Once students begin to work on final projects and look toward Spring Break activities, their attention often shifts from active engagement with their peers toward a focus on the instructor, or more specifically, course expectations and final grades. Students may also view you, the instructor, as the sole audience for their final writing projects, thus neglecting to take their colleagues into consideration. The following writing exercises encourage students to re-engage with their peers inside and outside of the classroom at the end of the quarter and help you maintain a strong learning community through finals week and beyond.

Ask students to check in with one another in small groups concerning the progress of their final assignments or projects. Have students talk with their peers about the challenges and successes they come up against when completing their final assignment. Students may also use this time to ask each other questions or request revision assistance. Walk around and listen in on the small group discussions. This exercise will provide you with new insights regarding any questions or challenges your students are experiencing and provide you with an opportunity to address these issues before finals week.

Ask your students to write about the most useful thing they learned this quarter and share it with their peers. This can be an anonymous large-group activity that you collect for your own reflection, or you can pair specific students together and ask them to write letters to one another that you collect after class. In addition to students learning about their colleagues’ accomplishments, you can locate patterns in their writing when looking through their responses. Think about sharing some of these responses with your students at the beginning of next quarter so that they can see your previous students’ writing accomplishments.

Have students collectively share their projects in panel presentations. Plan ahead to give students the opportunity to share their research and larger projects in a presentation format. When assignments are turned in individually, students can miss important connections to their peers’ work and course themes. Creating panel presentations, in which students with similar project topics can come together and present ideas, is a great way to keep students engaged with one another as they take on the responsibility of presenting to others the relationship between their individual projects. Consider making this panel presentation a more public event in which you invite colleagues, thus giving students a wider audience to present their work.

OSU Community Example: Susan Hanson, Academic Program Coordinator and Assistant Program Director for Literacy Studies and the Veterans Learning Community, asks students at the end of each quarter to write “letters of advice” addressed to her future students. This assignment creates an occasion for students to thoughtfully reflect on what they have learned by the end of course and what future advice might help others learn more effectively. In the process, it also gives instructors a chance to see the class from the students’ perspective. Giving students the opportunity to address an audience of their peers creates a unique engagement between students and gives instructors a way to assess the class as a whole. Instructors can also use the “letters of advice” as ways to introduce course concepts. For example, Hanson explains, “I have used the advice to introduce summarizing and synthesizing to incoming students. The in-class writing assignment involves working in groups to produce two paragraphs: one summary and one synthesis of the advice their colleagues from the previous quarter had put together.” The texts from the previous quarter then become the foundation for work in the following quarter, on the one hand giving the new students the benefit of hearing advice from the previous quarter, and on the other giving them an opportunity to establish their own classroom norms from this advice.

WAC Resources: Check out the latest additions to our Writing Across the Curriculum Resource Wiki: https://carmenwiki.osu.edu/display/osuwacresources/Home

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You: See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading two upcoming workshops Spring quarter through the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT):

•Making Research Meaningful. May 5, 2010. Time: 11:30am-1:00pm. Location: Thomson Library, room 165
•Writing Across Borders. May 12, 2010. Time: 11:30am-1:00pm. Location: Younkin Success Center, room TBA

For further information, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s website (http://ucat.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html). We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Victoria Genetin, Women’s Studies
Tanisha Jackson, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Kate White, English

The MLA and APA have recently revised their style manuals, and it’s a good opportunity to talk with your students about the stylistic conventions that scholars in your field follow. On the one hand, these conventions are formal–citations of different kinds must be written in a specific format, and rules for specialized cases of usage must be obeyed. On the other, style can also be taught as a tool of writing that helps student develop their individual writing voices while they also learn how style embodies particular ways of thinking within a discipline. Because style often embodies scholarly and disciplinary values, it is important for students to understand its significance and feel comfortable making appropriate stylistic choices within their writing. Here are some approaches to addressing style with your students:

Tomorrow: If you have style “pet peeves,” this is a great time to let your students know before they turn in the first major assignment of the quarter. Take time to sit down and make a list of things that frustrate you about student writing styles. For example, have you ever told your students that they are too wordy? Or that their sentences are too choppy? Perhaps you have asked students not to be too excessive with the use of particular words or phrases or you have encouraged them not to rely so heavily on the passive voice. These are all stylistic, rather than grammatical, concerns and can be discussed with students as they write throughout the quarter. Once you’ve identified these pet peeves, in the long run you can give students examples of clunky passages and demonstrate how they might improve them.

