In-Class Writing with James Seitz

Last November, University of Virginia English professor James Seitz offered a workshop through the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence titled “Teaching in the Age of AI: How Students Can Do All Their Writing in the Classroom.” When I saw the workshop announcement, I have to admit that my initial reaction wasn’t a positive one. Was this another call to return to the days of blue books, with high stakes essay exams depending on students being able to practice the lost art of handwriting? 

No! I’m excited to have Jim Seitz on the podcast today to share how he has moved the writing his students do into the classroom. This move is a response to generative AI’s disruption of writing instruction, yes, but it’s also the latest in a series of teaching choices Jim has made to teach his students writing as a way of thinking and to change their relationship with writing. Jim takes a very thoughtful and intentional approach to his in-class writing days, as you’ll hear in our conversation. 

Episode Resources

James Seitz’s website, https://jamesseitz.com/ 

“What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?” by Hua Hsu in The New Yorker

“Bringing the Term Paper into the Classroom,” an interview with Lily Abadal on the Designed for Learning podcast

“Getting Started with Specifications Grading,” a Teaching Hub collection by Dorothe Bach

“Strategies for Avoiding AI” and “More Strategies for Avoiding AI” on the UVA Teaching Center website

Transcript

James Seitz 0:04

The thing that has convinced me, really, more than anything else, about the value of in-class writing has been what they say about it. 100% of the 60 students said they prefer the in-class essay to the essay at home.

Derek Bruff 0:22

Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff.

Derek Bruff 0:32

Last November, University of Virginia English professor James Seitz offered a workshop through the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence titled Teaching in the Age of AI: How Students Can Do All Their Writing in a Classroom. When I saw the workshop announcement, I have to admit that my initial reaction was not a positive one. Was this another call to return to the days of blue books with high-stakes essay exams depending on students being able to practice the lost art of handwriting? I wasn't able to attend the session, but when I read some notes on the workshop from a colleague who attended, my attitude changed completely.

Derek Bruff 1:09

I'm excited to have Jim Seitz on the podcast today to share how he has moved the writing his students do into the classroom. This move is a response to generative AI's disruption of writing instruction, yes, but it's also the latest in a series of teaching choices Jim has made to teach his students writing as a way of thinking and to change their relationship with writing. Jim takes a very thoughtful and intentional approach to his in-class writing days, as you'll hear in our conversation. For one thing, and this is maybe what sold it for me, he's not asking students to write on paper. They're welcome to use their laptops as long as they've turned off their Wi-Fi and turned on their word processors' focus mode.

Derek Bruff 1:49

Jim's story has really convinced me of the value of creating AI-free experiences for our students. And perhaps more importantly, distraction-free experiences. If you've been thinking about moving some of the cognitive work your students do into the classroom, Jim has a lot of wisdom to share.

James Seitz 2:17

Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Derek Bruff 2:20

And we'll get into all things AI and writing here in a minute, but um I like to start my conversations with my guests looking backwards a little bit. Um, can you tell us about a time when you realized you want to be an educator?

James Seitz 2:35

Sure. Um it was, I can remember it quite clearly actually because it happened in my uh senior year of high school. Um I was fortunate enough to go to a pretty rigorous private high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico on scholarship. My family wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise. Um, and um the grading was tough, uh, the curriculum was tough, and the teachers were tough. And the last thing I thought I would ever do was become a teacher myself until um my 12th grade year when I had two really remarkable teachers. And part of what's interesting about it is they were completely the opposite pedagogically. One of them was a kind of know-it-all lecturer who was an English teacher, and uh he also could do Greek and Latin and knew philosophy and history, and he just seemed like a complete know-it-all. And but I was charmed by him.

James Seitz 3:35

Uh, but the teacher who really influenced me was a humanities teacher that I had that year, and we read a bunch of um things in psychology and philosophy and so on and so forth. And he was just a marvelous leader of discussion, um, really did well with a kind of Socratic method, not the Socrates who tries to pin you in a corner, but more like the Socrates who's really interested in what his interlocutor thinks. And we often came away not sure at all what our teacher thought of things, but he had really elicited a lot from us. And that ended up influencing the way I wanted to go about things. And I can remember that you were sitting in class at one point thinking, wow, this wouldn't be such a bad thing to spend the rest of your life in the classroom. The classroom is a pretty good space to be.

