I was doing a talk about teaching in the age of AI recently, and when I’d finished walking through the ways the AI “homework machine” had exposed and undermined our transactional system of schooling (not a wholly bad thing, IMO), an audience member raised their hand and in a semi-exasperated tone said, “But what am I supposed to teach?”
It’s an excellent question. In a lot of ways, it’s the question. If you think about it, it has always been the question, though I also think we don’t always think about it enough.
The core questions that govern what we should teach are:
- What do you want students to know?
- What do you want students to be able to do?
These concepts obviously overlap. Knowing stuff is a prerequisite to doing stuff, and then doing stuff helps build our knowledge. Longtime readers will know that I organize these things under the umbrella of a “practice,” the skills, knowledge, attitudes and habits of mind of the practitioner.
I have a strong idea of what this looks like in writing, because writing is what I teach and I spent over a decade experimenting on my pedagogy. The talks and workshops I deliver are designed to try to help others think through the challenge inside their own disciplines. In my view, the root of the problem is thinking about teaching for transfer, which goes beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge, but also involves the capacity to apply this knowledge to a new, novel situation.
When it comes to writing, I think about teaching toward inflection points, experiences after which the student’s understanding of writing is forever altered by adding something meaningful to their practice.
There are about 30 different inflection points I’ve gathered over the years. Here are some of them that I emphasize early on.
- The first time you realized you’re writing for an audience and connected your writing to that audience.
This is something I learned in Mrs. Goldman’s class in third grade, when she had us write instructions for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Sadly, because of the way writing instruction evolved over the years to emphasize rubrics and standardization, it is not something my first-year college students were necessarily familiar with, having exclusively written to those rubrics. Experiencing this inflection point was at the top of my list every semester. Until we’re thinking rhetorically, we cannot truly learn to write.
- The first time you appreciated the importance and impact of style.
Students often have vague notions about “voice,” but I want them to be able to draw a direct connection between voice/style and a specific choice in the written text. This capacity for reading like a writer is a necessity to long-term practice building.
- The first time you had a thought while writing, and then making sure you have a thought while writing every time.
One of my mantras is “writing is thinking,” and it is thinking across two dimensions, the effort to capture an idea we come to the page with, but also, the act of writing will alter the idea as we write. It is that latter experience that is ultimately the key to being able to use writing as a tool that allows us to capture knowledge for ourselves and then express them to others. Students should be making fresh discoveries for themselves every time they write. This means designing writing experiences that induce thinking, and also making sure that this thinking is rewarded in our assessment criteria.
- The first time you surprised yourself with a turn of phrase.
This builds on the second inflection point, where students become more intentional about experimenting with and developing style. This can also only be done if we are audience aware (point one). This is one of the inflection points that, once achieved, becomes most apparent in student writing when I read it. It’s simply more alive.
- The time you looked at something from your past and knew it could be better, and then what you could do to make it better.
The first part of this comes pretty early, the general sense that what’s on the page does not capture the potency of the idea in the writer’s mind. The second half may take longer to develop as we put in the reps that allow for the development of the writing practice, so that when the practice is turned on something from a previous period, it can be reworked while taking advantage of these new capacities.
This inflection point ties to one of the linchpin attitudes as part of a writer’s practice: the belief that there is no terminal proficiency as a writer. Once this attitude is in place, habits of mind around revision and editing and iterative experimentation can kick in as students have moved far beyond the notion that we write to a rubric for a grade and have instead embraced the deep, communicative purpose of human writing.
All of these are achievable over the course of a semester-long writing course. Some of the others in the list of 30 or so are more advanced, requiring practices that truly allow the writer to work from a place of intentionality and deliberate, iterative experimentation. At that point, writers should be perceiving themselves as possessing deep agency over their work, having an array of angles from which to attack any writing-related problem, including unfamiliar ones.
This does not mean writing necessarily gets easier. I like to break out the Thomas Mann quote “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” I take Mann’s meaning as pointing out that once the awesome scope and potential of the enterprise reveal themselves, the responsibility to take care in doing it feels weightier.
I wanted students to take their writing seriously, not for the sake of the grade but because it’s a worthwhile experience that benefits from the right kind of seriousness.
In doing these talks and workshops, I’ve come to see that these sorts of inflection points can be identified in other disciplines, though perhaps not as readily as in writing, given that writing is truly rooted in experiences. It is interesting to see faculty make these connections for themselves as they reacquaint themselves with capacities they developed so long ago that they’ve lost touch with how they were acquired in the first place.
But this is my answer to that question, “What am I supposed to teach?” We’re supposed to teach the things that allow students to continue to learn long after they’re not our students.
These are also things that are beyond the capacity of large language models, given that they do not exist in the realm of experience or metacognitive awareness. It is a challenging shift that the structures of schooling make more challenging than it needs to be, but I’m seeing significant evidence that it is very possible.
