Academic and Reflective Writing

Class on Academic and Reflective Writing

The topic of discussion today was that of the correct methods of Academic and Reflective writing.  Though I understand its merits, especially for those unused to writing essays in their subjects, but for those of us who have been doing it for the last few years, as part of our university course, it was useful revision, but a little obsolete. 

It made me think of the reading we did on Group Work (Chapter 18 of Geoff Petty's Teaching Today (4th ed).  I wondered if the class would have been more successful if there had been more allowance for the differentiated knowledge within the class.  We could have been put in discussion groups, or 'buddied up' in pairs and allowed to share knowledge within peer groups, discussing questions set by the lecturer and then sharing this discussion with the class, when the lecture can fill in any holes.  This is a more active way of learning, more apt considering our subject, and leaves more room for the sharing of individual methods - where interesting and helpful things can crop up.




The Essay Burger
The whole essay is a burger, topped and tailed by
the bready buns of introduction and conclusion
But the meaty middle (the main body of your essay)
should also be made of paragraph burgers.
Burgers within Burgers.
It's Burgers all the way down.....

For example, when talking about the structuring of essays, one of the students was struggling with the dry terminology, so I told her about the 'essay hamburger' a visual mnemonic of both essay and paragraph structure that I use with the students I tutor. Though the same theory as the one on the slide, it proved useful to the class in providing a more visual, and visceral explanation, helping to digest the information into more bite sized, manageable chunks. 


Likewise, other students had information on referencing systems and resources that had helped them that they were able to share.  Though this came up in discussion, It was only at the end and slightly tentatively, as with a rigid lecture or presentation, one feels less inclined to break the flow, and disrupt the class, or undermine the authority of the teacher.  It was only the reading which made me reflect on the different ways that the information could have been imparted, and the class could have been led.