Later this quarter: Ask students to identify conventions of style in their assigned course readings. Before or during class, take ten minutes to have students describe the tone, highlight the main claims, and underline the citations in an article or section of text. Students are often so used to reading for information, they don’t pay attention to the stylistic features of what they read, and miss crucial written cues that communicate how scholarly work is done. How, for instance, do scholars voice their disagreement with a colleague? How do they frame discussion of a primary text? How does a scientist account for outlying data? How can students trace a genealogy of scholarship from an article’s footnotes?

Next quarter: Help students to better understand stylistic conventions by designing a series of assignments that address the crucial components of style students seem to struggle with in your classes. For example, a course in the social sciences might include a writing assignment in which students look carefully at how researchers in the field pose analytical questions that properly operationalize variables. Following this assignment, students can further explore how they can frame their methodology in a way that builds off of previous research. Then, you might have an assignment where you help students to analyze numerical data that address their question (a good resource for quantitative writing is Jane E. Miller’s Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers, which is available in electronic form through the library’s website). Staging these stylistic themes within a larger project can help students understand how stylistic conventions are often connected to specific intellectual tasks in research.

OSU Community Example: Professor Mark Moritz in Anthropology has had his students create a wiki collecting articles on hunting and gathering societies. The goal of the wiki is to represent foraging societies without recreating myths that have been perpetuated from earlier scholarship and in the media. Dr. Moritz wanted the students to follow the stylistic conventions of the American Anthropological Association, but he knew that that guidance alone wouldn’t help students understand how that style might be adapted to wikis, or to tackle the difficulty of representing societies that too often are exploited through stereotypes. In collaboration with WAC, Dr. Moritz had students develop a style guide page as they began their project, which anticipated difficult stylistic choices that arose as they compiled their articles. How, for example, could they show images of people from these societies in ways that don’t reinforce stereotypes about foraging societies such as those perpetuated about the Ju/’Hoansi in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy? Students decided that all images and other media need to have clear headings that explain where and when the images came from, and need to carefully situate the images within a society’s history and current circumstances. “I was hoping to improve student’s critical literacy of internet and scholarly materials by having them become writers and editors of scholarly materials on the internet,” Dr. Moritz notes. “In addition, by writing for larger audiences and as producers of knowledge, students became part of the larger scholarly community and began to view themselves as anthropologists.”

Easy Online Resources:

See the handouts posted on CSTW’s Writing Center website: http://cstw.osu.edu/writingcenter/handouts/default.cfm. Find handouts that deal with MLA, APA, and Chicago Style Documentation along with handouts on Sentence Combinations and Word Choice. These handouts provide quick and easy ways to address issues of style with your students in the classroom.

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You:

See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading two upcoming workshops Winter quarter through the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT):

•Responding to Student Writing. February 4th, 11:30am-1:00pm, Younkin Success Center
•Grading to Learn: Writing and Assessment Across the Curriculum. February 11th, 11:30am-1:00pm, Younkin Success Center

We also have a workshop scheduled with Learning Technology:

•Assessing Digital Media: Re-Mediating Teaching and Learning. February 26th, 1-2:30pm, Learning Collaborative Studio, 060 Science and Engineering Library

For further information and registration for these events, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s website (http://ucat.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html) or Learning Technology’s site (https://registration.it.ohio-state.edu/node/110). We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Victoria Genetin, Women’s Studies
Tanisha Jackson, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Kate White, English

Activity Idea: Take some time at the end of this quarter to think about what writing assignments worked well and reflect on some of the challenges you faced teaching writing. Your colleague in the office down the hall might be your best resource for this, and you might be hers as well. In our work in WAC, we have the privilege of talking to Ohio State’s most creative and resourceful teachers every day. For this tip email, we’ve collected a few approaches from three instructors we’ve worked with this quarter that have really inspired us:

• Kimberly Clavin, an instructional supervisor in Mechanical Engineering, has developed a technical writing workshop for students preparing lab reports. The workshop covers a range of topics that introduce students to crucial tasks in report writing, and helps students work through their writing collaboratively. For instance, during one part of the workshop, students write instructions on how to assemble a mechanical system such as a glue gun, and then pass their instructions to another group, which attempts to follow the instructions and provide feedback to the writers. Another component of the workshop has students evaluate different components “dissected” from sample lab reports, while another has them collaboratively edit abstracts. “All three exercises were received well by the students with the report dissection proving to be the most helpful,” Clavin notes. “The implementation of the workshops has resulted in higher quality writing as well as increased student understanding.”
• Manisha Sharma, a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Art Education, has her students grade each other using an assignment rubric. After composing a rough draft, students trade their work and look for key elements in each others’ papers (i.e. thesis statement, key words, supporting literature and concluding thoughts). The goal is for students to go back and review the comments of their peers and make appropriate changes to their final draft. “My interaction with other instructors attending a WAC workshops brought clarification to the different areas of assessment (Evaluation, Grading, Feedback, Testing),” she notes. “Since then, I’ve applied assessment in my teaching practices through the student-to-student reviews and instructor-to-student reviews. This has been helpful to both students and myself in assessing their progress and understanding of course materials.”
• Rather than assign her students a lengthy research paper, Victoria Genetin, Graduate Teaching Assistant in Women’s Studies and WAC Consultant, decided to assign them a 10-entry annotated bibliography. Her goals were to help her students gain a better understanding of the research process, sharpen their organizational skills, and begin to draw connections between theories and arguments made by scholars in Women’s Studies. Recently, she has also asked her students to reflect on their experience completing the assignment: how much time they devoted to the project, what aspects of the assignment they found most challenging, any academic skills they developed or improved upon, and what they learned about themselves as a student and a writer. “Based on their responses,” she explains, “the annotated bibliography assignment introduced many of my students to the services available at The Ohio State library, specifically the online journal databases. Additionally, this assignment provided them with an opportunity to ‘get comfortable’ with the research and writing process and made them more aware of conversations and debates among scholars through academic journals.”

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You:
See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. If you want to trade ideas about your assignments, contact us to schedule an individual consultation. We also offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres, and can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading two upcoming workshops Winter quarter through the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT):

•Responding to Student Writing. February 4, 11:30am-1:00pm, 150 Younkin Success Center
•Grading to Learn: Writing and Assessment Across the Curriculum. February 11, 11:30am-1:00pm, 150 Younkin Success Center

For further information, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s website (http://ucat.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html). We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Victoria Genetin, Women’s Studies
Tanisha Jackson, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Kate White, English

Evaluating student responses to formal assignments alone only tells us so much about what students are learning, and usually tells us very little about how they are learning. Informal, reflective writing can give you a window into student learning: how they go about tackling a problem or question, what challenges they face in an assignment, and what about their work sparks their personal interests and passions.

Activity Idea: Try using short reflective writing assignments throughout your course to gauge students’ understanding of the material and to help them think through larger assignments.

•Today: Incorporate an icebreaker into your lesson plan that allows students to respond to a set of questions about the course toward the beginning of the quarter. Think about asking students for the most memorable idea from last class, to describe an aspect of the material that they are finding confusing, or their favorite part of the reading for the day. Not only can short 1-5 minute writing assignments help prepare students to actively participate in discussion, small group sessions, or other in-class activities, but they can also help you as an instructor to listen more closely to how students are interacting with your teaching methods and course content.
•Later this Quarter: After you have given your students a larger assignment for the course, ask them to reflect on the assignment prompt by writing a short response about what they think the assignment will entail. Not only does this help students to process an assignment before they leave the classroom and begin their work, but this kind of activity can also help you clarify questions or misinterpretations of the assignment right from the start. Students might also share their impression in groups if you would like them to be working collaboratively on the project you have assigned.
•Long-term: Try to plan regular (weekly or even daily) assessment activities that address particular learning goals you have set across the quarter. Using a diverse set of Classroom Assessment Techniques (see the Angelo and Cross book cited below) can offer instructors the opportunity to listen in on your students’ learning throughout the quarter. Ask students to reflect on their learning from a number of different perspectives by using varied assessments that allow students the opportunity to look at their own work and the work of their peers in conjunction with the feedback they receive from you as their instructor. In-class minute papers, Carmen surveys or discussion boards, as well as short reflections on lectures are all ways to help students reflect on their own learning in ways that also give instructors insight into their own teaching choices and their students learning needs.

