I have been asking my students in my advanced composition class to reflect on their writing each week. They seem well and truly tired of doing that. They are not making the connection between reflection and value. Perhaps I can tweak the class with this way “to encourage reluctant writers”?

I won’t belabor you with the study Matthew Johnson cites or his other blog posts, but I do recommend the post without reservation. As he notes:

[T]here is one concrete piece of data that gives me the best hope that I am on the right track. For the first time in my entire career, I’ve made it through nearly an entire year without hearing a single utterance of that terrible question–When will I ever have to use this in the real world?–and that alone makes me think that student-generated value will be a fixture of my classroom for a long time to come!

Matt. “The Best Way to Encourage Reluctant Writers.” Matthew M. Johnson, 20 Mar. 2019, https://matthewmjohnson.com/2019/03/20/the-best-way-to-encourage-reluctant-writers/.

The Best Way to Encourage Reluctant Writers

The idea that students would be best suited to make a case for a class’s value makes a lot of sense too because value is a highly individual thing. What is terrifically interesting to one person is often terribly boring to another, and we all have different priorities and goals.

Update: Here is an archive of the links taken from the original post and saved to the Internet Archive.