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Mobilizing New Modalities: Co-Requisite Writing Curriculum during COVID
- 1. TYCA National March 9, 2022 Mobilizing New Modalities: Co- Requisite Writing Curriculum during COVID
- 2. Greetings from Eastern Iowa! Tim Robbins, Instructor of English Overview: ALP, KCC co-req curriculum Marci Bowden, Instructor of English Shelby Myers, Professor of English Pedagogical strategies: online, hyflex, “in-person” Sondra Gates, Associate Professor of English Data: Enrollment, Retention, Persistence and COVID See you in Oct. 2022 (hopefully)! TYCA MIDWEST Conference Oct. 6-8, 2022 Iowa City, IA Hilton Garden Inn Downtown
- 3. A Decade of Undoing Developmental Writing at the Community College
- 7. Composition I Co-Requisite Strategies Marci Bowden Instructor of English, Kirkwood Community College marci.bowden@kirkwood.edu
- 8. Strategies discovered during the pandemic: – Lead with individual work and focus. – Bring online work to the classroom. – Take time to conference with students, especially if you’re in masks and/or online only. – Assume nothing when it comes to students’ prior experience with technology. – Share where students should always start in the online course and continuously “meet” them there.
- 9. Elements of Writing ENG-101 Co-Requisite Strategies Shelby Myers Professor of English, Kirkwood Community College Shelby.myers@Kirkwood.edu
- 10. Strategies for developmental writers: • Teaching annotation skills • Email etiquette • Tech navigation - uploading assignments • Google Docs • Finding your Helpers • Workshop time
- 11. Faculty Collaboration During COVID Sondra Gates Assoc. Professor of English, Kirkwood Community College Sondra.gates@Kirkwood.edu
- 12. Faculty-driven support systems: – Syllabus Support – Workshop concerns – Share activity/assignment ideas – Co-req Support LMS Page – Interviews – Course materials/research – Discussion boards – Faculty Inquiry Group (FIG) – Struggles & successes – Relevant research
- 13. English Co-Requisite Section Analysis: Fall 2019 through Spring 2021 vs
- 18. Students who passed English 101
- 19. Corequisite Composition Breakout Rooms! Room 1: Developmental writers Room 2: Teaching Strategies for Comp 1/online Room 3: Faculty Support
- 20. Final thoughts Tim Robbins, Instructor of English Marci Bowden, Instructor of English Shelby Myers, Professor of English Sondra Gates, Associate Professor of English Kirkwood Community College Cedar Rapids, Iowa TYCA MIDWEST Conference Oct. 6-8, 2022 Iowa City, IA Hilton Garden Inn Downtown Hosted by Kirkwood Community College
Editor's Notes
- Good morning, friends, and welcome to “Mobilizing New Modalities: Co-requisite Writing Curriculum During COVID,” a conference presentation that we envision as more of a storyshare and brainstorming session of the new challenges faced and surprising lessons learned of teaching accelerated first-year comp during the pandemic. And, I know we had some stiff competition here in this morning slot, so we especially appreciate that you’re spending your hour dishing with us on co-requisite writing studies.
- And….of course, greetings to all of you from Kirkwood Community College [CLICK] in the eastern corridor of sunny, snowy Iowa … [CLICK] where we hope to meet some of you in person next year for the TYCA Midwest Conference. [CLICK] At the lovely Hotel Kirkwood, the only four star hotel and restaurant in Cedar Rapids, which is just minutes from the Eastern Iowa airport. [CLICK] And boasts a lovely bar with happy hour specials and lots of hip seating and lighting. … Fair warning, that’s just our first commercial for next year’s TYCA-Midwest conference, but there will be many more shameful plugs throughout. Allow me to want to introduce our panel roster here by name and topic: [CLICK] [CLICK] Hello, I’m Tim Robbins, I’m in the leadoff spot. I’ll be offering a brief historical refresher of the co-requisite writing movement and an overview of the specifics of our curriculum at Kirkwood. [CLICK] [CLICK] [CLICK] [CLICK] My colleagues, Marci Bowden and returning TYCA champion, Shelby Myers will discuss some of the intricacies of teaching the various co-req classes at Kirkwood while sharing some of the strategies they’ve found most useful in navigating the ever-changing modalities in the face of the pandemic. [CLICK] [CLICK] Heather Strempke-Durgin has been charged with organizing faculty support for the co-requisite program and has done such wonderful work, she’ll discuss the process of forming co-requisite learning communities among faculty and providing support for their teaching. [CLICK] [CLICK] Of the very early and inconclusive data our college has gathered for the co-requisite courses in the last year, Sondra Gates will bravely lead us through a discussion of what we’ve learned (or what we haven’t) from crunching the numbers, [CLICK] [CLICK] and Chris Cronbaugh, our developmental ed specialist, is here to keep us honest and flash the “:30 seconds to go” signal should we go over time. I also want to reiterate that we hope this can be a collaborative “troubleshooting” session … Kirkwood faculty eagerly invite our two-year college colleagues to respond to our experiences with teaching co-requisite writing model with stories and practices of their own.
