Basic skills to prepare students for college

As an educational consultant, parents and volunteer organizations for foster children have asked me what they should be thinking about as they help teenagers prepare for academia. These are the basic skills that students should have in place to help ensure academic success:



A) Critical Thinking Skills:

Reading: The more you can encourage reading, the easier the student will have it when they get to college. Reading skills are the most complicated critical thinking skill to teach. How to read, especially when you're in college, is a huge issue. Most students don't know what to read for, so they underline everything in a textbook. Help them find the major issue in a piece of reading. What is the piece about? Who is it written for? What is the piece trying to get you to believe? Do you believe the credibility of the writer? These are crucial places to begin in college reading for any class, any discipline.

Categorizing: Ability to sort information hierarchically, logically, in order of importance. The ability to summarize, to express the gist of something. First-years will often give a blow-by-blow and think it is a summary; it’s not.

Vocabulary: Students often believe that ‘fancy’ words make them sound pretentious, and they need encouragement to use one longer word instead of three short ones. Therefore it's ideal to start with words they think they already know the meaning of, or words they think are funny-sounding. If you can get them to underline words they're not familiar with, and then look each word up in the dictionary, it's a great start toward building their vocabulary.

Argumentation skills/Providing evidence: Students must learn how to rely on sources when writing term papers. College writing will require students to use evidence to support their assertions and arguments from primary and secondary source material. To be taken seriously, they must get used to this convention, especially the reality of providing more than one source to support or contravene an argument.

Essay-writing: Usually based on argumentation skills. Ability to locate the argument/topoi, and to argue for and against.  Tell student about Blue books (remember those?). Students generally haven’t heard of them, nor are they familiar with essay-writing conventions. Usually they know the five paragraph theme from high school, but its conventions and rules will not help them in college. In fact, it will hinder them.


B) Practical Skills:

Note-taking: When to take notes during a lecture; what to take notes on (when you went to college, how did you know what was important and what to listen for?). Most first-year classes in big schools are lecture courses, so note-taking is crucial to surviving the first year. Students often believe that the information they’ll need on a test is in their textbook, and are dismayed to find that issues covered in class show up on the test.

Computer skills: Familiarity with computers, finding websites, online resources, and Microsoft Word, plus any other programs that will get the student through their first year. Microsoft Word is the standard, expected word processing program.

Internet Use: It is really helpful if students are not just familiar with computers before they get to school, but are actually fairly fluent. One of the best ways of familiarizing the student with the colleges they’re interested in is by having them search online for the colleges, departments, and courses they think they might want to take.

Library: Find a book and follow through with the entire process of looking it up in an online catalog locating it on the shelf, and taking it out.  It's important for the student to have some familiarity with journals and magazines in a specific area of interest. Professional journals are frequently overlooked by students as a source of information.

2) More complicated issues that will need your help:

Taking responsibility for their own learning: Students don’t ask enough questions for fear of looking stupid. Scared students from a difficult background are most at risk for not going to the teacher to ask questions, preferring to disappear into the woodwork rather than look as though they need help.

Writing Across the Curriculum: This curriculur change is fairly standard now for most larger schools, and smaller schools are catching on to it as well. Essentially, what it means is that students will be writing in all their classes, not just English Composition. Writing skills are central to success at college. Anything you can do to promote and support their ability to write rhetorically in any given situation (to make an argument regarding an issue, support it, show the opposition’s point of view, and what the writer intends to do about the problem they’ve discussed) will help the student’s chances of success in college.

Being able to work in a community of learners: The educational process is less and less about the individual and more about collaboration and group work. This can present a challenge for students who don't expect to have to listen to their peers more than to the teacher, whose authority is increasingly questioned. Authority issues have become a subtext of most college classrooms.

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The first three pages of my book "The Mythologized Writer"

In an effort to be brave and get the publication process started, I'm posting this, if only to get used to seeing my words in print:

Introduction

 What I Once Thought I Knew About Teaching Writing

“How we teach is shaped by whom and what we teach. To some extent we also define how we behave as teachers in light of our previous experiences as students. We emulate teachers whose classrooms we enjoyed and avoid the habits of those who most displeased us. By continually planning, executing, and revising our teaching performance, we eventually develop a style that best expresses our teaching self” (253).