Derek Bruff 4:25

That's great. That's great. So you saw a potential future for yourself, thinking, I I'm I might like to create these types of discussions.

James Seitz 4:34

Exactly.

Derek Bruff 4:35

That's great. Well, um speaking of uh what happens in class, um, I'm I I'd like to start this kind of unpacking of how you're responding to AI fairly concretely. Um and so uh what what would a what does a typical class session in one of your writing courses look like right now as you're teaching it?

James Seitz 4:59

Sure. Um I'm actually teaching a first-year writing course this semester, so it's fresh on my mind. Um I was just in class yesterday and we'll be there again tomorrow. And we really have two kinds of classes there. Um one is uh a class that's based on something they've read. And I assign no more than one essay per class, and it's usually relatively short, anywhere from 10 to 20 pages, and no more than that. And that's kind of part of a strategy I've developed recently, which is kind of that uh less is more, I think, when it comes to homework, particularly at least in, you know, if you're going to examine language and think about how something is written, then I don't want to give them uh too much to read. I want us to really be able to zero in on a single piece per class and talk about it in depth. So they'll read an essay. It's in a course packet that's printed out. Um, they don't read online, and I don't give them access to the articles online, though I'm sure they could find them that way if they wanted to. And uh we come in and we talk about it, and at some point we take 15 minutes to write about the essay, either right at the start of class so that they have some things to say to the questions I have in mind, or sometimes they lead discussion. I'll appoint two students to kind of come in with some questions, and then at the end of class, we'll write about what they feel that they've learned from that discussion. Um, so that's one kind of class, a discussion of the reading.

James Seitz 6:32

And then another kind of class is the we spend the whole 75 minutes uh drafting an essay. And uh we do that a few times during the course of the term, and then at the end, there's another class where they get to choose one of the essays they've drafted and revise it in class. So, again, other than reading one essay outside of class, all of the work for the class really happens in the classroom. And that was the change that I brought about more recently as a result of AI.

Derek Bruff 7:04

Okay. So um take me into that writing day. What are your students doing? What are you doing? What is the classroom setting like?

James Seitz 7:14

Yeah. The one thing that happens that's different is that rather than us sitting in a circle with me sort of up toward the front of the room, um, they do sit in rows on that day. And I sit at the back of the class where I can see what's going on on their screens. And we begin by I ask them to go offline and then to go into Microsoft uh focus mode, which you know sets up a black border around the white page in the middle. It looks as if you're sitting down at a typewriter, basically. Um, and so, you know, they're not receiving notifications. They don't have apps down at the bottom of the screen or anything. It's just like all they're looking at are their words that they're typing onto the page. So it's pretty old school in that way, except that I'm not having them write by hand. They are actually doing it at the computer.

James Seitz 8:11

And I found that they can get some pretty good flow going there. I asked them to write a minimum of 750 and 50 words. So that's, you know, roughly three pages, a little bit less than that. Um, and all of them really, my UVA students tend to write well over a thousand without any problem. I've had some students who write over 2,000 words in 75 minutes, they really get moving.

James Seitz 8:38

Um, the other thing that I do is I tell them that I'm not looking for a kind of polished argument of the sort where, you know, they've identified some thesis in the first paragraph and then they're going to support it the rest of the way through. I tell them that this is an exercise in thinking on the page. And so that even if they start by thinking one way about whatever the subject is, if they've changed their minds and they think something else by the end, I want them to say that and sort of so that I see the development of that thought rather than, you know, worrying about inconsistency. It's not about um showing a final polished document. That seems to relax them, to get a sense that, oh, I can just kind of think about this. And I tell them to use a conversational voice. They don't have to sound like a scholar or, you know, pretend that they know it all. Just, you know, um the way they would talk to a friend or a family member about this thing that I've asked them to think about.