- TIM: It’s been just over a decade since the Community College Research Center [CLICK] published its inaugural study of the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) or “co-requisite” model of developmental writing studies launched by [CLICK] Peter Adams and colleagues at the Community College of Baltimore County. The CCBC’s “deep version” of college composition – [CLICK] as Adams et al put it in their groundbreaking 2009 Basic Writing journal article on the ALP, “Throwing open the Gates” – saw eight (so-called) “remedial” writing students voluntarily placed in the three-credit first year writing course with twelve nonremedial students and in an accelerated “companion” or “co-requisite” course designed to help them complete the college-level English material successfully. [CLICK] To little surprise, this model--which doubled the time on task in composition, more than halved the student-teacher ratio, offered instructors extensive professional development, unified the curriculum, and focused on noncognitive as well as academic issues--was shown to improve student outcomes for remedial writing students. On the back of this evidence-based success, the ALP model accelerated in popularity across the community college landscape -- and in higher education research and reform circles more widely ….. heralded now as increasing retention, persistence, and credential attainment for some of the most vulnerable of student populations, while saving colleges the resources formerly spent on traditional developmental ed. I also want to mention that … there’s room for some skepticism here, especially about the ensuing cuts to workforce … and I’m just throwing that out there in case anyone wants to return to it in the discussion period! But…back to the matter: it is within the success of the ALP -- coupled with the move to fully online co-req model during the COVID-19 pandemic -- that the English faculty at Kirkwood Community College set out to configure a more cohesive co-requisite curriculum.
- While Kirkwood adopted a co-req model several years ago and remade its first-year comp (or FYC) and developmental sequences in the process, there’s been a renewed focus in recent years on “mainstreaming” more of the students placed in developmental courses. And it’s probably little surprise that this effort at streamlining the curriculum comes as Kirkwood is undergoing an institutional move towards a Guided Pathways program. To get a quick a sense of Kirkwood’s specific model here … because we are rather unique …. Our traditional FYC sequence has three different steps. [CLICK] Of course, there is Composition 1 – which is, an introduction to researched, argumentative writing with a particular focus on organization. [CLICK] We also have a Basic Writing courses – which as a developmental ed class really emphasizes writing mechanics along with sentence and paragraph structure [CLICK] and we also have a sort of an intermediate developmental writing class called Elements of Writing, which integrates more reading analysis skills and places more of a focus on the transfer of writing experiences across the curriculum than Basic Writing.
- So, our three-step FYC sequence actually yields two separate co-requisite clusters. Students who are mainstreamed from Basic Writing [CLICK] [CLICK] into Elements of Writing [CLICK] [CLICK] enroll in the 1-credit support class, Core Writing, which is capped at 12 and meets for two hours/week. While … students placed into Elements of Writing can take Comp 1[CLICK] [CLICK] along with the 1-credit Integrated Composition support class, which is also capped at 12 and meets for two hours/week. Finally….
