Online Writing Instruction for Those W/O Trainers

Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction composites valuable thought on training for Online Writing Instruction. Because it is focused on the trainer and program developers perspective, though, it leaves us with another task: how to translate knowledge of what the trainer needs to do for teachers collectively into knowledge of what teachers need to do for themselves.

This is an important consideration because, let's face it, we are unlikely to get substantial training for Online Writing Instruction from our departments or programs. If we do get training, they will appear as short, discreet technology-focused, largely optional workshops before or after an academic semester. Reading this book as teachers, then, it is important for us to figure out how to train ourselves.

Hewett and Ehmann present "Five Pedagogical Principles" for training instructors in Online Writing Instruction. I want to review these, then translate them into something more useful for the individual instructor.

Investigation – This principle addresses the need for departments, program, and trainers to do empirical research into successful training practices to develop more effective training materials. It suggests a recursive system of feedback on the materials and processes used and a willingness to revise those materials and processes accordingly.

Likewise, instructors should engage in such a process of investigation, both exploring the empirical research thankfully done by others and collecting feedback from their students. Of course, blackboard and other tech tools make this procedure easier by providing various survey tools.

I also want to suggest, though, that this process of investigation requires careful and relatively gradual experimentation, especially for those who already have so much competing for their time. As instructors implement online technology to enhance their teacing of writing, they should build a manageable curve of learning, implementation, feedback, and revision. Learn your technology in chunks, implement what seems reasonable and manageable, in a given semester, collect feedback, and review that feedback to consider revisions to your technology use. The following semester, implement those revision, as well as a new, manageable amount of technology that has been learned.

Immersion - This principle is simply that instructors who are called on to teach online should be trained online, making the training scenario a hands-on environment for the practice of online teaching.

Likewise, instructors themselves should not balk at immersing into online teaching. Many of us can attest that we never really knew a subject until we had to teach it. Similarly, you'll never know how to teach in an online environment until you try to teach in an online environment. This goes along with investigation in the sense of taking careful, measured steps. Do not, of course, entirely upturn your pedagogy or classroom structure. Rather, learn a technology and implement it. As you navigate that technology through your teaching of writing, you'll learn that technology and future technologies better.

Individualization - This principle addresses the need of training to anticipate and respond to the individual concerns of trainees. It suggests that an instituted curriculum must also meet people who at diverse places pedagogically and technologically.

For teachers themselves, this can cut two ways. Of course, we must also meet our students at their individual levels of expertise, both in terms of their writing and their technological experience. But we must also attune ourselves individually to the ways in which we teach online. We may have all experienced this: you heard from a colleague a terrific lesson that went over wonderfully with his or her students, but when you try it yourself, it fails miserably. Likely the colleague's praxis had much to do with his or her presence or persona in the classroom or who students were prepared previously for the particular lesson. Your implementation of it wasn't going to work without the same student preparation (unlikely) or instructor persona (almost impossible). Similarly, there's few one-size-fits-all approaches to technology. Even as you learn from others, be ready to modify and alter to make it fit what you do in or out of the classroom.

Association - This principle suggests that training should connect teachers to teachers so that they can create their own network and personnel resources to seek help, get feedback, and discuss problems.

This is no different from what we should do independently as instructors. Networking groups like Teaching Circles, implemented in the Writing Program, are meant to help teachers establish those connections. We should know who can answer our pedagogical and technological questions as well as who can provide a soundboard the pedagogical and technological problems we want to work ourselves through. These sorts of networks are frequently dismissed by instructors who don't feel they have the time to reserve for such communities of teachers. But it's this simple. Gabbing about teaching helps our teaching.

Reflection - This principle addresses the need for observation and assessment, for getting feedback from more experience colleagues, considering that feedback, and adjusting accordingly.

This reflection, of course, should occur at every level of pedagogy, from the observations imposed on us from programs, to those we ask for, to simply the observations and personal feedkback we gives ourselves after individual lessons. At every point, we should be thinking about how our tactics are doing, whether they are achieving the results we want, and whether they need to change.

Training Spiral - Simply “curriculum is always in a process of becoming” (24). For instructors, this can be said "Teaching is always in a process of becoming." In other words, we should teach recursively, always looking back to look forward.