James Seitz 9:41

And then I do a couple of other things, which I dim the lights in the class and um I bring in snacks, everybody gets uh something to eat, and um I put on soft jazz or classical music, so it has a kind of cafe atmosphere. And the first time around they do this, some of them say that, you know, they they still felt kind of nervous about the whole thing. But by the time we get to the second one, they've kind of gotten the idea. And particularly when I've shared with them excerpts from their classmates' work, and I highlight the ones that sound conversational, that show a change of thinking, that show a kind of relaxation there in terms of the way they're going about it, instead of like what I think of as AP exam writing. Um, these students, the ones that I have, tend to be quite proficient at AP exam writing and eager to show it off. And when I'm not sharing examples of that, but something else, that kind of gives them a sense of how else they might go about it.

Derek Bruff 10:44

So there's a lot to unpack here, but I I know this is this this approach to using your class time is in part a response to generative AI. So I'm gonna back us up a little bit.

James Seitz 10:55

Yeah.

Derek Bruff 10:56

Um how did you what was your response when when we we learned about Chat GPT and these other tools back in 22 and 23? How what was your initial response as a teacher to to these tools? And and maybe how has that changed over time?

James Seitz 11:10

Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll just say I was slow to respond. And in part it was because um I have these sort of highly personalized assignments that I give. And I thought that the fact that students were writing about themselves, or I always give them the option of writing about someone they know well if they want to apply the assignment to that instead of to their own personal life. But I just thought that this was some, I could imagine, you know, that chat, GPT, and whatnot were going to help students uh uh write academic arguments, but I thought that I was getting around that by personalizing things. And I think to some degree I was, because a lot of students, I think, wanted to write about themselves. They not often not given that opportunity, and so they found that engaging. But I don't doubt, and I'm I've gone back and I mean, certainly I was alerted along the way in 2023 to essays that sounded uh not so not so personal after all, or in or kind of ham-fisted in their attempt to be that way.

James Seitz 12:19

And so it wasn't until I was on sabbatical in fall of 2024, so about a year and a half ago, I started feeding my personal writing assignments into chat and saw what it was doing with them. And I thought, wow, it's actually producing, you know, it's pretending to be a person, it's creating past experiences, it's uh pretending to have emotions. Um, it's really doing a fairly decent job of this. And I can imagine students being tempted to use it. So as I was planning for my spring of 2025 classes, so like the classes I taught a year ago, I thought, I've got to find a way around this. And the more I thought about it, the more I couldn't see a way out that wasn't like all the way out.

James Seitz 13:11

It was, you know, I couldn't find a way to do this. And I talked to various uh colleagues about it, and many of them were saying, well, you know, we we start the assignment in class and then I send them home to finish it at home. And I would think, yeah, and so then they have chat finish it for them, or rewrite the whole thing, and you don't even know what they started in class. And just pretty much every version of things that I heard colleagues talk about that were sort of halfway measures seemed to me to not answer up to what's going to happen once they got home. There was a lot of trust there. And actually, I do trust most of my students to uh sort of uh follow the guidelines of the course. But I don't know, the more I read about examples, there are some pretty alarmist essays out there by like that one that Hua Hsu published in The New Yorker, the end of the essay, that came out while I was on sabbatical. And I was like, my God, he's going out talking to these students at NYU and other, you know, um high, I don't know, where students, there's a lot of uh, you know, high engagement on the part of students you would think. And they were talking about how they wrote their term papers in five minutes using chat and this sort of thing. And um, I don't think things are probably quite as bad as they're often presented, but they could get that bad.

James Seitz 14:42

And I just didn't want to be thinking about it when I was reading students' pieces. I didn't want to be wondering where did this come from? I thought, I want to know where this came from, and I want to be right there seeing it happen. So I realized there's a lot of problems with that position, and I'm not always comfortable with it. But it was the best I could come up with at the time. And um I'll I'll tell you later how I'm starting to change uh my thinking about this. But at first, you know, for the last year and a half, it's just been like, let's get them away from it entirely.

