Minute writing: a sanctuary for private thought

Historical case studies and in-class writing help students understand the sources of American violence.

by Todd Shallat, BSU History Department

"I'm never quite sure what she wants," says my graduate student, complaining about an English professor who has trouble getting people to talk. My student is quiet but thoughtful. A gifted writer, she has plenty to say in essays but seldom speaks up in class. Professors compound her problem when they expect instant answers to complex questions, as if the point was too obvious for quiet reflection, as if students were seals trained to bark on command. No wonder they crowd into the back of the classrooms. No wonder so many professors allow them to sleepwalk through college by memorizing information and reciting it back on exams.

It is a problem we have with silence. As a history professor in my ninth year at BSU, I value the Socratic method but dread the downtime spent waiting for hands. And I'm not alone, according to a 1987 Phi Delta Kappa report on questions asked in the classroom. The typical teacher will wait only .09 seconds before moving on with the lecture--hardly enough. "All reflection," wrote John Dewey in 1910, "involves, at some point, stopping external observations and reactions so that an idea may mature."

Here is where writing can help--not only term- paper assignments but brief in-class exercises that help students think through a problem and prepare to discuss it in class.

Thomas A. Angelo of Boston College calls these exercises "minute writes." As a break from note- taking or prelude to lively discussion, minute writing gives students pause to focus their thinking. I tell students to write simply as if they were talking to classmates. They write in a journal or spiral notebook, dating each entry so I can tell at the end of the semester who has been attentive in class. Although I require only brief responses to the questions posed in the lecture, I often find delightful surprises: feedback, criticism, catharsis, comments about the reading, comments about personal experiences that relate to points raised in class.

Minute writing not only stimulates active discussion, it provides what Toby Fulwiler calls "a personal sanctuary for private thought" about the course subject matter. "When you ask students to write to themselves and promise not to red-pencil that writing," Fulwiler explains in Teaching With Writing (1987), "you are sanctifying the value of personal reflection and affirming the student's right to his or her own opinion." Informal writing helps learning evolve from recording and memorization to a process of working things out.

Minute writing can complement many subjects, even science and math. In Writing to Learn (1988), William Zinsser devotes a chapter to "writing mathematics" and another to short writing assignments in chemistry and physics classes. I use the technique to review points made in readings and lectures and help students take responsibility for solving problems themselves. Below are four examples of in-class writing assignments developed for the history department's methods course, HY 210.

Just the facts, ma'am

Once I had a student with a tape recorder who clicked the machine on and off during class. If I stepped away from the podium for a long explanation--click!--the machine went off. Click!-- it went on again when I quoted facts and statistics. Click!--it went off when I digressed. Soon the entire note-taking class was following the lead of the tape recorder, writing and pausing and writing again like sleeping children breathing along with a snoring adult.

"Hold on!" I remember saying in mid- digression, "this stuff is also important." But students, trained to record, crave small chunks of data for bluebooks. Few consider the link between fact and opinion, yet that connection is basic to what scholars call interpretation.

One way to put facts in perspective is to pause long enough to ask: "Which statements from today's lesson are mostly factual and which are mostly opinion? Paraphrase two factual statements from the lecture. Then, in a sentence or so, write an opinion that interprets the facts." Students discover after a minute of writing that pure statements of fact are rare in historical writing. Having committed themselves to paper, students are usually eager to defend their ideas.

A variation of the same assignment is to ask students to paraphrase a critical passage from a reading assignment. Then ask them to underline opinions and generalizations and circle pure statements of fact. Surprised by the lack of consensus over what constitutes a factual statement, student begin to see that facts seldom speak for themselves.

Handling sources

Another way to promote active learning is to give students a feel for the first-hand information that historians call primary sources. In a lesson on consumerism, for example, I distribute a photocopied set of early 20th century advertisements. "How," I ask, "did advertisers sell their products? Carefully study each ad. Then, selecting three or four revealing examples, write a paragraph about the hopes and fears of consumers on the eve of the First World War." A spirited discussion erupts when students share their findings in class.

The technique can also demystify the use of statistics. As a former history major I am aware that many students retreat to my classes to find refuge from science and math. And so I have them look at statistics if only to make the point that numbers are as slippery as any source. One writing exercise asks students to interpret a table of data on annual wages earned by black males in five cotton states after 1865. Did the Civil War materially improve their condition? Were the emancipated much better off than before? Widely different conclusions drawn from the same information help students understand the value and limitations of a statistical source.

