Communicating-to-Learn Activities

The Principles

The act of communicating helps people understand the world in which they find themselves. When a person must convey information to another, he or she must describe the subject, define the subject, classify the subject, and explain the subject's importance. These acts of description, definition, classification, and explanation improve apprehension and the application of knowledge. Aristotle, whose scientific investigations are the model for our curriculum, believed that human comprehension demanded communicative abilities. Aristotle believed that humans know in language, J. H. Randall explains. Humans understand "by describing things in words, by making statements about things, by reasoning from one fact to another, by employing discourse" (Aristotle 6).

The connection between apprehension and communication is central to CAC programs. As Bean explains (drawing upon the work of John Dewey and Michael Polanyi), problems present natural and healthy motivations for living; they stimulate growth (even in the most basic forms of life).  And communication is a process of performing critical thinking and conveying the product of that thought (Engaging Ideas 2-3).  Courses that are part of a CAC program should have, then, components that emphasize writing and speaking as modes of knowledge acquisition and production.

For CAC programs, communication does not simply move information from one point to another, from one mind to another.  It serves as a method of forging ideas.  According to Susan McLeod, this aspect of CAC "assumes that [communication] is a mode of thinking and learning. . . . We build our own knowledge structures, the theory goes, changing them as we receive new information" ("Defining Writing Across the Curriculum" 20).  "One of the most powerful ways of building and changing these knowledge structures is through [communication]," McLeod continues, "through explaining new things to ourselves in a conscious way before we explain them to others" (20).  And when these ideas have emerged from communicative acts and are then conveyed to others in communicative acts, they are again transformed, recast through the experience of sharing with others who have different ideas. Communication serves as an act of knowledge production and understanding. 

Consequently, limiting writing to an auxiliary part of a course limits the potential of a course. When writing and speaking are limited to mere modes of conveyance, all that an instructor can ask about communicative acts is whether they are clear, Bean explains (3). But if communication is accepted as a mode of learning and discovery-an epistemic activity-then an instructor can ask if communicative acts are interesting . . . if they evidence a critical mind at work . . . if they attempt to connect with an audience and an audience's ideas with the new thoughts.  Communicative acts become a way to foster intellectual growth associated with a particular course's material.

To help students reason about course material, you can employ communicating-to-learn strategies, writing and speaking assignments that emphasize the connection between communication and cognition. These activities do not require significant rhetorical guidance: Students should be able to employ these strategies adeptly after minimal instruction. And the assignments do not require extensive commentary; you might not grade them. Yet, these strategies will foster thinking about course material in new ways and exercise communicative faculties that more complex forms of communication demand. The communicating-to-learn strategies will give students an opportunity to work with course material and develop critical understanding of the material. This work does not have to have the appearance of "busy work." Students could be asked to engage in rhetorical exercises that they will need to use in the future-both in their schoolwork and in their careers.

Prefatory Note: Our aim in this guide is to present teachers with as many options as possible for creating communication-rich courses.  You will likely find the suggestions overwhelming. Bear in mind that adopting and adapting even just one or two of these strategies in your course can transform it in dramatic and effective ways.  We therefore suggest that you choose just those strategies that will help you achieve your goals.  Try some of them.  If they don't work as well as you'd hoped, try others.

In-Class, Focused Communication

One of the most effective ways of incorporating communication in a course and using it to foster comprehension of course material is to set aside time in each period for writing about course topics.  In Engaging Ideas, Bean suggests that instructors could have students write while they prepare for the class. Better still, Bean suggests, instructors could write with the class (104-05).  Your participation in this writing will indicate that such writing is useful and that the students and you are part of a community, one which shares the common goal of discovery.

To prepare students for a course meeting and encourage their participation you could have students write for five or ten minutes in class on a topic that will help them focus on the day's topic for discussion.  This exercise will prepare them for the material that you will present and encourage them to define problems to be addressed and formulate questions that they would like to ask.

Reviews of Course Material. To encourage the integration of material is to have students write abstracts of the previous class meeting and the material covered and then have them suggest ways that this material relates to the readings for the present class. Students might also be asked to define an important term or concept and then provide an example, an analogy, or a metaphor for that term or concept. Students could be required to edit these abstracts/definitions, collect them in a binder, and submit the collection at the end of the semester. Students should be encouraged to use the collection as a study guide for tests.