Derek Bruff 15:17

So moving the writing into the classroom like this, does it change the has it changed the nature of the writing assignments you give students? Like they can't, they can't, if they're writing 750 words, right? They're not doing that 10 to 15 page term paper, right? They're they're is that something you did before? Like, like how do how does how do the writing assignments look different? And maybe what does that say about your goals for this course?

James Seitz 15:44

Yeah, um, AI didn't really change that. I had, oh, six or seven years ago, already moved to shorter assignments. I had lost faith in the long assignment as actually being that valuable for the students. And um, I don't know, there's nothing like finishing the semester and going home with a stack of 15 to 20 page papers and reading through most of them and thinking, oh my God, I am so bored and how boring must this have been to produce? And um, you know, this could just reflect on the fact that my assignments weren't as good as they should have been. Or uh maybe I'm misjudging the pleasure that the students might have taken in them versus the what they were like for me to read. But I just knew that I just started thinking, I think I can get a lot more to happen in a shorter version that doesn't put so much emphasis on the end of the semester, but puts emphasis on what happens throughout the semester.

James Seitz 16:50

So I really started going toward more in terms of uh um, you know, less is more in terms of reading and less is more in terms of writing for my class. I'm not even necessarily recommending that for anybody else, but this is the way I ended up going. So AI didn't really change that. It was easy enough to move from the shorter assignments I was asking students to write at home to just shift those into the classroom. I do see, though, and talk with colleagues all the time who want to continue doing longer assignments, and they're freaked out by AI. You know, they're just not quite sure how they're supposed to keep doing this. Um, and so uh, you know, I still think you can do that by spreading it out across the semester. Um, but you know, they're still having students do a lot of the work at home, and I think that at least puts the temptation in front of students, whether they're whether they actually act on it or not. But the temptation is certainly going to be there to have um, you know, AI help them.

Derek Bruff 17:52

Hey, this is Future Derek jumping in to say that if you're looking for a model for moving a longer writing assignment into the classroom, spreading out the work over multiple class sessions, you should check out what University of South Florida philosophy professor Lily Abadal is doing. See the show notes for an interview with Professor Abadal on Notre Dame University's Design for Learning podcast, hosted by Jim Lang. So, what how how do you describe your course goals to your students? Uh you're you're helping them learn to write, but what does that mean in this instance?

James Seitz 18:27

Yeah, that's a great question because I would say that that's another reason why my assignments changed uh long before AI came on the scene. Uh the other thing that I realized was that I had lost faith in trying to help them improve individual papers. I thought, why am I putting so much emphasis on this? And why are they having to work so hard at improving this particular piece of writing? What will ever happen with that piece of school writing that they did in October, you know, just before midterm or even at the end of the semester or whatever? I don't know the same thing that happened to all of my college papers, as you know, they eventually ended up in the trash. Um, it's not that I wasn't uh advancing as a writer through working on them. It was just that I thought the thing that really matters here is the advancement as a writer, the development of the writer, not the writing in terms of that particular piece of writing.

James Seitz 19:37

Um and I also rarely, almost never, in you know, 40 years of teaching, I could probably count the students on two hands that I felt that in 15 weeks made a change that was really visible, or that I felt thought, wow, something dynamic really happened here to this student's writing. Most of the time, I don't see that much difference. Um, and again, maybe that's my shortcoming as a teacher or my assignments. I don't know, but I tried a lot of different ways of going about this. I'm pretty serious about it. And I just I've also seen very few examples from colleagues. And when I talk to colleagues about revised papers and whatnot, what we mostly end up seeing are students who are trying so hard to make the paper better that actually they, you know, they edit and they they're confined by the draft that they initially wrote. Um, so I did start doing this thing with uh long ago with revision, where I would just say, look, you have to change at least 50% of the paper. And what I really want you to do is change 100% of it. I'd like you to just throw away what you wrote so it won't confine you as you think about what you could produce next.

James Seitz 21:01

So it was a thing of both going away from longer papers, from um thinking so much about the paper being the thing, and also uh pulling back from revision as being this kind of sacred cow in uh writing studies. I don't see it that way as all. I see the first draft as the place where the real action is. That's where the thinking on the page tends to take place. And so, yes, I let them, my nod to revision is to let them revise something at the end of the semester if they want to. I make it totally optional. They can write a fourth new draft if they want, and some go that way.