--Erika Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers

            

My “teaching self,” complicated by convictions and prejudices I was unaware of, developed years before I entered my first classroom. Revising my ideas about what I thought I knew about writing has proved to be fairly difficult; what I have learned has taken years to integrate, understand, and write about. What I learned was that everything I thought I knew about writing was wrong. I also discovered that long before anyone who wants to teach writing enters her first classroom, she has already formed complex beliefs about the act of writing. She may believe that writing involves inspiration, talent, even genius. She may have been told that the authors she has read were eccentric because of their solitude and isolation from society; that the act of writing itself isolates and secludes.

She may have been told that only certain people should be considered writers, and that only certain Authors (with a capital ‘A’) are worthy of her attention, those who elucidate ‘universal’ themes ‘all people’ identify with and understand. Long before a writing teacher discusses the subject of writing with her students, her writing will have been judged by someone in authority, someone who knows what ‘good’ writing is. Early in her education, she will be told whether she has talent, and whether she might one day become ‘successful’—a publishable writer. 

            Writing teachers educated during the process movement in composition studies will also have been told that writing is collaborative, recursive, revisionary (cf. Flowers and Hayes, N. Sommers, S. Perl). The workplace writer, she is assured, works in a group, and revises according to her readers’ demands (cf. Nancy Sommers, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers”; and Flower and Hayes on reader-based prose). She is told that the key to success is perfecting her craft. She will be able to sell her writing skills anywhere, for she is a marketable commodity. This potential composition teacher has been trained, as have most people educated in the Western tradition, to believe some combination of two reductionist concepts about writing: one, that writing ability relies on solitary inspiration, talent, and genius; and two, that writing ability relies on learning-by-doing, and by continually revising modeled skills.

            As I will show, the former belief is based on a philosophical, Platonic epistemology, and the latter represents Isocrates’ workbench pedagogical style. As I will illustrate, these differing perspectives represent the ancient debate between Plato and Isocrates regarding the meaning and definition of discourse and whether, or indeed if, writing could or should be taught. A full understanding of the import of this unresolved struggle is crucial because at its core lies a fundamental disagreement about the function of logos [i] and who is permitted access to the power of discourse. This debate has never been resolved for composition and rhetoric because the argument between Isocrates and Plato regarding the purpose of an education and discourse’s role in that education is renegotiated with each new generation of educators who must come to terms with these issues.

            Unfortunately, the inheritance of their debate includes elitist attitudes toward the power of writing, and how access to logos must be limited to exclude the masses. The material outcome of these attitudes is seen at the moment of assessment and judgement, when grades are given. Ultimately, teachers judge and assess students according to the beliefs they have about the subject of writing, and it is inevitable that students will feel confused by comments and behavior that reveal dissonant values.

            The issues of the debate remain; what changes are the social, historical, and political contexts within which the issues are debated. I will show that a Platonic, philosophical, and exclusive view of education is incompatible with a Sophistic, practical, technical, and communal view of education; that both models coexist within the educational system, and that they serve to infuse each subsequent generation of teachers with discordant information about writing, discourse and the meaning of logos. It is my contention that since this ancient debate has never been resolved, it has been inherited by English studies, and in fact underlies the pedagogical inconsistencies teachers and students experience in the composition classroom.

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[i] In The Sophistic Movement, G. B. Kerferd discusses the three ideas contained for the Greeks in the word logos: 1) “speech, discourse, description”; 2) “thought and mental processes . . . thinking, reasoning”; and 3) the world, that about which we are able to speak and think, hence structural principles, formulae, natural laws, and so on.” The “underlying meaning [of logos] usually, perhaps always, involves some degree of reference to the other two areas as well” (83-84). Logos then has a “range of applications,” although Kerferd does not mention that, according to Samuel Ijsseling in Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict, it has also been used to mean ‘fate,’ making logos a multivalent word indeed. The multiplicity of meanings possible in any given Greek word not only makes absolute translations difficult at times, but it also can lead to misreadings and misunderstandings based on the biases or stance of the translator.