Lindsay Knisely
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
I created an exercise for first-year writing students titled “Using Reflection and Metacognition to Develop Your Half Essay” because I wanted my students to use reflection recursively, as a tool to strengthen the analysis in their essays while they were still engaged in writing the essays themselves. This half-essay reflection exercise is a practical application of what Taczak and Robertson recommend in their chapter of Yancey’s A Rhetoric of Reflection. In “Reiterative Reflection in the Twenty-First-Century Writing Classroom: An Integrated Approach to Teaching for Transfer,” Taczak and Robertson write that “reflection encourages students to put what they are learning into practice while also serving as a way to set goals and move forward in their writing ability…more robust reflection begins with the invention or planning stages of writing and continues during the writing itself, in addition to involving a looking back after the writing is completed, or at each completed draft…” (43-44). In order to create an opportunity to incorporate this intentional recursive reflection in the earlier stages of their writing, when it might be most helpful, the students were asked to pause after writing the first half of their papers and answer a series of questions to prompt them to reflect upon what they had written. In the activity, the students were asked to locate the most powerful moments of insight in the half essay and then add several sentences of deeper analysis to extend their thinking in those moments. Next, I prompted students to reflect upon what still needed work in their essays. The students then reflected on how effectively they were responding to the prompt, and what other sources they could incorporate. I reminded the students about the specific instruction in writing they had received— the recent in-class lessons, the resources they had reviewed—and asked them to reflect upon how they could directly apply what they had learned when writing the second half of their papers. Lastly, in order to emphasize the portability of this activity, I asked the students to reflect about how they could transfer the work they did in this exercise to future writing projects. This final element of the activity applies three of Anne Beaufort’s “four moves teachers can initiate… [based on] what the current research in cognitive psychology suggests for facilitating transfer of learning.” These three interconnected moves, as described by Beaufort in her chapter of A Rhetoric of Reflection, “Reflection: The Metacognitive Move towards Transfer of Learning,” are: 1. Broadly frame the course content as knowledge to go, that is, make explicit references to broad applications for the course content in other arenas of life… 3. Introduce reflection about deep structures, broad concepts, and process strategies as tools not only for getting writing done for an immediate rhetorical situation but for transfer of learning to future writing tasks. 4. Invite application of learning to new tasks, drawing on mental models, deep-structure knowledge, and an inquiry process for learning. (26-27) I’ve been using this exercise for the past several years in first- and second-year writing courses, and it has been gratifying to see how positively students respond to it in class and in their feedback on my course activities.