Making sense of theory

In a wise book on the tension between history and social science, the historian Jack Hexter, writing in 1979, divided intellectuals into "lumpers," who love to see what diverse phenomena have in common, and "splitters," who shun these generalizations and emphasize the uniqueness of any particular case. I think most of us want our students to be neither lumpers nor splitters. We value the ability to see how things are different no less than the sociological talent for seeing how things are alike, yet how do we pause long enough so that students, through writing, have the tools to compare and contrast?

Social scientists often use case study exercises to foster this critical thinking. A teaching strategy pioneered by the Harvard Business School, case studies are used to measure the utility of a theory against the reality of an event. I combine case studies and minute writing in a lesson on the sources of American violence. After a lecture about anti-Catholic riots in early Philadelphia, I list some popular explanations: the frustration- aggression theory (rioters used violence to send a message to dominant classes), the status-anxiety theory (the strong attacked the weak when threatened by a loss of power), the ethnocultural theory (our nation has always been an explosive mix of rival races and tribes), and others. I then give each student an newspaper article about a massacre, riot, or gunfight. Students break into groups, discuss the article, then write a paragraph about which theory, if any, best explains the source of the violence. Some students find that the case fits a theory nicely. Others are dissatisfied with all of the theories and offer their own explanation. Either way the exercise makes use of the "three R's" of active learning--reading, writing, and reflection--that help students get specific about the relationship between theory and case.

We interrupt this program . . .

Aldous Huxley imagined a brave new world of happy amusements that would disable our most human characteristic, our capacity to reason and think. Play a history video for your class and watch that Huxleyan nightmare. Brains shut down in a stupor as the tube entertains. Writing about video education in Promoting Active Learning (1993), Chet Meyers and Thomas B. Jones suggest clever ways to slap students out of their trance. One jarring but effective technique is to interrupt the tape for some quick minute writing. I wait for a dramatic moment. Hitting pause on the VCR, I flick on the lights and ask for a paragraph on the thesis or argument of the program, making the point that all historical presentations have an interpretive bias whether the historian knows it or not. Before resuming the film I tell students to compile a list of images and ideas that illustrate the film-maker's point.

Writing--the articulation of knowledge

As lecturers we want to believe that most of what we say will be heard and retained. Dream on. In 1984 a University of Tennessee study found that most students attending lectures were not paying attention 40 percent of the time. Four years later, school psychologist Rogers H. Rickard was surprised to learn that students from an introductory psychology class, interviewed four months after the final, knew only eight percent more than students in a control group who had never taken the class. No wonder a 1982 study by the American Association for the Advancement of the Humanities denounced the traditional lecture format as a "pernicious curriculum" that discouraged critical thought.

So dismal is the literature on lecture retention that some critics see a conspiracy of traditionalists hogging the spotlight, men and women afraid to liberate students through informal writing, afraid to relinquish control. To Meyers and Jones the traditionalists reflect "an almost feudal mentality in which teachers surrounded their classrooms with psychological moats and fortifications." Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has called them an asocial priesthood of "shy, timid and even fearful people" who are generally too insecure to express themselves clearly or allow students to air their concerns. "We must remember," said Limerick, "that professors are the ones nobody wanted to dance with in high school."

Limerick may have a point. Teaching, like any profession, thrives on the pompous language that puts distance between expert and novice, but I doubt we take revenge on our students by purposely remaining aloof. Many of us would welcome any opinion, dissenting or not. We encourage critical thinking in essays and term paper assignments, but there are limits to what students will say when a grade is at stake. Some scholars make the distinction between formal "transactional writing" that reports information and informal "expressive writing" that allows students to wander, reflect, work through problems, and refine their ideas. I see the value of both. Transactional writing--the research paper, the bluebook exam--encourages students to subordinate facts to a thesis, to be clear, informative, methodical, and concise. Expressive writing is less structured. Breaking the fear of composition by removing the threat of an immediate grade, it transfers responsibility from lecturer to listener so that writing can become what Richard Bailey has called "a tool of inquiry, a stage in the articulation of knowledge." Or, as Martin Nystand recently put it, expressive language "facilitates discovery by crystallizing experience."

There are trade-offs, of course. Time spent minute writing means fewer hours devoted to content. It means relinquishing some control in the classroom and frustration, perhaps, if the effort is not rewarded by productive interaction and talk.

But consider the alternative. If we fail to unlock the full potential of teaching through writing--not just writing as an excuse for grading but as a process of thinking and discovery as well--we leave that responsibility to the English department where composition stresses certain forms and has a literary bias, and the science or music student may be less motivated than he or she would be in their major. We also miss a chance to legitimize student concerns. Years from now when our students are struggling with the unforeseen in a world we can barely imagine, college graduates, we hope, will draw from the storehouse of facts they stockpiled on campus, but the power of informed conviction will probably help them the most.

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