Discussion Organization. Focused writing can also be used to energize lagging discussion or to structure heated and disorganized debate.  "When students run out of things to say or when the discussion gets so heated that everyone wants to talk at once, suspend the discussion," Bean recommends, "and ask for several minutes of writing" (Engaging Ideas, 105).  Both of these activities emphasize the importance of writing in learning: the former helps students learn that writing is a method of extracting information from their thoughts and developing ideas; the latter helps students understand that writing is a method of organizing disjointed knowledge, focusing it, and preparing it for association with other ideas so that it can produce more knowledge.

Minute Papers. One effective and quick way to promote writing to learn is to assign "minute papers" at the end of the class periods in which students explain the most significant thing that they learned in class that day and their most important question related to that topic.  Or you could have them indicate what was the most difficult point of the discussion and suggest reasons for their difficulty (Bean, Engaging Ideas, 105-06, citing T. A. Angelo and K. P. Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers 2d ed. [San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993] and S. Tobias, "Writing to Learn Science and Mathematics," in Writing to Learn Mathematics and Science, ed. P. Connolly and T. Vilardi [New York: Teachers College Press, 1989]).

Class Outlines. Note taking is an important aspect of any course  and an important activity in almost all forms of communication.  To encourage students to take effective notes, you could present students with "outline quizzes" near the end of the period. These quizzes would resemble an incomplete outline (similar to those often distributed at conference presentations) and the students would have to fill in the blank spaces along the outline.  The first question, for example, might ask the student provide a thesis for the day's meeting.  Then the outline might walk the students through the day's meeting, asking them to fill in the main points, define key terms, and provide examples of the information that they learned.

Out-of-Class Work

The communication across the curriculum movement emphasizes the use of writing and speaking as ways to grasp course material.  Through communicative activities associated with course material, students are able to make that material part of their own intellectual frameworks.

To make course material part of their intellectual growth, students need time to work with material on their own.  Consequently, you should augment in-class assignments that emphasize communicating to learn with out-of-class assignments with a similar pedagogical emphasis. 

Like the in-class assignments, this "homework" can appear in a variety of communicative modes; in fact, these assignments likely should not have the appearance of official course projects because these assignments should serve as "places of exploration," in which students take those risks that are necessary for intellectual growth, in which students experiment with novel modes of conception and communication.   Often times, these assignments could be begun at the end of a class period (with students working individually or in small groups) and then finished at home.  Again, the important element of these assignments is diversity: provide students with opportunities to think and communicate in variegated ways so that they develop the intellectual and communicative skills that will allow them to master course material and apply it in a variety of contexts.  Assignments "should encourage role playing," Erika Lindemann contends, "because it allows students to imagine rhetorical situations and audiences outside academic contexts" (A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers 194).

Class Minutes. One useful assignment is to have each student write the minutes for one class meeting.  All the students could provide the day's class recorder with copies of their notes.  Then, the student writing the minutes would synthesize the notes and the discussion in the class minutes. The student would distribute the minutes a week later.  This assignment is useful because it helps the students learn how to integrate material: They will have the instructor's information and various class members' comments to record.  And, unlike straight notes, reading these minutes will help the class understand how ideas developed in the class. Course notes usually record the answers, the words of the instructor. These minutes, however, will include the questions that lead to the answers, the problems that students had with material and the class members' group resolutions.

If you wish to add a verbal component to these minutes, you could have the student who is composing a particular meeting's minutes present a summary of the meeting at the next meeting.  The student would have three to five minutes at the beginning of the class to summarize the material that was discussed, present some questions that were raised, report their answers, and then suggest discussion topics for the present meeting.

Readings Summary.  The ability to summarize material for others is important, and you could easily incorporate summary exercises in your course.  You could assign each student a day's reading over the course of a semester and require him or her to summarize the material and give copies of the summary to other class members.

If you do decide to use this summary activity, you might also integrate it with the an oral component that requires each student to meet with you before writing the final copy of the summary. At this meeting, you could discuss the material and require the student to compose a list of questions that he or she would like you to answer.

