"CW: Teaching Methods" Case
Case Description
Susan is a dedicated writing instructor. She often provides extra individual assistance to students.
Last quarter, Susan had one student in her introductory writing class who told her he had a learning disability: Adam. Although Adam had many good ideas and spoke eloquently in class discussions, he struggled with writing. He made frequent mechanical errors in his papers and often had difficulty producing enough text to meet the page requirements of the assignments. Adam met with Susan frequently throughout the quarter for help with his writing. During their conferences, Susan helped Adam with brainstorming and pre-writing so that he could write enough to meet the page requirements of each assignment. For one paper, she lowered the page requirement for Adam. Between conferences, Adam emailed Susan his papers for help with mechanics. She marked his errors with red font and returned the corrected papers via email. Twice, she let him turn in papers after the due date without lowering his grade.
When it came time for students to fill out course evaluations, Susan allowed Adam to dictate his to a transcriber who typed up Adam's response.
When asked "How did the instructor respond to your work in this class," Adam responded:
Susan always said I had good ideas and liked what I said during class discussion. I liked the discussions the best. But I had lots of trouble with the writing. Susan tried to help but I felt she looked at me differently, graded me differently than the rest of the students because of my learning disability. When I would meet with her to go over a paper, she would say, "yeah, that's OK," when I thought it really wasn't so good. I wasn't working as hard as I could. It seems like she would look at my paper and say, "Oh, well, that's because he has a learning disability, so it's good enough." I felt almost like she expected me not to be able to do work comparable with the rest of the class, even though I'm capable of doing it. It just takes me longer. She should have expected the same quality of work and not let me turn in stuff late without the normal penalty. I felt singled out.
When asked, "Which course activity most helped your development as a writer," Adam responded:
The conferences were really helpful. Susan helped me put on paper the ideas I had in my head. But when I emailed her my papers for grammar corrections, that didn't really teach me anything. It was good because I have a fear of watching someone read my paper. I think they're thinking to themselves, "This kid can't spell, he doesn't know proper grammar. He keeps making the same mistake a hundred times!" So the emails were good because I could avoid that feeling. But at the same time, it was bad. She was allowing me to continue making the same mistakes over and over. She didn't help me to learn how to use commas correctly and all that other stuff. I can't proofread my own paper. If she had taught me that, then I would at least be able to do that and overcome some of my writing problems. She tried real hard to help me, but it wasn't the right kind of help for me.
Susan is distressed. She thought she was helping Adam. She is concerned that other learning disabled students she had in the past felt the same way and now wants to change her practices for the future.
What should Susan do the next time she teaches?
