But I Like My Third Eye! Or: How I Came to Stop Worrying and Love WAC

But I Like My Third Eye! Or: How I Came to Stop Worrying and Love WAC

Books About Getting Writing Done When You Are an Academic/Professor

Professors as writers: A self-help guide to productive writing by Robert Boice

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success

*The Slow Professor* by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber

*Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write*, by Helen Sword

Writing Intensive (WI) Faculty Workshop (video series)

Writing Intensive (WI) Faculty Workshop (Central Michigan University)

1.  ​An Introduction to Writing Intensive Courses at CMU 
2.  Planning Your Writing Intensive Course
3.  Designing Writing Assignments​
4.  Strategies for Teaching Writing​
5.  Providing Feedback to Writers​
6.  Assessing Writing, Improving Writers​
7.  Working with International Students​
8.  Resources and Reference​s

Decoding the Disciplines Project

http://www.iub.edu/~hlp/decodingthedisciplines.html

For the last decade the Indiana University Freshman Learning Project has taken faculty through a two-week seminar designed to help the participants find new ways to increase learning in their undergraduate courses. This “decoding the disciplines” process allows professionals in departments from across the university to develop ways to identify the kinds of operations that are required for success in their fields and to more effectively initiate students into these ways of thinking.

We Know What Works in Teaching Composition (Doug Hesse)

We Know What Works in Teaching Composition

When I came to the University of Denver to start a campus writing program in 2006, I heard many faculty members say, "A lot of my students can’t even write a decent sentence." So when I read Joseph Teller making much the same assertion in an essay last fall, "Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?" I recognized hyperbole when I saw it.

My response to that sort of exaggeration 10 years ago — joined by my 20 new colleagues in the writing program — was to gather and analyze a corpus of 500,000 words of student writing from classes across the campus. We found that, in fact, well over 90 percent of the sentences coded clear and error free.

Faculty members wanted to see better student writing (and I surely acknowledged and valued that desire), but it was clear that merely fixing sentences wasn’t going to achieve that end. There were larger issues: Students needed help developing and deploying their ideas and matching their writing with the expectations of various disciplines. Those things, we could work on.

Complaints about the state of student writing have a long lineage. In 1878, Adams Sherman Hill, a professor of rhetoric at Harvard, famously protested: "Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges has known men who could not write a letter describing their own commencements without making blunders which would disgrace a boy twelve years old." Hill and others devised pedagogies grounded in their own experiences and in common sense — though one man’s common sense was another man’s folly.

Teaching grounded in actual research took a scholarly turn in 1950, marked by the founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Its journal is now the leading one in the field. By 1963, research on what worked in teaching writing — and what didn’t — had accumulated to a point that a synthesis was published, "Research in Written Composition."

Roughly 25 years later, George Hillocks conducted a new analysis (Research on Written Composition), using studies published in the intervening years. Since then, peer-reviewed research on the best ways to teach college writing has accumulated in dozens of books and well-established journals — including College Composition and Communication, Written Communication, College English, the Journal of Teaching Writing, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Composition Studies, Writing Program Administration, and the Journal of Writing Assessment, to name but a few.

A 2005 article, "The Focus on Form vs. Content in Teaching Writing," analyzed why formalist approaches — like the back-to-basics kind that Professor Teller advocates — remained so popular in teaching composition, despite overwhelming empirical evidence that they were significantly less effective than other methods.

The teaching of writing happens — or should — within a deep field of practice, theory, and research. It’s also an enterprise marked by a fair amount of what Steve North, in a 1987 book, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, called teaching "lore." Lore consists of ideas and assumptions that are grounded in local experience ("what worked for me") and then passed along informally, for the most part, from one faculty member to the next. Lore is sometimes informed by research, and thus transmutable and generalizable, but more often it is not.

Teller’s essay participates in the tradition of lore. Not having been in his classes or having read his students’ work, I can’t judge his local experience, but I can judge how well his approach compares with the most effective national practices.