Reading Responses. Teachers have found David Bleich's method of encouraging expressive interpretation of reading an effective way to get students to write when other methods seem to fail.  Essentially, "students are asked to write, first, about what they perceive in the text, and then how they feel about what they see, and finally what associations-thoughts and feelings-inform and follow from these perceptions" (Petrosky, "From Story to Essay" College English Feb. 1982).  Bleich believes that there is too little emphasis on feeling in the classroom and in reading responses, and he believes that students will learn to appreciate reading more if affective responses are encouraged rather than prohibited.  His response heuristic can be successfully used in a number of situations.  Some teachers have students keep journals that follow Bleich's method of response.  Others have students compose more polished essays from the set of questions that follow.  However you decide to use Bleich's heuristic, you'll find it applicable to almost any type of reading. 

1.                   Restatement: What is the text about?  (This question asks students to practice perceiving.  They should try to be as accurate and thorough as possible.)

2.                   Affective Response: What did you feel as you read?  Explain the reasons you felt as you did.  (This question asks students to be self-conscious of their responses and to point to specific points in the text that guide them.)

3.                   Associative Response: What does the text remind you of?  (This question asks students to deliberately make associations and to understand the difference between their private associations and more public ones prompted by the text.  Students can be encouraged to generalize from these private associations and make them ones other readers can identify with.)

4.                   Deciding on Literary Importance: What is the most important word, line, scene, etc. in the text?  (This question encourages students to make judgments and to argue for them.  It also calls for frequent citation of the text).

5.                   Extending the Response: Suppose the text is not about what you said it was above, that it's about something more complex, less obvious.  What is it really about?  Explain.  (This question asks students to imagine new ways of seeing the literature, perhaps in more abstract or "philosophical" ways.  Students shouldn't invent new story lines, but should try to imagine new ways of describing what a text is about.)

Bleich's response heuristic seems to work best for students when they respond in journals.  Have students share their responses in groups or with the rest of the class.  Particularly encourage students to form their experiences and thoughts into material useful for others.  It is important that students learn how to convert private associations into public ones, that they generalize from their private experience of texts and point to aspects of the text that stir their associations.

Related-Material Report. In addition to providing students with an opportunity to master summarizing, the out-of-class assignments could encourage them to perform research and synthesize various kinds of information.  To promote this research and synthesis, you could require students to obtain information about a day's lecture from a source not used in the course.  Students could be directed to academic journals, news articles and reports, webpages, and even to professionals in the field.  Have the students summarize the information, critique it in relation to the class meeting to which it is connected.  They might answer questions like the following:

Ø       "How is this article related to the class meeting and the readings?"

Ø       "What is the author's main point?"

Ø       "Given your present understanding of this topic, does the author adequately support the argument?  How?"

Ø       "Where does the author need to add more information?

Ø       What does he or she need to add?"

Then, place the valuable material that students obtained (journal articles, radio reports, television news reports) on reserve at the library under your course. Encourage students to refer to this material for developing course projects and preparing for tests.

An excellent oral component could be added to this assignment by requiring students to perform at least one interview during the semester for the "related-material report."  Have the students contact a professional in the field (people working in business or industry, other professionals, or members of professional listservs) and ask them a series of questions that issue from the topic for a particular class.  Require the students to transcribe the interaction and distribute it to the rest of the class.

Conferences. An excellent way to foster good communication and make sure that students engage the course material is simply to require conferences.  You can require students to meet with you once during the semester for fifteen or twenty minutes. In this meeting, you can discuss the course material, their questions, and their ideas for tests or course projects.  You could have this conference be an informal activity; or you could prepare a list of questions and topics that you would like your student to examine and prepare to discuss before the conference. 

The out-of-class writing provides an opportunity to integrate computer technology with the course.  Students could be encouraged to learn basic HTML coding or the basic features of a webpage-production program; then, you could require them to post these out-of-class writings to a class website.  The website would be particularly useful for the minutes because you would not have to make copies of the minutes for the whole class, and students could easily access these minutes in order to prepare for tests or find ideas to pursue in course projects.  A website would also be an excellent forum to communicate the discussion of private conferences.  Students could report on this webpage the topics that they discussed in one-on-one situations with you so that the entire class could benefit from the discussion.