OSU Community Example: Art Education Professor Christine Ballengee-Morris uses an activity in her class called “Baggage and Luggage.” This activity asks students to identify ideas, notions or concepts they had prior to working on an assignment (this is ‘baggage’). From there, students reflect on any new ideas, notions or concepts they may have developed after a particular class session (this is ‘luggage’). This writing exercise allows students to process what has been discussed in class, encourages them to reflect on their own transformative learning process, and lets the instructor know whether or not students need clarification on course concepts or assignments. Dr. Ballengee-Morris explains, “I have been using this assignment for over five years and so far, the students’ answers demonstrate self criticality (baggage), which provides fodder for acknowledging their learning”.

WAC Resources: For more resources on assessing student learning with writing, check out our new resource wiki, which includes a whole section on writing and assessment, with tips, resources, rubrics, and sample assignments: https://carmenwiki.osu.edu/display/osuwacresources/Assessment+and+Writing

Other Resources: For further ideas on Classroom Assessment Techniques, see Angelo, T.A. & Cross, P.K. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Angelo and Cross’s text offers a variety of short assignments to be used as in-class activities that assess student learning. The authors also discuss assessment techniques broadly, offering tips about how to plan and implement these techniques in the classroom in a variety of ways on a day-to-day basis.

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You: See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading two workshops this quarter through Faculty and TA Development:

•Grammar 101: Effectively Addressing Surface Error in Student Writing. Thursday, October 28 from 11:30-1:00 @ 300 Younkin Success Center
•Writing and Critical Thinking: Quick and Easy Assignments for Any Classroom. Wednesday, November 4 from 11:30-1:00 @ 300 Younkin Learning Center

For further information, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s website (http://ucat.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html). We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Victoria Genetin, Women’s Studies
Tanisha Jackson, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Kate White, English

Next, as a group,we talked about the different kinds of errors that students make and the ones that we make in our own writing.  We all struggle with split infinitives, comma splices, and figuring out when to use “that” and “which” in a sentence.  The goal of the workshop was to develop certain strategies to help students learn what surface issues matter in specific contexts, and help them become careful readers and crafters of their own writing.

After looking at three different sample student paragraphs, we explored some of the most common errors across that were occurring across the class. Many people noticed a recurring pattern of errors: missing a comma after an introductory element, awkward word choice, comma splice, and informal diction. As a group, we devised strategies to help instructors develop meaningful activities and ways of discussing grammar with their students. Here are a few of the helpful tips that we discussed:

Activity Idea: Make use of outside resources to supplement the teaching of writing in your classroom. Bringing in a fresh face can be a great way to keep your students engaged in the learning process throughout the quarter and it can offer your students a different perspective on the writing process. Furthermore, partnering with a university ally is a great reminder that you are not alone in your quest to teach students how to be effective writers. Try one of the following ideas for outside guests to supplement your own teaching practices:

OSU Community Example: Trish Houston, coordinator of the Minor in Professional Writing, has students organize a public panel featuring writing professionals from around central Ohio. Students interview the guests, prepare promotional materials, arrange their visit, and do all the writing involved with putting on a public event, including producing a thoughtful project evaluative report after the event. In the process, students not only learn forms of writing widely used in the work world, but also learn how writing works in the day-to-day lives of professionals. “Because my students engage in writing with real-world purpose, audiences and consequences, they enhance their professional writing skills and writing accuracy in meaningful ways,” Houston explains. Student Ashley McAtee summed up what she and her classmates gained from the program: “the biggest impact, for me was the way being in a room with writing professionals made me feel like my career goals are realistic… and it is much clearer to me now that professional writing is a rich, multidimensional field.”