For example, his assertion, "Substantial revision doesn’t happen in our courses," might speak for his own classroom, but it surely doesn’t speak for mine or those of thousands of other professors. Consider his claim that students "do not use the basic argumentative structures they need." Again, while perhaps true of students in Teller’s own classes, that broad claim is unsubstantiated by my experience, by research on my campus, or by the wider literature in the field.

Where Teller departs most from actual scholarship in the discipline is his claim that "pedagogical orthodoxy" assumes that "composition courses must focus on product, not process." He could hardly be more wrong.

The two most dominant pedagogies today in college composition each focus on product as well as process. Genre approaches have students learn features that readers expect in specific kinds of writing (lab reports, op-eds, business proposals, magazine feature articles, movie reviews, and so on). Rhetorical approaches have students analyze the kinds of evidence, structure, and style that will be effective for particular purposes (for example, to persuade, inform, or entertain), for particular groups of readers (experts, novices, or people of particular viewpoints), and in particular situations. Both methods make significant use of model readings and examples.

One key to both approaches is sustained, guided practice. On that point, Teller and I surely agree. Students learn to write by writing, by getting advice and feedback on their writing, and then writing some more. What can be told to college students about writing can probably be encapsulated in a lecture of two or three hours. It parallels what meaningfully can be told about playing piano — the music notation, the relationship between notation and keyboard, the hand and finger placement, the posture, the pedal functions.

But without sustained practice on systematically more complex pieces ("Chopsticks" is not a Rachmaninoff concerto), the world’s best lectures will not — cannot — make a pianist. So, too, with writing.

Here is what this looks like in the best writing courses, informed by decades of research:

• Students have ample opportunities to write. Professors expect them to write frequently and extensively, and we demand and reward serious effort.
• Professors carefully sequence writing tasks. The idea is progressively to expand on students’ existing abilities and experiences.
• Professors coach the process. We offer strategies and advice, encouragement and critique, formative and summative assessments.
• Courses provide instruction and practice on all aspects of writing. Attend to the form and conventions of specific genres? Yes. Talk about creativity, invention (how to generate ideas), grammar, and style? Certainly, but also discuss things like logic and accuracy in writing, and how to fit a piece to various audience needs and expectations.
• Courses use readings not only as context and source materials (which is vital in the academic and civic spheres) but also as models — and not only static models of form but also as maps to be decoded as to how their writers might have proceeded, why, and to what effect.
• Professors teach key concepts about writing in order to help students consolidate and transfer skills from one writing occasion to the next. But we recognize that declarative knowledge is made significant only through practice and performance (see Bullet No. 1).
• Student writing and student writers are the course’s focus. Everything else serves those ends.

Lore is a form of knowledge in every field. In pointing to the best practices of teaching writing — indicated by extensive research in composition studies — I don’t ignore the experience of individual teachers like Teller.

However, I can’t let pass unchallenged general claims about the way "we" are "wrongly" teaching composition, especially when they so dramatically misrepresent, even ignore, the field they would aspire to correct.

Doug Hesse is president of the National Council of Teachers of English and a professor and the executive director of writing at the University of Denver. He previously served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

I Cannot Prepare Students to Write Their (History, Philosophy, Sociology, Poly Sci., etc...) Papers

I Cannot Prepare Students to Write Their (History, Philosophy, Sociology, Poly Sci., etc...) Papers

Occasionally, one hears grumbling from faculty who assign writing in their courses about the apparent lack of preparation of students to successfully execute those assignments. They wonder what’s happening in the general education writing courses when so many students seem to arrive in without the skills necessary to succeed at college-level writing, particularly research-based analytical work.

As an instructor of first-year writing it can be hard not to take these things personally.

I do my best to help students succeed for the future writing occasions they’ll confront in college and beyond, but the truth is, I cannot properly prepare them for what’s coming.