Course Journals or Logs

Journals, notebooks, learning logs, or commonplace books have a long tradition of serving as effective tools for communicative activities.  And journals could serve several functions in a class: recording class experiences (like lab experiments or field encounters); gathering quotations, definitions and ideas for course papers; or distilling essential information from notes for exam preparation.  Journals provide students with the opportunity to work with course material and work with words.  They traditionally afford a "place" for writers to explore their ideas without strict rules that might limit thought. 

Students can be required to keep journals in which they regularly canvass course topics. You could require a certain number of entries each month on any subject and check the journals during a test period, during labs, during conferences; or you could regularly collect them.

Although all journals should likely include some aspect of open exploration, there are number of approaches that you could use in your course.

Critical Log. Students keep notebooks containing specific assignments, particularly accounts of course ideas and activities. Students record lab activities, relevant events, or difficulties with material and then critically exam the information and relate it to the course.

At first students might resist the critical log and claim that they don't have anything to write about.  In this case, you should make some suggestions, or begin the semester by assigning specific "journal prompts" that the students could use to guide their writing.  Some words that you might wish to keep in mind in developing these prompts are speculate, sketch or describe, record or capture, react, explain, complain or suggest a change in (Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers 80-81). You might also consider providing various "writing scenarios" so that students can practice addressing different audiences.  A history instructor might, for example, have students write letters to the producers of a war film in which they urge them to include an event that they were planning to ignore.  Later in the semester you might ask students to develop journal prompts; you might even hold each student responsible for producing one journal prompt for the whole class over the course of the semester.

Double-Entry Log. In this kind of journal, students keep notes from readings and lectures on the verso pages of a notebook and then respond to those notes or analyze the topics on the recto pages.  They could use the response side to raise questions, answer questions, and relate the information to other ideas or readings.

The double-entry log particularly aids the development of original ideas for longer papers that are united both to the course material and to one another.  The double-entry format encourages students to find information that they find interesting and useful and then to explore both their interests in the material and the material's potential use.

Contemporary Issue Journal. An effective way for promoting interest in course material is to demonstrate that the material that you treat in a course is part of the students' everyday lives.  A contemporary-issue journal provides a format for this demonstration.  "Here the teacher wants students to relate the course to contemporary issues and problems. The teacher asks students to read current newspapers and to write about how course material applies to current affairs" (Bean Engaging Ideas 109). Students could paste news articles into a notebook, summarize the issue, and then analyze the issue and relate it to the course material.  Such a contemporary issue log is particularly effective in social science, history, and ethics courses (Bean 109).  Students could be encouraged to track one issue during the semester and be asked to produce a formal paper, like an editorial, by drawing upon the articles and their analyses.

Marginal Gloss Journal. As Bean suggests in his recommendations for teaching critical reading, highlighters have, in some ways, become a bane for education: students often mark material indiscriminately or without taking time to analyze the material that they have marked yet believe that they have sufficiently engaged the material  "Many teachers report success [in improving critical reading] simply by forbidding the use of underlining or . . . highlight[ing]," Bean writes.  To encourage the move from mere marking to intellectual engagement, you can have students create journals of critical glosses in which they copy a passage from a text and then present interpretations, expansions, and allusions that they believe will "enlighten" readers.  Have the students replace the highlighting with their own brilliance.

This style of journal can easily and productively be combined with audio or even visual glosses.  To improve  students' abilities to present materially orally and to read critically, you could have each student perform one or two critical oral glosses during the semester. You could have the students record their readings of an assigned passage or description of an assigned object or situation. Then you could have the student record a repetition of the passage or the description in which the student stops at certain points to make critical comments about the work. You could provide the student with suggestions for critical topics to discuss. This assignment could be used in conjunction with the analysis of literature, philosophy, plastic arts, or scientific experiments.  This installment in a critical gloss journal could even be made visual: You could require the students to gloss the "text" before a video camera.  This visual component might make them more aware of their audience.

