Teaching Essay Writing: When Good Intentions Lead to Bad Outcomes.

This warning narrative explores the tension in student-centered learning between attempting to teach individual students the skills of scientific writing in good faith versus encouraging student responsibility. There are often protocols to facilitate student learning that systematically apportion tasks between different members of staff. These protocols are reliable and well-established, but in the face of a failing student, plainly some aspect of the protocol has gone wrong. Has the student fallen through a gap in the system, has a busy instructor given insufficiently personalized teaching, or has the student failed to take responsibility for their student-centered learning? We conclude that deviating from protocols, even with due caution and substantive teaching experience, can still lead to conflicts. In this narrative example, the author, a physiology educator, failed to follow protocol and ended up creating predictable problems for his colleagues. The author made this mistake despite the fact that he has also been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship (UK) and has also written a book "Writing for Biomedical Sciences Students" for Macmillan Study Skills. The tension between the student needing skills and the student needing to take responsibility highlights how learning in good faith (and teaching in good faith) is at the core of student-centered learning. The case study looks at an anonymized group email trail among faculty to explore the sequelae of an optional "essay help session" for a group of students who have failed an essay assignment. As the author ran an active learning workshop session for 8 students, a latecomer interrupted the proceedings to complain about her original mark in the form of not understanding what was wrong with the original failed essay. In our system, remarking is neither encouraged nor allowed except in extraordinary circumstances. The author, falling into the situation of wanting to teach in good faith, skimmed the essay during the class and found it on first glance to have only a series of subtle problems. The promise "to look into it after class" resulted in a series of group emails that suggested that the author -- despite extensive efforts to avoid the obvious conflict between faculty -- had undermined the original tutor while being absorbed by a student's aims that may have been in bad faith from the beginning. The student definitely took responsibility for addressing their failure, but not necessarily by learning the skills being taught. Despite the instructor's explicit recognition of the potential conflicts and acknowledgment of the important roles of other instructors, the conflicts can still arise.