James Seitz 21:41

You had asked me, you know, how do I explain my goals to them? And I think, you know, what I was trying to build toward is that I tell them that what I'm interested in is not the quality of their papers per se, or improving those papers. That's what I want to change, if possible, is their relationship to writing. Not the specific pieces of writing themselves, but their relationship to writing. And there, I think their relationship to writing has really been corrupted by the influence of AP exams and various kinds of formulaic writing that place these strictures and rubrics and so on and so forth on what the writing outcome should be. I would like that outcome to actually be unpredictable. And I would like it to be their experience on the page to be a matter of discovery, as opposed to trying to, you know, abide by preordained rules that the teacher has given them for what a good paper will be. And so, my in my experience, the the way I go about changing their writing, I'm not saying other people should do that, is to have them want to have a personal stake in it. So that has really been the reason why I've moved from first-year writing classes that are based in academic writing to first-year classes that are based in personal writing, because I've found that they develop a personal stake in their writing and their relationship to writing much more quickly through that method than they do uh through academic uh methods. I also know they're gonna get a lot of academic assignments during the course of their college career. So it feels like, hey, this is a place where something else could happen. Yeah.

Derek Bruff 23:37

Yeah. So I'm gonna ask the uh maybe obvious question. How how do you grade and how do you grade for that?

James Seitz 23:46

Yeah. Yeah, my grading had to change when I moved to this because you can't ask people, I don't think, um, to take risks on the page and then punish them for taking them. So um the thing about taking risks and experimenting with your writing and exploring and seeing where your thinking takes you is that sometimes it doesn't work or it falls flat or whatever. And then I feel like, well, I can talk with the student about why. We can have a conversation about what went, why did this go off track or run aground or what questions might lead you to, you know, get back on your feet with this line of thinking that you were taking.

James Seitz 24:29

Um, and so I actually use a version of specifications grading, though I would call it much less specific in a sense that, you know, I just basically students have to come to class. Um, I mean, I really want 100% attendance aside from illness. And I generally get it. I would say about 90% of my students come to every class. And um, and I want that because that's where the work takes place. And then I want them to do complete all the assignments. I want them to complete them on time. And if they don't, they have to actually, if they're not there to do one of their writings, they have to come in on Saturday morning early to meet me in my office to make it up. So I found that that ends up being pretty um uh motivating for them to um and so you know, I'm contributing to grade inflation for sure by having students um, you know, complete the assignments at a certain level of requirement and um and thereby get a good grade. But I mean, this goes along with my what I would really like to see happen.

James Seitz 25:42

I saw recently that Harvard is um, you know, going to start trying to set up a thing where only um a certain number of students can get A's in class and so on. I I just want us in humanities classes, or at least the kinds of classes I teach, just go to credit, no credit. Uh I just don't want to give grades anymore. Um and I mean, who won't uh giving grades is, you know, people have complained about that for decades. But particularly in a class like this, where the point is to engage in the process. And I'm a real believer in process now. AI has made me even more of a believer in process than it used to. I think it's actually a boon to process-oriented education. Um and uh now I just believe in it more than ever, but I also believe that process isn't something to be graded in the typical ABC kind of way. Um, so it has changed my grading in that respect. I used to be quite the stickler as a grader, and I'm not anymore. And um, there are gains and losses that come with that, but I'll I'll take them.

Derek Bruff 26:50

Okay. So then what um uh I I I'm gonna let the the voices over here are complaining about grade inflation. They can go talk to the wall for a minute. Yeah, thank you. I'm gonna I'm curious what your role is in this process that you're having the students engage in. What do you do during class? And then what happens after a writing class like that? Because presumably, like you said, it's not that they they turn in the essay and then it goes in the trash, right? There's a there's there's there's something that happens after the writing too.

