Participation notebooks are due every week by the time you go to sleep on Friday.
How Participation Works in This Class
At the beginning of the quarter I’ll be sorting people into small discussion groups. (There should be 4-5 people in each group.) You’ll be meeting with your group (at least) once a week for a good portion of our class time on Wednesdays. The important thing about these meetings is that they will involve everyone in the group meeting together to discuss the material, touch base, and provide help for one another as needed.
What Happens in Discussion Groups
As the name implies, you’ll primarily be using these discussion groups to discuss things – mainly the course content, including readings, videos, websites, etc. Sometimes I’ll also ask you to do specific things during your group meetings, like talk about assignment prompts, workshop drafts, and so on. Mostly, however, you’ll just be working with your group members to talk about the course material and help each other understand and make connections (both as writers and as people).
Your success in any course (and more generally, with anything in life) depends upon your active participation. Participation can take many forms, though, and we all learn (and thus participate) in unique ways. For instance, making space for every participant in a conversation to speak can sometimes be more valuable than taking the lead yourself. Participation in dialogue means not just speaking up often but also listening to and talking directly with your peers (asking them questions, extending their ideas, reconsidering your own point of view in terms of what they say, helping create an environment where everyone feels empowered to learn from one another).
The Logistics of Discussion Groups (Recognizing Participation)
In order to recognize the unique forms of participation that each of you bring to the table, your participation grade will be based on a participation “notebook” that you will write in once a week (after you meet in small groups). In this document, you will write a paragraph (about 150-200 words) that always respond to the following two questions:
- What was your most meaningful moment of participation in your small group this week? Why?
- What questions or concerns do you have that you didn’t get to share? (This question is optional.)
The meetings you have with your small group and these notebooks will constitute a significant portion of your participation in this course.
If you address the two questions above with evidence of good-faith effort (writing roughly a paragraph or two that demonstrates you actually talked with your group and then thought about that conversation) and complete any additional work for the week (initial thoughts activities, proposals, peer review, etc.), your participation notebook is considered “complete” each week.
How to “Submit” this Work
We’ll be using a Shared Class Google Drive this quarter, which is where all of your writing assignments will be submitted. In that folder, you can create a single document labeled, “Participation Notebook” that you add to on a weekly basis, or you can create individual documents for each week (that are also clearly labeled). As long as it is in your Individual Folder in our Shared Class Drive, you should be good to go. (If you would like a more private option for your Participation Notebook, please just let me know. That is also an option.)
Participation notebooks are due every week by the end of the day Friday.
(adapted from Palmeri and Dubisar’s “Participation as Reflective Practice“)