If you’re one of the student-teachers in the English area, you’ve no doubt been given a list of tricks, techniques, and strategies for getting students to write, and you’ve been (rightly) told that “interest” is key. Personal engagement is especially important at lower levels, and it is always great when you can keep a student’s interest, but now that we’re on the cusp of our professional careers, close to completing a degree that certifies our advanced reading and writing skills, I can let you in on a little secret: a lot of the writing you’re going to do in professional settings, even the professional setting of academia, is not “authentic,” “interesting,” or even remotely enjoyable. (To give but one example: every time I write an assessment report, a little of my soul dies.)
So what will be the castor oil of composition that prepares us for career work in 499c? Meeting “minutes.”
Minutes are written records of official meetings. These records aid in the compilation of institutional/organizational history while they provide handy references for what occurred in the recent past–a handy reference that is invaluable to persons who may not have been in attendance.
There are a host of online guides for minute-taking. “The balance career” site gives a great “how to” with clear steps, and “Personify” prefaces its advice for effective minutes with an outline of the purpose of minute taking.
Although our class sessions aren’t committee meetings, they are still meetings with set times and designated attendees, and our syllabus does provide a sort of “agenda.” So, for the purposes of this assignment, we will be considering our class sessions as “meetings” that students can and will “record” when it is their required day.
During the course of the semester, each student will be required to submit “minutes” of two different class periods/meetings. Each student’s designated periods/meetings will be specified early in the semester, and students can and should prepare for the very real possibility that (a) classroom discussions will not easily fit into a corporate minute template and (b) another student may also be taking minutes on the same day.
Final drafts of minutes must be uploaded to our BlackBoard site before the next scheduled class period.
Crowdsourcing accuracy
I’m obviously the final arbiter of scores, but I am far from the only “check” on your demonstrated skills. Your classmates, who are covering the same material, and completing the same assignments, know precisely what is expected of you, and will be able to gauge your performance. Not only will they be the audience for your PowerPoint Karaoke; they will also be the “fact checkers” on your minutes.
Done right, our classroom should become a collaborative experience wherein everyone is encouraged to succeed while being held to career-ready baseline expectations!
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