James Seitz 27:24

Yeah. So I go home and I read through all of them first at once, and um, I find that a very pleasant experience, you know, just seeing what they've what they've written. The other thing is that when students are writing about themselves as you learn about them. And uh so I find it very informative. I know my I know my students now so much better than I ever used to know them, and um in large part because of their writing. Um, and then, you know, I write back also in a very conversational way to them about, you know, um generally trying to first of all really appreciate whatever work they've done on the page, whatever thinking they've done to try to tackle a problem or work through an issue. And then to say, you know, have you considered this perspective? You know, something that is beyond the way they've been looking at it. Uh maybe it would be useful to think about X or Y. And again, my comments are not uh directed toward here's how you would improve this paper next time. It's here's where you could, where you might want to take your thinking. Here are some questions that you haven't considered yet that it were you to expand on this, this would be a direction you could go. And then I ask them to write back to me about what I've written to them, you know, like um uh well, what do you think of that suggestion, or what what comes to mind as a result of what I've said? So that I it's not just like I respond and that's the end of it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of what happens. And then they also look at each other's papers anonymously because this is, you know, because of the personal nature of the subject matter. I just group them together and give them three papers from uh those in their group uh that are anonymous, and they read them. And instead of giving feedback to the writers, they then write to me about what they've learned about their own writing as a result of reading what, uh reading their peers' papers. And a lot of times they'll say, Wow, so-and-so did X. I didn't know I could do that. Like this person cracked a joke in their paper. You mean we can be funny? Oh, yeah, of course. You know, that sort of thing.

Derek Bruff 29:52

Yeah, yeah, I love that. Because I I do feel like, you know, a lot of college students it's just a lack of imagination or experience. They don't know the moves that they can make as writers.

James Seitz 30:02

Yeah.

Derek Bruff 30:03

Um, and so and they're not always great at giving each other feedback to begin with. So why not let let the input go like the way that it maybe is most fruitful?

James Seitz 30:13

Yes.

Derek Bruff 30:14

Yeah. So does that um those later stages when you have them read and respond to other students or they're responding to your comments, does that also happen during class?

James Seitz 30:27

That um that does not. My my comments, of course, are happening at home as I'm reading. And then let's see, I guess I have done it two ways. I've both said, hey, do you uh just send me, send me back by Sunday night, send me a reply to my comment. But I guess I have on a couple of occasions done it in class too. I've said, hey, why don't you pull my comment up and write here? I'm realizing, of course, that they could have Chat GPT respond to my comment. Um, it doesn't appear that they are though. They don't have to write that much to begin with. I'm really just asking for a paragraph. No. And um I think uh they can usually bang that out pretty quickly. So um probably not too much of a hazard there, I hope.

Derek Bruff 31:15

Right. And if they have indeed put some of themselves in their writing, yeah, having done that in class in this environment that's conducive to that, and then you as a reader have attended to that, right? Have have have read them and thought about it and responded. I feel like there's a kind of human connection there that you wouldn't want to let go of at that point. You're like two links in the chain at that point. So why why let the robot take over now?

James Seitz 31:40

Yes, exactly.

Derek Bruff 31:41

Yeah. So what do you do during a writing class? Are you just sitting at the back of the room the whole time?

James Seitz 31:47

I am. I'm uh I'm sitting there. I'm I'm you know, sometimes they'll call me over for a question about something. Again, it's usually on the uh order of can my can I do this? Am I allowed to do X? Well, yeah, you're allowed to do it, you know. There's there's a lot of this, I don't know. I feel with first year students, especially, because they just come out of high school, they don't quite realize that uh they're adults in college and that that comes with a lot more agency than they used to have. And so learning about their agency can can be something that the course is also about. And I noticed that Annette uh Vee, my former colleague at Pitt, talks a lot about student agency in very interesting ways. And I'm very much behind that notion that we should treat students as adults. Even though I can see how, you know, you could say, well, you're Jim, you're not treating them as an adult because you're forcing them to write in class. You should just have them do that at home. But I see it more as uh uh taking temptation away from the, and I should add, even more so than temptation, distraction.

