Writing Across the CurriculumRead around groups are a great way to support peer review in your classroom in an non-traditional way. This activity helps students develop their vocabulary for discussing and critiquing writing, and solidifies ideas about what good writing looks like. Consider using this method in your classroom to engage your students in more dynamic peer review!
Interested in utilizing Dr. Thomas Sura’s One Minute Paper in your classroom? Here is a brief instructional video detailing how to implement it. This is a great way to foster reflective thinking in your students concerning their own writing practice, and has the added benefit of allowing you instant feedback on your own teaching practices!
Based on a presentation by Melissa Broeckelman-Post, this learning module illustrates a methodology for course design that begins with the broad and gradually focuses in on how to create assignments and assessments. Each assignment is encouraged to link back to the original goals and outcomes desired for the course, so that everything remains focused and connected.
Consider using this method the next time you begin to design your class.
Looking for a new way to foster discussion in your classroom? Try this sticky note exercise! This highly adaptable exercise allows for meaningful discussion, while the anonymity of it allows students the freedom to express their ideas. Try using this method to discuss writing in your classroom, and see what new revelations your students come to.
by: Mikal Cardine
Mikal is a senior studying English at George Mason. She previously worked with WAC to create disciplinary writing guides for student use. To reach her, please contact wac@gmu.edu.
The average undergraduate will hear a variety of conflicting viewpoints from their university professors on the topic of Wikipedia. While some professors will openly express distrust of Wikipedia as a source for research, others are more open to the use of Wikipedia as a learning tool. While Middlebury College outright banned undergraduates from citing Wikipedia in any academic essay—stating that “students need to be taught to go for quality information, not just convenience” (Jaschik, 2)—professors such as Mark Kissling argue that faculty do a disservice to their students if they don’t help them to understand why instructors are concerned about the source. As Kissling writes, professors have a duty to teach “their students to learn to critically read Wikipedia…helping them understand how it is created, how it defines and positions knowledge, and what it makes possible and fails to do” (Kissling, 1).
As an undergraduate, I have to admit that Wikipedia is in. Originally branded as untrustworthy, the site is now our go-to research tool – but why? Has student scholarship fallen so far? Or has Wikipedia possibly become a useful research tool? Prompted to learn more, I decided to do a little research and created a simple survey to determine Wikipedia’s current value to both professors and students.
by: Caitlin Holmes
Caitlin Holmes is the Assistant Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at George Mason University. She blogs regularly about teaching here at thewritingcampus.com. You can reach her via email at wac@gmu.edu.
During a pre-semester meeting to discuss the QEP assessment findings of Mason’s English 302 Students-as-Scholars Program, instructors of our Advanced Composition courses went over the primary student learning outcomes (SLO):
What those discussions reinforced for my colleagues and me is that engagement in scholarship and knowledge transmission requires that students have advanced reading practices that often are not overtly discussed – or are sometimes presumed as proficiencies – as we work on writing competencies.
Jessica McCaughey is an Assistant Professor at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she teaches and writes about the intersections of academic, creative, and professional writing. You can reach her at jessmcc@gwu.edu and find her online at jessicamccaughey.com.
When it comes to communicating with students, all writing instructors face two hurdles:
The latter is a challenge that becomes especially clear when I find myself crafting embarrassingly long emails that could have been presented orally and visually quite easily. I have—although I’m really not proud of it—taken four paragraphs to clarify a homework assignment. I have written multi-page emails detailing the wonder that is the inter-library loan system. Most writers—and writing instructors—I know love the quote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time,” by French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. (You may have heard a similar quote falsely attributed to Mark Twain.) Concision takes time in writing, especially writing that is intended to teach in some way. And so it was with genuine pleasure that I discovered and began implementing the use of Jing, a program that supplements and improves the way I teach writing in so many ways.
Jen Stevens is the Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian at George Mason University and a consultant for Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum Faculty Senate Committee. She has extensive experience assisting undergraduate and graduate student writers discover new resources and information in their research process. For her information and current InfoGuides, click here!
In my work as a Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian at George Mason University, I work with faculty members and their students to help the students learn how to do better research, which in turn leads to better writing.
Last week, I found the strangest thing in the Fenwick Library Reference area. . .
Mason WAC’s learning module on best practices for writing assignment design in any discipline!
Elaborated Assignment
Unelaborated Assignment
Assignment Design Principles
By Caitlin Holmes
Since Dr. José Bowen visited Mason in September 2014, I have been working to implement more of his suggestions for teaching practice into my class. I wrote previously about utilizing one such suggestion: a combination of reading, writing in response, and discussion to understand the rhetorical nature of APA style. More recently, I have experimented with another approach to improving student writing in a low-stakes environment that requires students to show the higher-order thinking skills that Dr. Bowen emphasized: read-around groups. During his workshop at Mason, Bowen reminded us that students respond well to uncertainty, failure, and experimentation, and read-around groups (or RAGs, as they are also known) certainly allow for those conditions to emerge in a productive way.