ACE Series Part I: Your Students Can ACE Critical Writing

Yep, salve we asked for it. The classroom has never been more diverse. Students are coming from both sides of the poverty line, from all walks of life, and from everywhere on the map. Slowly but surely our ivory tower’s doors are widening to more of the world. And we professors have the opportunity of a lifetime. We get to guide students on the path to informed global citizenship, the dream of a university education.

But that also means we can no longer pass the buck. You know what I’m talking about, and you’ve seen what I’ve seen. Each passing year, seemingly more students come to us with fewer critically thinking skills. And it is easy to lay the blame on primary and secondary educators, but the problem is not what one schoolteacher did or did not do. It’s the consequence of trying to balance high-quantity classes and high-quality teaching all on the edge of a dime.

As professors we cannot afford to think that this is not our problem. The same issue is before our colleges and seminaries. They are our students now, and it is our responsibility to invest in them. And for me, teaching critical writing within the subject classroom has proven a fruitful way to make up for lost time.

They’ve Got to Know the Rules if They’re Going to Play the Game.

To get some teaching experience and money for college, I ran evening review sessions of “REL101: Understanding Religion: The Bible” for my university’s athletes. These students suffered from many of the trials, tribulations, and temptations you’ve heard about on any number of nightly news specials.

I wish I could tell you that this story has a Dangerous Minds or Stand and Deliver sort of resolution. It most certainly did not. But I did stumble my way through a semester that changed my understanding of teaching. And I’ve come to sum it up my education like this: No student likes losing arguments. No student enjoys being wrong. No student wants to be written off.

It is far easier to lose sight of this than many of us care to admit. There’s a convenience to marking papers with AWK, So What?, Relevant?, and Not Enough Support! We could sleep better were we to consider being a good writer like being double-jointed—the benefit of a genetic disposition rather than that of a skill set.

But then I started thinking of the message this sends about the writing craft. Could I really expect my students to develop it if I was unwilling to give feedback in complete sentences? Why should they work hard if the desired results required the help of a genius that they simply didn’t have? There could be no winning for these student athletes as long as I refused to teach them the rules of the game.

The ACE Body Paragraph Workout Plan

And of course these guys wanted to win, maybe more than I had ever witnessed. They were doing grueling two-a-day workouts in addition to (some) of their studies. They worked hard to realize their aspirations. And they bore all the shame and stigmas associated with tutoring. That takes the kind of pride that if even a little were siphoned into their writing, the change could be prolific. In coming to honor their potential, I came to another realization: Students like winning arguments. Students like being right. Students can learn to write.

This is where I now begin with my students. Whether I am teaching a class on ethnography, religion, or writing, I challenge all of them to find me an exception to the first two statements. And I tell them that if they are on board with those, then I can help them with the third through something called the ACE model.

The ACE model distills critical writing into three categories –assertion, commentary, and evidence— and uses them to build robust blocks of knowledge at the body paragraph level. From this framework, writing an essay of any length becomes a matter of scale, and reading one becomes second nature. 

We take the body paragraph and think about it as, well, a body. An assertion is the skin of the body paragraph. It’s the outer part that leaves the first and, often, lasting impression on the reader. The evidence is the bone that frames and supports the assertion. Without it the body paragraph is just mush. And the commentary is the muscle that connects the two. Without it, your writing won’t move anyone to do anything. And that’s basically it.

They Can Do It. You Can Do It.

There are a lot of approaches to critical writing out there, and this one isn’t new. But I’ve found that the ACE model sets a foundation for analysis that pays dividends for a wide range of students (e.g. undergraduates, graduate students, and doctoral candidates) in a wide range of fields (e.g. biology, psychology, engineering, history, religious studies, English). Rather then focusing strictly on writing conventions, it gets students asking the better question of how to make a more convincing argument.

Suzanne Henderson is Associate Professor of Religion at Queens University of Charlotte, NC. Since using the ACE model in her classroom she and has seen “great growth in [her] students.” Dr. Henderson “has had more students come to meet with her for office hours than ever before,” and although this is time consuming, it has been “truly beneficial.”

I’m really excited to be here on Seminarium discussing how we can enhance the teaching-learning process. Below I’ve shared the video that my students watch to get a handle on the ACE model. The next three posts will break down some of the reasons students struggle with each component and how I’ve used the ACE model to address them. My final post will focus on implementation, classroom design, and why the ACE model works.

 

 

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