At some point early in my first semester as a graduate student I was sitting in a class (ENGL 530, in fact) where we were discussing the purpose of writing and the purpose of first-year composition courses. As this discussion progressed, numerous classmates made comments and claims about needing to teach students what they were not taught in high-school. Or, un-teaching what they were taught because it was wrong. The blame-game continued until I finally lost my temper and said that not all high-school teachers were bad. I am not the first or the last high school English teacher to cross the bridge and enter teaching in the collegiate environment. Starting my program and beginning teaching WRIT 101, I was afraid I would be too much of a “high school” teacher and not enough of a college one. I wasn’t sure I knew how to teach at a college level, despite always trying to prepare my high school students for college writing. What I’ve discovered is I’m not alone in wondering about the gap between high school English curriculums and college writing courses. The literature currently available seems to agree that one of the reasons this gap exists is because there is very little communication about writing expectations K-16. Even worse, “Most states implicitly discourage K-16 policy making,” making collaboration difficult (Kirst and Venezia 97). High school teachers think they are preparing students to write at the college level and college instructors think high school teachers are not preparing students well enough. In his book The Transition to College Writing, Keith Hjortshoj explains this discrepancy clearly and succinctly. He cites, “High school teachers were much more likely to emphasize the interpretation of literature…while college teachers assigned papers on a much wider range of topics and readings” and “Half of the high school teachers stressed specific formulas for structuring essays…while 93 percent of the college teachers discouraged the use of these formulas” and lastly, “While half of the high school teachers believed that the use of the first-person I would be inappropriate in college writing, 95 percent of college writing teachers disagreed” (28-29). Each example here demonstrates a number of differences in the structure and role of the classroom, the presence of external, standardized measurements of success, and the assumptions on the part of each side as to what is “college writing.”
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One thing that is inherently different about teaching writing in high school and teaching writing in college is that college writing courses are focused mainly on writing. High school English courses, however, are focused on teaching writing and literature, language, and speaking and listening skills. There are a number of focus areas crammed under the umbrella of English Language Arts. As Hjortshoj explains, “While high school teachers are generalists, college teachers are specialists” (15). Even if a first-year composition instructor is not a composition or rhetoric specialist, it is still his or her job to teach students how to become better writers, which may include reading better as well, but that is not where the focus is. In opposition to the high school structure, nobody is expecting or testing college writing instructors to see if their students can read as well as they can write. Patricia J. Sehulster’s “Forums: Bridging the Gap Between High School and College Writing,” includes exit survey comments from high school and college teachers who hint at this difference. One high school respondent writes, “I see now that I don’t have my students reading enough nonfiction. We’re all about poetry and short stories and drama and analyzing characters and figuring out plots” (Sehulster 347). Due to time constraints and the need to address a wide variety of state or mandated standards, it makes sense that high school English teachers would focus on writing about literature. However, like Hjortshoj shows, very few college writing programs ask students to write a literary analysis of a novel. Likewise, college instructors who participated in Sehulster’s forum realized what types of writing students were being asked to do. One college participate explains, “Knowing that most [high school students] are familiar with journal-writing has inspired me to use journal writing as the source of choices for their topics and theses in a given assignment” (348). By just opening the doors of communication, instructors on both sides of the gap were better able to understand the constraints and opportunities of each classroom, and then they were able to adjust their own teaching practices to better take into account actual expectations and accurate past-experiences.
| Example College Classroom Photo Courtesy of this site |
Still, just realizing that high school English teachers have more to teach than writing does not take into account the difference in accountability. While it is true that college writing teachers are really, even if not rightly, accountable to all of their students’ future teachers, high school English teachers have to worry about standardized tests that measure how well they have taught a specific mandated standard. Fanetti, Bushrow and DeWeese explain that “High school education is designed to be standardized and quantifiable. College education is designed to be theoretical” (77-78). As is evidenced by the fact that 45 states and 3 territories have adopted the new Common Core State Standards, which will come packaged with two assessment options, high school education is driven by quantifiable data.
Everything that is being taught, even writing, needs to be measured. This is where teaching things, such as the five-paragraph essay, come into play. I would argue, and Hjortshoj would agree, teaching students some structure, or a formula is necessary. As Hjortshoj explains, “Writers who were left entirely to their own devices in high school, without models and standards, face equally difficult problems of adjustment” (41). What happens, though, is teachers forget that the model is just a place to start, and that students should be encouraged to expand on the model to develop more complex pieces of writing. Instead, “secondary teachers feel compelled to teach to the test, and college instructors wish students hadn’t learned so well in high school that an essay is five paragraphs and a thesis statement can appear only as the first or last sentence in the first of those five paragraphs” (Fanetti, Bushrow, and DeWeese 79). Standards, but really the assessments that go with those standards, are part of the problem. High school teachers become so focused on the quantifiable data, or how well their students perform on the assessments associated with the standards, that they are no longer really teaching students how to write for college. But they are teaching them how to write to pass a test.
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It seems worthwhile to mention, if ironically, that the new Common Core State Standards are striving to bridge this gap with more standards and more assessments. The standards are touted as “a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce” (“About the Standards”). Ideally, then, these standards would solve the issues being addressed by those concerned with the gap between high school writing instruction and college writing expectations. But returning to the idea of communication, even as the standards were being written, key associations in the field of compositions studies—NCTE, CWPA, and NWP, to name a few—were not included as part of the conversations. So, the standards define “College and Career Ready” students as those that “Demonstrate Independence,” “Build strong content knowledge,” “respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose and discipline,” “comprehend as well as critique,” “value evidence,” “use technology and digital media strategically and capably” and “come to understand other perspectives and cultures” (“Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts” 7). Holistically these ideas may not be far off the mark. In the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing,” a document written by those who were not part of the Common Core dialogue, the CWPA, NCTE and NWP identify “Rhetorical knowledge,” “Critical thinking,” “Writing processes,” “Knowledge of conventions,” and “Ability to compose in multiple environments” as they key components to developing strong writers (1). Comparing these two lists brings us back to the previous point made. While there are similarities—rhetoric being linked to audience, composing in multiple environments and using technology—the Common Core standards are broad to encompass all of the Language Arts and not just writing. And the real problem with this alignment may not be the general goals, but how those goals are then phrased in specific standards. For instance, the second 9-10 writing standard, includes sub-point e, which reads, “Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing” (45). For most high school English teachers, this means an objective third person, and as Hjortshoj shows, that is not what is actually expected in college writing. Because of this lack of communication, even lofty goals of preparing students for college writing through standards will not work because people are not engaging in dialogue about what it really means to be a college writer.
Finally, while all of these discussions do highlight serious roadblocks that are preventing this gap from being closed, almost none of them are looking at how the classes are structured around technology. In the 21st century, it makes sense to assume that technology use is having some effect on students’ preparation for college and the workforce.
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