Contributed by Zoe Speidel

Have you ever heard a teacher proudly proclaim that they assigned busy work? Or a student say they loved a busy work assignment? When I started teaching, I wanted to engage my students in big ideas! Critical thinking! Self-discovery! Busy work, in the form of worksheets or grammar exercises, did not fit into what I envisioned would be the glamorous endeavor of Teaching People to Write. 

And yet for some reason, last summer, I decided to start assigning worksheets.  

I’ve never come across a writing textbook that I thought was perfect or if I’m honest, even one that is 75% perfect. Explaining how to write in writing is maybe even more challenging than explaining how to write in person. At least in person I can see glazed eyes and try different metaphors to explain concepts like evidence integration (my personal favorite being the quote sandwich). But I teach mostly online, a modality that relies heavily on written instruction. This makes OER, where I can freely pick and choose from various texts, even more useful. 

Last summer, having just completed an OER/ZTC Community of Practice training at Clark College, I was hellbent on reconfiguring my entire online English 102 course to use OER. Unfortunately, this foray has not led me to a more perfect writing textbook. But after reviewing several OER writing textbooks, I landed on Open Stax’s Writing Guide. 

Writing Guide is, more or less, a traditional textbook. And in spite of my wariness of anything that might look like busy work, I was intrigued by a feature of Writing Guide that other OER textbooks I’d been looking at didn’t have: the Student Toolkit. The Student Toolkit is a downloadable folder that contains a worksheet to accompany each chapter of the book. Since this was a condensed 8-week summer course, I knew that students would need to do a lot of work in a short amount of time to be able to write an 8-10 page research-based essay by the end of the term. I decided to give the Student Toolkit a try. 

While the ultimate assignment of English 102 is to write a research paper, I also knew I wanted to have students write in a specific genre (since the generic “research paper” isn’t something anyone really encounters outside of school). I chose the proposal, which is the genre covered in chapter 6 of Writing Guide. This proposal had to be significantly research-based in order to meet the learning objectives of the course, so I also assigned readings from chapters 12 (“Argumentative Research: Enhancing the Art of Rhetoric with Evidence”) and 13 (“Research Process: Accessing and Recording Information”). 

In a fully online course, it is difficult to guarantee students will complete content in exactly the order I present it (Canvas, the LMS used at Clark College, allows pre-requisites by module, but not by pages within modules), the way you can in face-to-face courses. This becomes a particular challenge when attempting to teach students nuanced and complicated processes, such as how to move from research to drafting, or how to take data and turn it into evidence. But the Student Toolkit worksheets were able to support students surprisingly well. 

I know this because my students actually told me so. Toward the end of the course, I asked students to reflect on the role Toolkits played in their learning and I was so pleasantly surprised that the Toolkits turned out to be useful work and not simple busy work:  

• “[The] toolkits actually allowed me to form my ideas in a more structured way that I usually find harder to do on my own.” 
• “I would say the toolkits are so organized, like the step-by-step instructions on how to proceed with my proposal assignment. It reminds me of where I need to improve more and how I could improve my piece.”
• “The toolkits made writing my rough draft a lot easier than I was expecting. Throughout my drafting process I looked back at the toolkits countless times. The way I look at it is that I was writing bits and pieces of my rough draft throughout the term and getting feedback on each of those individual pieces. This made it so that when it came time to put my entire essay together and form my proposal I only had to iron out the kinks instead of writing a completely new unchecked piece of work.” 
• “Following the toolkits helped me stay on task with my organization and even helped me to get out of parts where I was unclear how to proceed.” 
• “The toolkits well integrated with the other learning and readings I was assigned from the text books. It definitely helped make lessons more clear when after reading about a concept, I got to put them into practice using the interactive toolkits.” 

As an instructor, the Toolkits gave me an additional point of intervention to support students’ development of their proposal. For example, about halfway through the term, students completed Toolkit 6.5: Organizing Your Ideas, which uses a table format; Toolkit 6.6: Drafting Your Proposal, which helps students translate the 6.5’s table content into prose; and Toolkit 12.4: Opening Strategies, Closing Strategies, and Responding to Counterarguments, which guides students through strategies for developing specific portions of their proposals. Combined, these three sections provided a stepping stone between students’ research notes and developing a prose draft. They encouraged students to articulate, organize, and synthesize their ideas prior to writing their rough draft for peer review. Through some individual feedback and a detailed class-wide announcement, I was able to provide a substantial amount of feedback to students prior to the rough draft. 

Since last summer, I have adapted an English 101 course to use Writing Guide and the Student Toolkit. I’m currently teaching two sections of English 102, using a slightly revised series of Toolkits based on student feedback from last summer. Other than a few of last summer’s students telling me that a couple of the Toolkits felt like they were asking the same thing (I’ve since removed those), I have not had anyone complain or tell me the Toolkits feel like busy work. For the most part, the higher a score students receive in the Homework category of my course (which includes Toolkits), the higher a grade they receive on the course’s major assignments and the higher a final course grade they receive, even when Homework only counts for 5 or 10% of their total grade.   

I can pretty safely say that Writing Guide’s Student Toolkits are not busy work in the classic sense, despite first appearances. Like all materials I use, I am careful about which parts I assign to make sure they align with what and how I am teaching. But in general, I am glad I threw caution to the wind and discovered these useful tools.  

This post is by Zoe Speidel and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.