WAC Resources: Collaborate with Writing Across the Curriculum to develop a writing workshop for your class. Think about scheduling a visit from Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) for an in-class workshop, presentation, or co-facilitation of a difficult writing topic. The WAC team can help you instruct students on how to write a thesis statement, how they can effectively both summarize and analyze sources, or how to use pre-writing practices to get a project off to a productive start. Keep in mind that you can schedule a WAC presentation or workshop for fall now and then meet with a WAC consultant early in the quarter to decide a topic that will best meet your students’ needs.

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You: See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50.  For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

Look for the following workshops Fall quarter through the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT; formerly FTAD):

We hope you’ll join us.
Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great rest of the summer,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies

We often talk about grading solely as a form of evaluation and judgment without considering the various ways it can help students learn. As we near the end of the quarter, consider using grading as a tool to increase students’ critical awareness of their own learning process. End-of-the-quarter grading can be an important step in the learning process as we offer a final evaluation of student work that can illustrate to students what they have gained as learners and writers over ten weeks.

Activity Idea: Student Self-Assessment: Asking students to participate in your end-of-the-quarter assessment practices can offer an important opportunity for students to assess themselves and reflect on what skills they would like to work on in the future.

Today: On a note card, have your students anonymously write down one of their key accomplishments from the course, then have them circulate these amongst themselves. Have students share these accomplishments out loud and be sure to contribute your own feedback on what you perceive to be students’ key accomplishments for the quarter. This allows you to gauge what students are taking away from your course and will provide a forum for both student and teacher self-assessment. It also gives you as a class an opportunity to step back and take a comprehensive look at what you’ve studied over the quarter.
During Finals Week: As part of a final assignment, consider asking students to turn in a short reflective essay in which they discuss the progress of their writing over the quarter. Since you have had access to a quarter’s worth of work from your students, you can respond to their self-assessment by offering your perspective on patterns in their writing and triumphs that they have yet to notice in their learning. Try to respond to your students’ final projects and papers by offering students suggestions for the future and new goals that they can work toward in their upcoming coursework and continued education. Offering brief comments in addition to a letter grade can help validate your students’ efforts and show them what to work on in their future courses.
Long-term: Think about how student self-assessment can be worked into your course throughout an entire quarter. For example, after students receive grades on major course assignments, ask them to write a paragraph in response to your feedback on that assignment in order to further a dialogue between you and your students about your assessment techniques, their progress, and the learning goals of the course. This on-going dialogue throughout the quarter can help both students and teachers gain information about the learning process.
OSU Community Example: A GTA at OSU using student self-assessment in her writing course finds it extremely valuable. After students draft their final paper, she asks them to offer a grade for themselves using an instructor-designed rubric. After explaining to students that they are going to be required to put all of their critical thinking skills to the test by analyzing and grading one of their peers’ papers, the GTA then hands the students their own papers to grade. “I am always amazed at how seriously and thoughtfully they go about critically analyzing their own work,” she explains. “Half of their final score ends up coming from their own grade, while half of it (usually much higher than what they give themselves) comes from my own assessment.” Asking students to self-assess at the end of the quarter, she explains, “reinforces to my students that we are co-constructors of the course, meaning that I am learning from them just as much as they are learning from me.”
WAC Resources: Want to learn more about ‘grading to learn’? Check out Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson’s Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1998). Walvoord and Johnson Anderson give practical advice to teachers about how to design courses with meaningful forms of assessment from the bottom up. Also, stay tuned for a new WAC wiki tool about assessment coming online in Summer 2009.

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You:

See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

Let us know how we can help you plan for Fall Quarter over the summer. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Lastly, we would like to thank all of you who worked with us during the 2008-2009 year. We learned a great deal from our partnerships this year, as we hope you gained something valuable from us.

Have a great summer,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Lindsay DiCuirci, English
Vicki Daiello, Art Education
Julie Fox, Dance

Although we don’t often think about it, much of our students’ learning occurs outside of the classroom and when we are not present. All year, and especially in the spring when students want to enjoy the beautiful weather, writing assignments outside the classroom can help students stay engaged in their learning while also helping them to gain more awareness of writing contexts and audiences.

