The Writing of Business Memo on Memos

In many ways, the memo assignments can become the heart of the class, dovetailing on the one hand with one of the most common business practices and genres and on the other hand with some of the most vitalizing pedagogy of the current decade, the Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs), particularly as developed by K. Patricia Cross and Thomas A. Angelo. (For an excellent resource on the theory and practice of CATs, see Angelo and Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, published by Jossey-Bass, 1993.)

The memos to the file serve, cumulatively, as a reading log and ultimately as a quick reference and review aid for students. Individually, they serve at least two immediate purposes. First, they provide you an opportunity to check quickly on people's responses to the reading to see if they are reading and understanding the material appropriately. Second, they offer a platform for launching discussion of the reading, either in small or large groups. People may begin by sharing their respective memos to the file, then may respond to each others' readings. In fact, reviewing the memos to the file can provide you some rich insights into people's reading of the text-and, occasionally, we have found, into the text itself.

The memos to the instructor are almost pure CATs, offering both you and students a venue for discussion of your concerns and hopes for the class. For us, they have been an excellent early warning system, alerting us when our assignments or classroom comments have been unclear or have misled people. Often, they result in our adjusting an assignment or a timeline. And just as often, they result in students' understanding and accepting the original assignment and deadline. A crucial element in the memos, especially the memos to the instructor, is the affective dimension of the communication. The memos have been a vital medium for our students to vent anxieties and frustrations emanating both from within the class and from events or circumstances that may be entirely personal and that have nothing to do with the course itself but impact on students' learning and performance in the course.

You'll notice that we don't set these memos up as anonymous communications. In this practice, we are running counter to the advice not only of Angelo and Cross but of other practitioners and learning theorists as well, such as Stephen Brookfield. (See Brookfield's The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom, published by Jossey-Bass, 1990.) Brookfield in particular has convinced us of the need to provide for anonymous feedback, especially early in the course before the bonds of community and trust have been well established. A quick and very effective technique that Brookfield describes is asking people to respond briefly to the following kinds of questions:

1. Describe something that I or someone else did or said in the class that provided good insight or assurance or that otherwise enhanced this learning experience for you.

2. Describe something that I or someone else did or said in the class that was confusing or off-putting or that otherwise retarded this learning experience for you.

This getting a sense of the whole class is one of the most valuable benefits of this kind of proactive soliciting of feedback. One of the most discouraging experiences in college teaching is to have a student complain individually about some aspect of the class structure or about an assignment, then to change that aspect of the class or the assignment, and finally to discover that the complaint was an idiosyncratic response and that the change responding to the complaint has created confusion and disaffection on the part of the class as a whole. The memos and other systematic feedback can help you eliminate this kind of mistake.

You'll notice that the kilbornj@stcloudstate.edu or rinkster@stcloudstate.edu.