing control of the class.

Since part of my job is to visit classes, I had observed several of our graduate instructors doing just what I had advised. To form groups, these teachers would have the students select shapes out of a hat and would then have them walk around the room to find the people who matched their shapes. These teachers would have the students do revision exercises that required them to move from station to station within the classroom. Whenever I observed these classes I was always envious of how these teachers were able to get the students out of their seats and interacting with one another. The energy level in the room was always increased. The classroom on the surface may have appeared to be chaotic, but it was clear that everything was under control. I wished I could do this too. But I was still hesitant.

Okay, I was actually afraid.

During my observations I would see teachers with a range of teaching styles. Some would sit at the teacher’s desk, some would sit on the desk, some would sit at a desk in a circle with the students. Some would move around the room, sitting, and standing. This made me notice something about my own teaching style. I realized I was always standing. I would move around the room, but I would never sit at the teacher’s desk. Some times I would sit at a desk in a circle with my students, but I would get up to write on the board and remain standing.

I could say this was my preferred teaching style. But I’m not sure that was completely true. After thinking about I realized it wasn’t so much that I felt more comfortable standing in front of my students as I felt the need to be standing above them. In other words, I was confusing authority with height. I’m short and the majority of the students are taller (and some are really a lot taller) than me. I felt being physically above my students gave me more control and authority in the classroom.

But one day I went to observe a class where the instructor was like me – a short woman. During this particular class she had the students standing and moving throughout the entire class meeting. She had them do one activity that asked them to move around the room asking one another questions. When they were ready to transition to the next activity she called them together and they all stood around her and listened. Watching her I realized that authority comes not from height or age, but rather from being prepared, from having a purposeful plan, from speaking with confidence. I realized that I didn’t have to speak over my students to gain their attention or their trust.

So I tried it. I first had the students move around in order to get into groups. When that worked, and I felt more comfortable I began incorporating activities that asked the students to move around the room. I still catch myself standing a lot. I still feel a little uncomfortable when a really tall student comes up to speak to me after class.  But I just try not to let my discomfort get in the way.

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Showing vs. Telling in the Teaching of Revision

Since the start of the semester I’ve been reading course evaluations and talking to teachers about their plans for the semester. These discussions usually lead to teachers wanting to work on a specific part of the curriculum. Sometimes it’s how to make in-class activities more purposeful, sometimes it’s how to use the readings more effectively, sometimes it’s how to design better peer review activities/exercises. These are all great things to work on. One thing I’m always working on is how to make each class meeting productive.

When we, as teachers, say we want to make peer review more useful, class time more productive, in-class activities more effective, I think we are pointing to a larger issue about our classes. The bulk of what we do—the readings, the peer response activities, the in-class exercises, our responses during the drafting process—are all about moving the students through a revision process. The drafting process that we teach is really a revision process, a process that enables our students to develop and complicate their ideas, a process that enables them to evaluate the choices they have in terms of tone, voice, language, structure, and organization.

So maybe it would be useful to ask ourselves two questions:

How can we teach revision better?

How can we enable students to see and understand the importance of revision?

As a writer and as a teacher of writing, I understand the importance of revision. Despite the longing in all of us (I admit it, I have that longing too) to write an essay, a short story, an article, etc. “right” the first time, it rarely happens. Writing is a process. We begin with an idea, a question, a thought and then we work at it. We read texts about what we are thinking about, we talk to colleagues about our ideas, we write more, we get feedback about what we are writing and that makes us write more, question more, read more, and then write more again. We work on shaping, testing out different introductions, conclusions, different organizations, different language. We write more. Revision helps us to think more deeply and more critically about what we want to say. Revision enables us to know and understand what we want to say.

So how do we enable our students to see the importance of revision?

The other morning when I was walking my dog I was thinking about this. In my own class, I know the things that I do are all geared to enabling the students to revise their papers. I even tell them at the beginning of the class the purpose of the in-class or peer review activity we are doing is to help them further revise their papers. At the end of class, I even remind them that everything we have done is to help them revise. But sometimes something seems to get lost along the way. Somehow somewhere along the line the things we do in class just seem like the things we do in class and writing multiple drafts seems like writing the same draft over and over again.

As my dog and I got closer to the lake we walk to each morning, the creative writing advice, “show don’t tell” popped into my mind. Maybe I’ve been spending too much time telling my students about the importance of revision rather than showing them why revision is important.

How can we do this?

This semester I want to keep working on making my class more productive. I want to make peer review more effective, my in-class activities purposeful, the discussion of the readings we do more useful. But I want to think about all of this in terms of how these activities and exercises show students the importance of revision. Here is my question:

How can I more effectively show my students the importance of revision?

Any thoughts?