Activity Idea: Ask your students to conduct fieldwork outside of the classroom. Fieldwork can be a great way to encourage students’ learning in active contexts, to have them collect data in “live” contexts as well as to struggle with how to interpret and represent that data. Fieldwork can be made into both low-stakes and high-stakes assignments as well as individual activities or small group endeavors, so the possibilities for incorporating this concept into your course are numerous. Consider the following out-of-class exercises:

OSU Community Example: A professor of landscape architecture asks his students to walk up the Olentangy bike path and to ride the bus up High Street, recording their observations. In class, he asks them to briefly write about how what they observed connects to concepts they’ve discussed. “There are some content related reasons for this that go to the lecture component of the course about landscape forces and policies,” he says, “but it’s also just an experiential base to get them writing from something that’s direct and personal rather than library-based research that would be in the larger papers.”

WAC Resources: Last year we recorded a conversation about engaging students using community-based writing, including field research, service-learning, and work-world writing. This conversation, entitled “Motivating Students to Write”, is available as a podcast on our website under “Writing Instructor Podcasts”: http://cstw.osu.edu/podcasts/

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You:
See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50.

For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading two workshops this quarter through Faculty and TA Development:

For further information, visit Faculty and TA Development’s website: http://ftad.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html. We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Lindsay DiCuirci, English
Vicki Daiello, Art Education
Julie Fox, Dance

Grading student writing can be a challenging process that may initially appear subjective. However, there are certain strategies that you can implement to make grading writing a more objective and transparent process for both you and your students. Furthermore, you can make grading become as much a form of feedback to students as it is an evaluation of them. Consider the following strategies:

For an archive of our bi-quarterly WAC tips, go to our blog: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50

If you want to learn more strategies for grading student writing, consider attending the following workshop next week:

Get Help with Grading Student Writing
Monday, May 5, 2008, 11:30–1:00 p.m., 300 Younkin Success Center
In this session, we will discuss ways to develop effective grading rubrics for your classes, talk about how you can negotiate common grading criteria with your colleagues, and give you time saving tips to help you manage your work efficiently and effectively.

Upcoming Workshops:

Making Ordinary Writing Assignments Extraordinary: A Hands-on Workshop
Monday, May 12, 2008, 11:30–1:00 p.m., 300 Younkin Success Center
Are you unsatisfied with how students are responding to major research assignment prompts? Tired of receiving the same bland papers from students? Bring one of your “tried-and-true” writing assignments to the workshop and learn how to revamp it into a sequence of new assignments that your students will want to write and you will want to read.

Grammar 102: Helping International Students with Surface Errors in Writing
Monday, May 19, 2008, 11:30–1:00 p.m., 300 Younkin Success Center
In this workshop, we will discuss some of the most common ESL writing issues at the college level and explore writing pedagogies that introduce ESL students to discipline-specific writing rules and conventions. As part of this discussion, we will work with two academic papers written by international students from different countries of origin.

Let us know how we can help you. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great rest of the quarter,
The WAC Team
Dr. Chris Manion, coordinator
Kelly Bradbury
Kate White
Shannon Thomas
Lisya Seloni

Students frequently struggle with understanding how to conduct library-based research. Developing skills such as searching topics in databases, evaluating applicable source material, and synthesizing information into an argument can be frustrating and challenging for students, and it can be trying for the instructors who coach them. Using writing in various stages of the research process can help students navigate the methods, purpose, and meaning of effective research. Try the following approaches to help your students think through how to make research meaningful:

If you would like to learn more about ways to make student writing and research meaningful, check out our upcoming workshops that address some of the themes and issues included in this email:

For further information, visit Faculty and TA Development’s website: http://ftad.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html. We hope you’ll join us.

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You:

For an archive of our past tip e-mails, visit our blog: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50.  For more ideas about how you might implement research-based writing activities, or if you have questions regarding assessing student writing and learning, please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great rest of the quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Lindsay DiCuirci, English
Vicki Daiello, Art Education
Julie Fox, Dance