Semester’s end causes me to consider why this is the case.

So, some thoughts on why I cannot effectively prepare students to write their (history, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, whatever) papers.[1]

1. First-year writing is only one semester long.[2]

2. The students are young or inexperienced or both, and writing is a skill that develops over our lifetimes, not a semester. We are all works in progress. The notion that a first-year writing course is a kind of vaccine that prevents bad writing going forward is a fantasy. (We do not expect this expertise of students in other types of writing courses. Having taken a single creative writing course, students are not expected to become published authors.)

3. Many students arrive in the college classroom with writing processes stunted by a near-exclusive diet writing in the context of standardized assessment. They are armed with the 5-paragraph essay and an ability to parrot existing information. The shift to writing analysis and argument is very very difficult, and a semester (or even a year) is not enough time for this to happen.

4. One of the biggest reasons students have a hard time writing analysis and argument is because they often don’t have sufficient subject and domain expertise about what is being argued. They can describe what someone else says, but don’t yet have the knowledge to build upon that information. I see this time and again in the analytical research papers I assign as students struggle to insert their ideas into debates they’re not yet prepared to join. If your (history, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, whatever) course is the first time they’ve encountered your field, they will struggle.

5. If I am successful, students exit my course armed with a flexible and adaptable writing process rooted in an analysis of the rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, genre), but when they encounter a new genre they often regress, often in every dimension, even down to the sentence level.

6. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that students do not understand the genre you are asking them to write within. Inside of our own fields, we usually have thoroughly internalized genre conventions to the point that we don’t even think about them.

7. But to students, the genre of a (history, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, whatever) paper is entirely new.

8. Actually, it’s worse. It’s not entirely new, but somewhat familiar, which means they will trot out the closest template with which they’re comfortable and try to use that. Rather than making choices rooted in a rhetorical situation, they fall back to “rules” that may or may not apply.

9. When faculty in other disciplines complain that students “can’t even write a decent sentence,” (likely true when looking at the actual assignments), the problem is not that students don’t know grammar and syntax, but because they are struggling badly with making meaning, and because they have no idea what they’re trying to say, why they’re trying to say it, or to whom, flailing commences.

I don’t mean this list as an excuse for unprepared or underperforming students. No one wants student writing to be better than the first-year writing instructor, but my time in the trenches tells me that we could be doing more to help students achieve success.

Occasionally I get asked for advice on assigning writing in non-English courses. I say the following.

1. Help students understand the genre they are writing in. They should know not only the genre’s conventions, but the source/rationale behind those conventions. For example, rather than commanding students use a particular citation style, help them see that a citation style is rooted in a specific audience need, that we cite sources so other scholars can come in afterward and check and respond to the work.

2. Rather than listing these conventions as rules, ask students to build them through a process of observation, inference, and analysis through examining examples of the genre. Make them confront all the dimensions of the rhetorical situation (including audience), so that when it is time for them to write, they know who they’re writing to and why.

These are not guarantees of success – as my own struggles teaching first-year writing attest – but they give us a fighting shot.

We can bridge some of the disconnect between what we want students to do and what they think we want them to do, but it’s up to us to build that bridge. And let's not forget that having students struggle is actually an excellent educational outcome.

But that struggle must be meaningful to students, and so even if they are defeated, they are better armed for the next battle.

Faculty Development and Student Learning Assessing the Connections

Faculty Development and Student Learning Assessing the Connections

William Condon, Ellen R. Iverson, Cathryn A. Manduca, Carol Rutz, and Gudrun Gillett
Foreword by Mary Taylor Huber
Afterword by Richard Haskell

Colleges and universities across the US have created special initiatives to promote faculty development, but to date there has been little research to determine whether such programs have an impact on students' learning. Faculty Development and Student Learning reports the results of a multi-year study undertaken by faculty at Carleton College and Washington State University to assess how students’ learning is affected by faculty members’ efforts to become better teachers. Extending recent research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to assessment of faculty development and its effectiveness, the authors show that faculty participation in professional development activities positively affects classroom pedagogy, student learning, and the overall culture of teaching and learning in a college or university.