Group Work Assignments

Group work has particularly strong associations with the goals of any CAC movement.  The connections occur in two areas: (1) CAC's interest in encouraging students to interact-in language-with other members of a discourse community and (2) CAC's interest in placing students in situations that force them to abandon (temporarily) rigid modes of thought and communication and adopt (and adapt) new modes of thought and communication.

As Susan McLeod explains, an important aspect of WAC or CAC is the interest in fostering communities "of learners and writers in a classroom, similar to the knowledge community we call a discipline" ("Defining Writing Across the Curriculum" 20).  To understand how to communicate in a discipline, students need to understand how a discipline-a group of people who are gathered about an intellectual endeavor and who share goals-develops and exists.  In a bachelor's program, students need to become aware of the conventions, the communicative and intellectual norms, of a discipline.  Group work provides students with an opportunity to develop this understanding.  Small-group discussions of course material, conducted in a variety of communicative modes, provides students with the opportunity to connect with a real audience that provides feedback.   Thus, students will likely become more aware of the need to consider the discipline and its conventions when they make their own contributions.

In Engaging Ideas, Bean asserts that the collaborative, group approach to instruction is highly effective.  He recommends using small groups in a course to provide students with "supervised practice in disciplinary thinking under the tutelage of the teacher as coach. This method," he continues, "has a consistent rhythm: the teacher presents a disciplinary problem requiring critical thinking; students work together in small groups to seek a consensus solution to the problem; and the teacher coaches students' performance by observing their process and critiquing their solutions" (150).

Bean draws upon the work of Kenneth Bruffee, an esteemed collaborative learning scholar, and claims that group work benefits students because it encourages intellectual synthesis. (See Bruffee, "Writing and Reading as Social or Collaborative Acts," in The Writer's Mind, 1983; "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind,'" College English 46.6 [1984]: 635-52; Collaborative Learning, 1993.)  Group work does not simply result in "a pooling of knowledge."   The collaborative period fosters "argumentation and consensus building," in which students support hypotheses and encourage others to accept them. "By presenting small groups with critical thinking problems to wrestle with, teachers can create an environment of productive talk," Bean explains, "that leads to greatly enriched inquiry, analysis, and argument.  The goal of each [group] task is not . . . the 'right answer' but . . . reasonable, supported answers that [students] will be asked to defend later in front of the whole class" (150).

To reach these points of intellectual synthesis-rhetorical situations that demand effective argumentation-students must first experience a period of intellectual discord, a period in which their thoughts, conceptions, and opinions are challenged . . . questioned . . . undermined.  Here is the second benefit of group work: it creates environments of cognitive dissonance that require students to develop new ways of thinking and that require students to apply the material that they have learned from readings, class discussions, and lectures.  The group work fosters "critical thinking."

The critical thinking that teachers prize-and often associate with good writing-is difficult to define.  "Critical thinking" is a shifty phrase whose elusive nature might be one of its most (and maybe singular) distinguishing characteristics: We do not usually view critical thinking as a faculty that can be prescribed, limned for students in a step-by-step process; we view critical thinking as an activity that we can only foster and encourage.  This inability to define critical thinking may derive from critical thinking's essence.  If we associate it with anything, we usually associate it with questioning simple standards, questioning reductive reasoning, questioning insular intellects, questioning myopic methodologies.  Teachers cannot encapsulate and prescribe questioning of this caliber.

Critical thinking emerges from an activity of a personally chosen "decentering" in which the person chooses to question his or her traditional modes of thought, then attempts to develop new modes of thought to account for certain events.   Unless a person's traditions are challenged, unless the cognitive structures by which a person apprehends experiences are rendered ineffective, then critical thinking will not be developed.  "Cognitive dissonance," the inability to account for experience, energizes critical thinking.

Group work provides a forum for creating this cognitive dissonance and, thus, fostering the critical thinking that leads to effective and powerful communication.  When students are placed in groups to discuss topics and problems related to the course, they will encounter different conceptions of course material, they will find that what and how they believe is not what and how others believe.  The discord will force the students to rethink their approach to the problems and issues in the course and to develop broader and more widely applicable modes of thinking and, in turn, communicating.   One of the advantages of group work is that it introduces students to "conflicting interpretations of material . . . [that] encourage[s] them to confront the inadequacies and contradictions lying dormant in the views they bring to college" (Bean, Engaging Ideas 27).

