I had a student email me to tell me how much she liked workshopping because it had given her a chance to see what others were doing and she got some good ideas from others’ papers. Also, a had a few students come up to me after class and ask questions about things they’d seen in other papers or things that had been written on theirs…I like that this made them question and showed them what their peers are doing (and what level their peers are at). I think I need to focus the tasks a little more. As I mentioned n class, I gave them three tasks: find places that needs to be cut, find places that need to be expanded, find cool ideas. I think they talked about everything but those tasks. I’ll see how my first class seems to do with the workshopping tasks for Thursday. I wrote my own question/prompts for Tuesday and I’m going to stick with the very simple for Thursday: What needs to be cut? What needs to be moved? What needs to be expanded? Also since we’ve talked a lot about “quote sandwiches” (46) in my classes (my students love that it takes up space without looking like you’re taking up space), I’m considering asking them to look at each others quotes and comment on whether the quote is introduced, then explained (and if the explanation matches what is said in the quote). That will be too much to ask, I realize, but I’m musing over ideas for doing something to that effect. Inspiration usually hits between 2 and 3 a.m., so we’ll see… I had some doubts about workshopping. As a student, I rarely had helpful comments during workshopping (until I got into the graduate program). I was hesitant to put my students through the exercise. However, it seems that some students have had a good experience. I think I like having them read at least 3 papers per class—for the final, I may try to stretch it to 4, then hopefully it will balance out with some helpful comments and some unhelpful ones. I’ve also considered trying to group students—perhaps 4 in a group and then just pass the papers left/right in the group until everyone has read everyone elses’ (or something like that). That will also help manipulate the groups, which I like doing. Looking ahead, I’d like to have students workshop one of their summaries in the next part of the semester—perhaps bring 3-4 copies of the article and their summary, then have students read it as a group and discuss the main idea and supporting points. I’m wondering if this might help students as they are trying to analysis the sources they find.