Reflecting on Focus Group/Town Meeting: Reading, Writing, and Discussing

In an informal reflection, write about what you gained from this segment of the class, dividing your writing into the following parts:

Part I:

What did you learn about effective analytical writing by
picking a piece collaboratively with each of your five different focus groups and writing a
• one-page analysis of the text based on a a focus aspect of your choice
• discussing the issue, the writer's handling of it, and your group members' focus aspects

How did you use this knowledge when writing composition 3? How do you think you can apply it to future writing?

Part II:

What did you learn about the process of close and critical reading from 1) the six pieces we read and talked about in our focus group/town meetings discussions (Tannen's piece, which I chose, and the five others chosen in your small groups) and 2) the Reading Tips I posted for you in the Announcements folder on our classroom network? What can you take with you into other reading tasks in this and other classes to make your reading more effective than it has been in the past?

Part III:

How much did you participate in focus group discussions? Be as specific as possible about the times you made statements, asked questions, or contributed to these discussions in some other way; and reflect on factors influencing the extent of your participation, your comfort level in each of your five groups (four based on gender, degree program, geographical area, and conversational style; and your heterogeneously mixed writing response group), etc. What did you learn about yourself as a discussant from these small group meetings and from your playing the role of participant-observer and/or discussing with your group these observations of early leadership, communication actions of one member of the group, amount of time members talked, and to whom various people talked?

When we came together at the end of small group discussions into our larger town meeting group, how much did you participate? How did that compare to your small-group participation? If these were the same, whey do you think they were? If different, what factors made the difference?

Part IV:

In your quest to learn about what effective writing involves/contains and the various forms it may take, what helped you most from our experience of reading, writing, and talking about other writers' texts.