Electronic Discussion Lists. One highly effective way to encourage students to write to learn is to develop a listserv (an electronic discussion list). Students can be required to join the listserv and then to use their e-mail accounts to discuss course material  on-line. You could occasionally post questions or course problems.

An advantage of the discussion list is its unlimited nature: there are not time limitations or topic limitations.  In-class discussions can often be hampered by the small amount of time instructors actually have with their students.  In addition, they can be hampered by a need to cover a certain amount of material.  If you were to employ a discussion list in your course, you would be able to provide a forum in which students could discuss material in more detail and in a more digressive way. Furthermore, the listserv acts as a "public" forum that gives all students an opportunity to present their views, not just those students who are comfortable speaking in class. (It also provides you with a way to curb particularly prolix students: you can ask them to refer their comments to the discussion list.)

The discussion list also can save you time by providing you with a "place" outside of class to distribute and explain assignments.  You can distribute assignments on the listserv and require students to discuss the assignment in this forum rather than using large amounts of class time.

Problem-Solving Groups. In order to foster oral communication skills and interpersonal skills, you could divide students into small groups at the beginning of class and then assign them small problems or paradoxes related to the subject for the day. You could require the students to work on a solution, and then have one group present their solution to the rest of the class (and answer any questions that arise.)

John Bean offers the following problem as an example:

In class yesterday, 80 percent of you agreed with this statement: "The maximum speed of a sailboat occurs when the boat is sailing in the same direction as the wind." However, that intuitive answer is wrong. Sailboats can actually go much faster when they sail across the wind. How so? Using what you have been learning in vector algebra, explain why sailboats can sail faster when the wind blows sideways to their direction of travel rather than from directly behind them. Make your explanations clear enough for the general public to understand. You can use a diagram if that helps. (Engaging Ideas 27)

The group problem-solving does not have to involve objective questions. Instructors of more "subjective" courses can also incorporate these groups.  Dilemma ethics problems (though over used) provide a good model for these types of group problem-solving sessions.

Question-Generating Groups.  In order to encourage students to develop effective questions that lead to answers that are useful, you can have students work in groups to develop and refine questions for class discussion. "After instruction in the kinds of questions asked by a particular discipline," Bean explains, "the teacher breaks students into groups and has them brainstorm possible questions. . . .  After this phase, groups must then refine their lists into the two or three best questions and explain why each question is a particularly good one (Engaging Ideas 156, emphasis added).

Metacognitive Analysis. Often, student groups will develop responses to problems that are wrong, Bean explains, and instructors' pedagogical reactions are frequently to correct.  Instructors should resist the "remedial" reaction, Bean suggests; instead, they should require the students to explore the potential problems in their response.  Inform the students that their response does not reflect the attitudes of experts in the field; then ask the students to return to their group and discuss what are likely the differences between their reasoning and the experts' reasoning.  "The effect of this approach," Bean claims, "is to deepen students' understanding of how knowledge is created: instead of accepting (and perhaps just memorizing) the 'right answer' based on the teacher's authority, students struggle to understand the principles of inquiry, analysis, and problem solving used by the experts to arrive at their views" (159).

Group Conferences.  Your students may not have developed the skills needed to perform group work, to explore collaboratively an issue or a problem.  You should not despair. Their difficulties with this activity provide you with an opportunity to get to know them better and to provide them with a model for group work: Hold a conference in which you ask a group of your students to visit you in your office to work through a course problem.  You might even consider recording the group conferences on a video tape and placing the tapes on reserve so that students could benefit from the discussions in which they did not participate.

In an upper division course, in which students are more comfortable with criticism, you might have students write an analysis of a different group's meeting and distribute it to the members of that group. (This approach is modeled on a form of group counseling.)  A student would listen or watch a tape of the session and then analyze the discussion of a class issue, explaining why certain members came to an agreement about an issue or why they did not.  This analysis would help students help one another learn the material and help them understand how others think about the material that they will treat in course projects

Go to next section

Return to the CAC Guide index