- A quick vocabulary key: we at Kirkwood affectionately refer [CLICK] [CLICK] to our co-requisite courses as the motorcycle and the sidecar classes, which we learned last week conjures up different images of motorcycles for us all. For me, I think of Adam West and Burt Ward’s Batman and Robin from the 1960s television series Batman. {CLICK] [CLICK] [CLICK] [CLICK] So, on the right side of the batcycle you’ll see our 3 credit courses, while young Robin riding on the left represents our 1 credit support or “sidecar” classes. Here’s a heads up, that you may hear the “motorcycle-sidecar” imagery in the next few minutes, so think of the caped crusader and the boy wonder!
- Shelby does this one
- Sondra - Our school analyzed two years of Kirkwood’s composition co-req classes. The data included completion rates, pass rates, grades, and retention in both of the motorcycle courses—Elements of Writing and Composition 1. Comparisons were drawn between students who were and were not taking the sidecar classes, as well as between the two sidecar courses themselves. It’s difficult to draw firm conclusions given that the pandemic hit during the second semester analyzed by the study. However, the data do suggest that the majority of sidecar students are successful in the motorcycle class. Also, sidecar students fare slightly better in Elements of Writing than in Composition 1. Image by <a href=" https://www.vectorportal.com" >Vectorportal.com</a>, <a class="external text" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" >CC BY</a>
- This chart shows the number of students who completed and passed the motorcycle courses—Elements of Writing and Composition 1. The two sets of bars on the left show that Elements of Writing students who were enrolled in the sidecar passed the course at about the same rate as students not taking the sidecar: 82.4%, compared to 82.2% . The two sets of bars on the right show that while more than three-fourths of sidecar students taking Composition 1 passed the motorcycle course, their pass rates lagged behind those of students not taking the sidecar. Only 78% of sidecar students passed, contrasted with 87.1% of students enrolled in Composition 1 only. We don’t yet have a clear reason to account for this discrepancy. Why do sidecar students in Elements pass at the same rate as the other students in their class, while sidecar students in Composition 1 have pass rates 10% lower than the other students in their class? Could it be that Composition 1 is more challenging than Elements of Writing, and thus under-preparedness affects students more strongly in that class? At this point, we can only guess.
- The same pattern shows up when looking at grades earned in the motorcycle courses. In Elements of Writing, sidecar students had a higher percentage of A grades than other students in the class. In this graph, the darker blue bars to the left show that significantly more of the A grades went to sidecar students.
- In Composition 1, in contrast, the grades of sidecar students were lower than those of other students. The dark blue bar to the far left shows that only 86 sidecar students (or 14.7% of them) received an A in Composition 1. In contrast, 101 students not taking the sidecar received an A (or 22.1% of them).
- Here are the two charts together. In both, the darker blue shows grades earned by sidecar students, and the lighter blue shows grades earned by students taking only the motorcycle class Clearly, sidecar students in Composition 1 (the bottom chart) earned a lower percentage of A’s and a higher percentage of F’s than did sidecar students in the top chart, who took Elements of Writing. It would be helpful here to be able to compare how sidecar students did in these courses compared to students who took the semester-length prerequisite before enrolling in the motorcycle course. In other words, how did the scores of students who took Elements of Writing prior to Composition 1 compare to those of students who went straight to Compositon 1 with the sidecar? Unfortunately, we do not have that data. It’s something we hope to learn in the future.
- This final chart shows what happens to students after passing English 101 (Elements of Writing). Students who passed Elements of Writing went on to enroll in the next course, Composition 1, at similar rates, regardless of whether they had taken the sidecar. However, students who had taken the sidecar course with Elements struggled more in Composition 1 than other former Elements students did. Only 73.8% of students who had taken Elements with the sidecar before enrolling in Composition 1 went on to complete the course. In contrast, 93.2% of students who had taken Elements without the sidecar did so. This is despite having similar overall GPAs. This suggests that the former sidecar students are not less successful students in general than their counterparts; the disparity pertains specifically to their composition classes. This is only a single year of data, so we need to see if this trend continues. However, this significant difference suggests that students who were identified as needing extra support to succeed in Elements of Writing might also need extra support in subsequent courses.
- Room 1 – Tim Room 2 – Sondra, Marci Room 3 - Shelby
- Shelby pitch the topics we need to still consider