Source for Writing Assessment Best Practices

Dear Colleagues,

Can anyone point me to an easy-to-engage print or web source they've had success using to introduce people from outside R&C to best practices for writing assessment? I'm currently working with our Core Curriculum Director, a chemist, on a writing assessment plan, and this work so far has taken the form of catching her up on assessment practices in our field and how writing assessment differs from other assessments. I've shared chapters from important texts in our field (*A Guide to College Writing Assessment; Assigning, Responding, Evaluating*; etc.). Now I've come to the conclusion that a nuts and bolts article would really center our conversations. What's the best source (that's not a full book) for talking writing assessment to those who don't have a background in writing pedagogy?

Thanks, Matt

---

Barbara Walvoord's Assessment Clear and Simple is a good book for introducing non R&C folks to writing assessment best practices. Walvoord has a newer book, Assessing and Improving Student Writing in College, that would also be good for your purposes. I just did a review of this book and one of the books that's already been mentioned, Very Like a Whale, and I recommend them both.

 Cheers, Dan

Two WAC Books to Consider

Schön, Donald A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Schön, Donald A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Inc.

National Census of Writing

http://writingcensus.swarthmore.edu

WAC/WID Notes at RIC (Summer 2015)

Money

Why and what we want to get out of it?

First-year writing staffing

Utilizing writing center effectively

Incoherence of WAC program (and lack of accountability)

Is the writing board working?

Pieces:

Writing Retreats (faculty writing)

WAC

FYW (staffing)

Writing Center

Writing Board

1-2 pages (opening coffee hour)

·      What’s working, what’s not working?

·      Would could improve your unit?

·      What are your areas of concerns?

2472

969

3441

10875

WAC Resources

Pittsburgh State WAC/WID Best Practices

Writing Across the CurriculumA Guide to Developing Programs

Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers

Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers

Workshop Idea: “Teaching the Writing-Intensive Course"

We began tackling the incongruence of proof writing with the process goals of writing-intensive courses in faculty development workshops. At Dickinson College, those teaching writing-intensive courses are invited to a half-day workshop entitled “Teaching the Writing-Intensive Course.” This workshop draws faculty from across the disciplines and begins with a discussion of disciplinary genres and conventions before focusing on pedagogical skills like creating clear assignment prompts, designing an effective peer review, developing rubrics, and responding to writing assignments. After this workshop, faculty often elect to have follow-up consultations on course-specific concerns. ("Transfer and the Transformation of Writing Pedagogies in a Mathematics Course," The WAC Journal Vol 25 p. 95)

Sources that Make the Argument for WID/WAC

Alexander Astin, *What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited*

George Kuh and Jillian Kinzie, *Student Success in College: Creating
Conditions that Matter*

Richard Light, Making the Most of College

Alice Horning's "The Definitive Article on Class Size" would also be useful. You can show directly the relationship between class size and learning. http://wpacouncil.org/archives/31n1-2/31n1-2horning.pdf

More on WAC/WID

Model WAC_WID Programs

WAC/WID, General Education, and Assessment Report

Teaching in the Cloud: How Google Docs are Revolutionizing the Classroom

Any experienced English teacher knows the drill: on the dreaded due date, students bring printed copies of their essays to class, where we collect them, take them home, jot inscrutable comments in the margins, bring them back to class, return them, and then watch students promptly toss them in the recycling bin on the way out of the room. The whole cycle borders on farce....

Teaching in the Cloud: How Google Docs are Revolutionizing the Classroom

Duke

WID Program

Faculty Teaching Writing Across the Disciplines

See WPA-L Thread:

Seeking inspiration and wisdom for WAC/WID initiative
Rebecca Ingalls, Fri, Dec 4, 2009 9:38 am