James Seitz 32:58

So what my students say, the thing that has convinced me really more than anything else about the value of in-class writing has been what they say about it. So I've taught about, um, I guess I've had about, if I include my students this semester, I've had about 90 students who have been doing all their writing in class now. And of the 60 who I've talked with about it, both in one-on-one conferences, which you could say, oh, they're talking with you, maybe they're afraid to tell you what's what they don't like about it. But then in anonymous course evaluations, where it's one of the questions. 100% of the 60 students said they prefer the in-class essay to the essay at home. And I was like, why? What are the reasons? And these are the reasons that they give.

James Seitz 33:48

The first one is if they have to write an essay at home, they feel guilty about how long it takes them to actually sit down and do it. So it's kind of anxiety provoking. They're like, wow, I should be working on my essay. I know I should be working on it, I'm not working on it. Wait till the last minute, et cetera, et cetera. Second, this is the one I think is most important. I remember this one student saying, you know, in the course of writing my first paragraph, I would check my phone 20 times. So I can't get any momentum going. And many students have said that. The distractions abound and they just can't get moving on it. And then the third thing that they say is that it turns out that some of them feel anxious about the kind of writing solo, and that there's a communal atmosphere of writing together in the classroom. And they all say they love, of course, getting it done in 75 minutes. You know, doesn't hang over their head anymore. It's done. But the main thing they, you know, it's this issue of focus, that they can focus in class without the distractions. And that has made me a believer that there's something here that may not mean that we never give them any at-home writing, but it does mean to me that there's value in some substantial periods of in-class writing that they will find valuable because the distractions aren't there.

Derek Bruff 35:18

Do you see this as a strategy that could work in just about any course or should be in any course?

James Seitz 35:26

Yeah, I mean, uh if I were teaching any other course, if I were teaching anthropology, if I were teaching history, whatever, I would be doing something like this during at least, let's say 50% of the writing. I would want to have, let's have it take place in class and um and see what comes of that. Um and I think, as you know, that I've proposed something at UVA called focus courses, where you know, students would know in advance that when they signed up for a course, that it would be a focus course, and that that would mean we're gonna basically be doing things analog. Um and uh I think the university needs to preserve room for that. I'm not one of these people who thinks that AI should be banned from the university or it's all bad or anything like that. I just think that some courses, and writing is particularly an important one, need to protect that space uh from distractions and also from AI stepping in to do the work that students uh need to learn how to do themselves.

Derek Bruff 36:33

Are there students who take issue with the environment that you've created? I mean, students learn and write in very different ways. Are there ones who've pushed back a little bit on the like the lighting or the music or anything like that?

James Seitz 36:46

I had actually for the first time, I had a student this semester after they wrote their first paper a couple of weeks ago. Um, I asked them, uh, what did you think? Uh they I had them write a little comment after they finished, and then like, A, what were the, what do they think of what they just did? And what did they think of the environment of writing in class, et cetera, et cetera? Out of the 16 students, um, one said, uh, I actually don't like writing in class because I really like to have more time. He said, I'm I'm kind of slow in what I produce, and I feel like I really like to take more than one session before I show share my writing with someone. And I get that. I I actually would be more like that student than I would be like uh the others I've been describing, because I do tend to uh, you know, take my time with writing, and I don't like sharing it unless I've gone over it a number of times. Um so I related to what he said, but um that has been uh that was a minority opinion for sure.

Derek Bruff 37:57

Sure, but uh and I guess part of this is helping perhaps that student see some value in more in earlier sharing. It is more vulnerable, perhaps. Um, but it's something they could grow into maybe and get some value out of.

James Seitz 38:12

I hope so. I'm very interested in seeing what that student says at the end of the semester, what they think. If having done it uh at least four times, they come away thinking, oh, you know what? Um that's not as bad as I thought it was at the start.

Derek Bruff 38:26

Right.

James Seitz 38:26

Yeah.

Derek Bruff 38:27

Well, um, I do want to look ahead a little bit. Sure. What's what's next for you? Are you are you changing up the strategy? Are you trying out new approaches this spring?

