Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
For instructors, really the thing is to pay close attention to the sort of prompts that
you’re giving students. It’s a really complex issue; it’s almost like surgery.
You don’t know if you’re going to tweak one vein or the other and all of a sudden
the whole thing’s going to blow up, whereas before it was function, you know, just fine.
And the reason I say that is because you can really have one of two scenarios that go wrong.
On the one hand, you can have a prompt that’s so open that a student doesn’t even know
how to begin to approach it, and thus, as a result, kind of wanders and maybe is lost
in the paper. And on the other hand you might have a prompt that’s trying to connect so
many different specific things and trying to do so much that the student just becomes
overwhelmed and really just can’t process the information. So it’s a tricky balance,
you know, you really have to be very delicate in how you phrase the assignment because sometimes,
especially when you’re a student, and you’re sitting there late at night, you know, you’re
wondering about how to do the rest of the assignment, you really can hinge on even a
single word. You really can get thrown off by it. My advice to instructors is to really
think about the kinds of writing you’d like to get out of your students and try to really
iterate those assignment prompts and really get them running as smoothly as possible and
so you can really picture how a student would think through the process of responding to
your prompt.