Working Toward Alignment: Bringing Classroom and Workplace Practice Closer Together

As online learning researchers and practitioners, we place extreme value on course alignment. And rightfully so. Pedagogical alignment in online learning is crucial to achieving learning objectives and long-term student success. Quality Matters (2018), the global leader and authority on quality within online learning, and the OLC place alignment as a central requirement for a successfully designed course. While much scholarship exists surrounding the significance of alignment in online learning (Cohen, 1987; Reeves, 2006; Blumberg, 2009; Polikoff & Porter, 2014; Biggs, 1996), less exists that discusses the importance of online pedagogy aligning with workplace practice (Cook, 2002; McWilliam & Dawson, 2008; Paretti, 2006)). More specifically, an even smaller portion is devoted to the intersection of writing pedagogy, professional writing practices, and online learning. This proposal will explore alternative methods to writing instruction in the online environment that more strongly align with workplace writing practices.

So, what do we know about current practices around writing in the virtual classroom? Currently, by and large, online instructors fall back on the traditional approaches to writing pedagogy stemming from the fields of composition and rhetoric. The process of student draft, individualized feedback, final draft, grade, is one that many instructors—even those outside writing—know all too well. What they also know is that the feedback is often ignored or misunderstood (Beason, 1993; Connors & Lunsford, 1993; Straub, 1997; Smith, 1997; Hyland, 1998; Knoblauch & Brannon, 1981; Kramer-Simpson, 2012), leaving instructors frustrated and time-deficient and the students no more familiar with what actual workplace writing looks like.

In most cases, those writing in the workplace are not submitting a draft to an expert writer who will provide them detailed, individualized feedback. In today’s technology-enhanced, virtually connected world, writers often write in real-time with collaborators or in a solitary way working through their own revisions as they go, in accordance with feedback received from experts or clients whose specialties lie in other areas. Frequently, writers must conform all future writing to feedback provided on a past document. These practices, and subsequent processes for writing, aren’t often what students see when working on their own writing in the classroom. So, how can online instructors create a stronger alignment between classroom and workplace practice surrounding writing and make thinking visible for writing practice (Klucevsek, 2016)?

Alternative forms of writing instruction provide opportunities to engage students differently with what the writing process actually resembles in practice. First, we return to our roots in learning theory to the intersection of Jonassen’s (1991) constructivist learning, Lave and Wenger’s (1991) situated learning, and Vygotsky’s (1978) social learning to land us in the territory of Brown, Collins and Duguid’s (1989) cognitive apprenticeship. The art and pedagogy of teaching writing is not new in terms of theory, but our rapidly advancing technology which provides opportunities for visualization is in terms of making thinking visible for students. Cognitive apprenticeship proposes a tiered model in which a particular cognitive task can be articulated for transfer of skill. In the context of writing, no longer can learners be told “just write” and be expected to produce a final product without the scaffolded approach of cognitive apprenticeship which guides their thought processes in alignment with the physical task of producing documents.

While cognitive apprenticeship is not a new pedagogical framework, it has seen a recent resurgence. The emergence of technology and advanced tools which support visualization have provided new mechanisms for displaying the process through visual displays (collaborative documents, interactive whiteboards, screen-sharing, etc.). As a result, the opportunity to guide writing pedagogy through an iterative process supported by cognitive apprenticeship is even greater. CA is comprised of seven (7) steps including: modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection and exploration (Emmons, 2017). It is through this process that learners are able to observe and apply complex cognitive tasks that may typically not be visible due to their cognitive nature. With traditional apprenticeship at the root, it is instructors guiding and demonstrating writing practices in real-time that learners are able to acquire a particular skill with the augmented through process required to complete such a task. The value added of cognitive apprenticeship as applied to online, tech-enhanced writing instruction is that it provides students with an opportunity to observe the process of a professional writing in action. By making the cognitive processes which lead to writing visible, students are then able to see how professionals move through the process of writing, regardless of that professional’s expertise. This process versus product approach to writing pedagogy bridges the long “you should already know how to write” with the “how do I write” expectations. Courses that apply writing assessment may consider the practice of CA over the more traditional writing approaches to improve the value of process and skill transfer.

Secondly, we offer the practice of collective feedback as an alternative strategy to provide students with feedback during writing assessments. As noted above, scholars have intensely studied how students engage with instructor feedback in the traditional classroom, and more recent scholarship also explores how students engage with feedback in the online space (Beetham & Sharpe, 2008; Gallien & Oomen_Early, 20089; Getzlaf et. al, 2009). Yet, even with a more nuanced understanding of what kind of comments work, the method of delivery has largely stayed the same - individualized comments noting common mistakes that often become copied and pasted from draft to draft. This process is both time-consuming and often disappointing for instructors, as they quickly realize students submit drafts that have failed to address large, comprehensive issues in their writing. Again, while students know they need to write, they lack an understanding of how to write and revise.

However, collective feedback is delivered one time, in a centralized location through a “Feedback File” that includes samples of the issue coupled with detailed instructions of how to address it, in addition to other supplemental materials including visuals and links. Similar to the professional practice of using a style guide to model writing, Feedback Files engage students in metacognitive awareness of their writing as they review their own work for similar issues. While not a traditional method of delivering feedback to students, collective feedback more closely aligns with workplace writing practices and engages students in cognitive processes that build skills more likely to transfer to writing as a professional.

This presentation will share the qualitative results from a series of asynchronous interviews with professionals who write on the contrast of the writing practices they used in the classroom to the writing practices they encounter in the workplace. Furthermore, this presentation will present two alternatives to traditional writing practices that can be used in the online classroom to better align course activities with professional practice: cognitive apprenticeship and collective feedback. These two approaches provide meta-cognitive benefits to the learners and improved pedagogical results to the instructors. Additionally, they continue the press for alignment throughout the entire learning experience, from course design to professional practice.