James Seitz 38:38

I'm going, I'm going to be. Well, this spring I did one thing that I regret, which uh is that I regressed even further, and I've been having my students do their um all their in-class writing. We we write responses every day and sometimes do sentence exercises and whatnot. And I I bought them uh little notebooks and I've been having them do those with you know pen and paper. The essays, I'm still allowing them to write on their computer because they they kind of lose momentum uh if they don't uh have the the keyboard. But I'm regretting having gone to the uh to the pen and paper. There's to my mind, there's only well, there are a couple of advantages, but the one, the big one is that it's just quieter. People aren't clacking away, and you don't have to listen to, you know, if you're a sort of slower writer, you don't have to listen to the person next to you who's racing away and making you potentially feel like, oh my god, I'm not doing anything here. And um, but so it's quieter, and I know they're doing it. There's no way they can fool me with AI here. Right. Um so those are the two advantages.

James Seitz 39:52

The disadvantages are uh significant though. One is that I found they really do write quite a bit less than um they were able to bang out in 15 minutes on the keyboard. And so less, it just feels to me like I'm slowing down their thinking, and that doesn't seem to be a good thing. Right. The second thing is that, you know, some of them have abysmal handwriting, and I just find it really, really difficult to read. And then the third thing is that since it's not online, I can't fit it into like the course uh grading and record keeping system. So I have to do that by hand on the side, and I write back to them by hand, and I don't like it either. It slows me down and gives me cramps in my uh, you know, hand and so on. So I'm gonna maybe after spring break, I may just change mid-stride here and go right back to having them write on the computer for even their shorter responses. Now, I know I have colleagues here at UVA who absolutely swear by having students do handwriting for the whole semester, but I'm finding it's not for me.

James Seitz 41:01

Oh, and then you know, you asked me what's next though in the future. Like basically getting ready for this interview and uh looking uh through, listening to some of the podcasts you've done and looking up pieces by things like my colleague, uh, you know, former colleague Annette V, or things that uh Ethan King, my current colleague, does, um, and others at UVA, Heidi Noble's, etc. I'm I really am beginning to see that there there is potential for AI to do some very interesting things with students in regard to writing. Um, and I'm I don't feel like such the Leadite about it anymore. Um, I still think I'm gonna have a lot of the writing be done in class, but I'm very curious about the kind of responses they might get to their writing from AI and then compare those to human responses. I mean, what's what could be bad with getting more feedback about your writing? That seems like a good thing. Um, and to compare it with and see the differences between what human beings say back.

Derek Bruff 42:09

Yeah, yeah. I think the risk that some faculty see is that students will ascribe too much authority to the AI.

James Seitz 42:16

Yeah.

Derek Bruff 42:16

So I think as long as you're careful to try to mitigate that and help them understand this is one source of input, but it's a flawed source. Yes. Just like other sources of input are flawed and complicated, right?

James Seitz 42:27

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Derek Bruff 42:29

Well, I look forward to hearing about that at some point. Um, thank you, Jim. This has been really great. I appreciate you taking us into your classroom a little bit and pulling back the curtain. Um, I think you've given our listeners lots to think about, about what the purpose of a college education is and what the structures are we use to achieve that purpose. Thank you for being here.

James Seitz 42:49

Derek, thanks so much for inviting me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Derek Bruff 42:54

That was James Seitz, Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. I really appreciate Jim coming on the show. He has one of the most thoughtful takes on resisting AI that I've heard. I'm glad I could share it with my podcast audience. For more on Jim and his work, see the show notes for a few links. I'll also link to a couple of workshop recaps I've written recently, featuring other faculty sharing their approaches to minimizing their students' use of AI.

Derek Bruff 43:21

I know the discourse about AI in higher education says that there are two camps: faculty who refuse or resist AI, faculty who engage or embrace it. I find that the reality is more nuanced, with most faculty who spend time rethinking their teaching in response to AI, landing on some mix of AI resistance and AI engagement. That's why I was excited to share Jim's story with my listeners who are all in on AI, and why I'm excited that Jim is exploring potential roles for AI generated feedback for his students' writing.

Derek Bruff 43:54

Intentional teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website and socials, and to the Intentional Teaching newsletter, which goes out most weeks on Thursday or Friday. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.