professional writing – Writing Across the Curriculum

March 21, 2016March 18, 2016

Guiding Students Toward Successful Discipline-Specific Writing

One of the fundamental tenets of WAC pedagogy is that learning in every discipline is enhanced by writing. This is one reason you will often see WAC linked with another acronym, WID. Writing in the Disciplines, or WID, is a category of WAC practice that seeks to “introduce or give students practice with the language conventions of a discipline as well as with specific formats typical of a given discipline.”

As has been noted in the Fellows’ Corner before, it can be difficult for instructors to introduce discipline-specific writing in the classroom. The academic, technical, or professional writing in your field may be obscure and full of jargon, rigidly formatted, or otherwise intimidating to novice learners. As instructors, one of the most important things that we can do is to acknowledge the complexities of writing in our respective fields and help students take the first steps toward mastering it.

Providing a variety of examples of professional writing from your field for students is a good way to get started. Even better is guiding them through the first one or two readings. This may mean sharing insights into how you read writing of this kind as an expert in the field, or perhaps assigning simple, informal writing assignments to help students articulate their understanding of content or structure (see this post for more suggestions on assisting with difficult readings).

While professional writing provides good models and can be inspiring for students to see, it can also be daunting. Students may find themselves wondering how on earth they are going to produce writing that looks like the samples they have read, leading to unnecessary anxiety and discouragement. Providing examples of successful student writing can be a counterweight to these negative feelings.

Samples of non-professional writing are concrete evidence that good discipline-specific writing is within reach for students. You may choose to pull samples from the internet (this journal of student writing from Middlesex Community College contains some good examples from a variety of fields) or gather your own. The more unique the assignment is to your course the more you may want to collect one or two exemplary assignments per semester to serve as models to future classes (be sure to get permission from the student to use their work in this way, and always remove the name from the sample).

Supporting discipline-specific writing is a major goal of the WAC program at City Tech. Follow the links in this post for more helpful tips, or contact the WAC fellows through the OpenLab.

December 8, 2015December 9, 2015

Utilizing WAC Pedagogy to Support Your Professional Development

Faculty introduced to Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) principles often note how implementing WAC practices may support their students’ academic development.

What teachers may not immediately realize is that WAC pedagogy can also support their own professional development in the following ways:

Be More Productive

In their article Enhancing Pedagogical Productivity, Walvoort and Pool (1998) discuss how implementing WAC techniques can reduce costs in relation to outcomes. The authors argue that by varying the modes of content delivery (e.g., journal writing, group activities, and peer review), faculty can free up time previously devoted to delivering class content through lecture. Additionally, by designing scaffolded assignments and implementing WAC best-practices for grading, faculty can further free up time while improving learning outcomes. By becoming more pedagogically productive, faculty can devote more time to research, publications and other important aspects of their professional development.

Expand Your Research and Publications

In conjunction to freeing up time to devote to research and writing, your experiences with WAC pedagogy can itself be the focus of your research and writing. You could examine several outcomes related to implementing WAC practices, including student interest in class topics, pass/fail rates, exam grades, writing quality, etc.

Several journals are devoted specifically to WAC pedagogy. For example:

Writing Across the Curriculum
Language connections: Writing and reading across the curriculum
Language and Learning Across the Disciplines

Other journals that publish WAC-related research:

American journal of Education
Assessing Writing
College Teaching
Research in the Teaching of English
Communication Education

Be a Stronger Collaborator

Faculty often collaborate with their colleagues on projects. In the same way that WAC principles help improve student critical thinking and writing skills, applying these principles to your own work can have the same effect. For example, you may realize that it’s helpful to scaffold your own group projects, with due dates for outlines, drafts and peer reviews. Further, your feedback to collaborators may improve when you focus on higher order concerns and provide forward-looking feedback, without copy-editing your colleagues’ work.

Improve Your Teacher Evaluations

Improved teaching performance is related to a teacher’s sense of satisfaction and commitment to teaching (Hughes, 2006; Peterson and White, 1992). Research further supports that student achievement is closely tied to the quality and training of the teacher (Darling-Hammond, 2000). By completing WAC training and implementing WAC pedagogy, teachers are better prepared and often increase their performance and sense of satisfaction, which in turn translates to more positive evaluations from both colleagues and students.

For example, one study by Blakeslee, Hayes and Young (1994) provides support that faculty who participated in WAC training differed significantly from non-participating faculty on attitude and teaching behavior. Specifically, participating faculty were more likely to view writing as a means for learning rather than testing, developed stronger writing assignments, and spent significantly more time answering student questions.

Positive teacher evaluations are associated with several professional development factors, including increased publication record and improved job opportunities (Feldman, 1987).

References

Blakeslee, A., Hayes, J., & Young, R. (1994). Evaluating training workshops in a writing across the curriculum program: method and analysis. Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, 1(2), 5-34.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2000). Teacher quality and student achievement. Education policy analysis archives, 8, 1.

Feldman, K. A. (1987). Research productivity and scholarly accomplishment of college teachers as related to their instructional effectiveness: A review and exploration. Research in higher education, 26(3), 227-298.

Hughes, V. M. (2006). Teacher evaluation practices and teacher job satisfaction (Doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri–Columbia).

Walvoord, B. E., & Pool, K. J. (1998). Enhancing pedagogical productivity. New Directions for Higher Education, 1998(103), 35-48.

March 24, 2014

Why Using Samples?

Have you ever tried to solve a jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture on the cover? I have. It’s frustrating, and I gave up after a very short time. And yet, I handed many of those ‘blind jigsaw puzzles’ to my students when I assigned a writing assignment without explaining what the final result should look like. To my defense, I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s how I was taught to write, and it’s probably how must of us are, and were taught up until today. But when I started to progress from being an undergraduate student to I discovered how useful samples can be. Before writing my first grant application I gathered grant applications that have been successful. Before and while writing my first journal article I read many, many articles in the journal I wanted to submit the article to. I am not copying what has been written, but I am trying to get a sense of what the final result (the jigsaw puzzle) should look like to be successful.

For some reason, I have denied the same right to my students. I often expected them to come up with formal assignment that meets my expectations without ever explicitly showing them what those expectations are. Luckily, my students are vocal enough to let me know about their frustrations when trying to solve the puzzle. Their objections reminded me of my own frustrations when writing without knowing what’s expected, and I started to incorporate WAC principles, and my own experiences into my teaching.

Here is what I do:

I scaffold assignments, and assign many explorative writing assignments that lead up to a larger, more formal assignment. That helps students not to feel overwhelmed, and prevents the attempt to plagiarize.
All my assignments are handed out in writing, and as explicit as possible. I use Blackboard to post assignments, and I provide hard copies for students.
I always check in with students and ask if the assignment is clear (we do that during class time). If something is unclear, I make changes and ask my students to help me clarifying the assignment.
I do my best to provide samples for formal assignments. My formal assignments are often a combination of smaller, informal assignments. As a final step, I ask students to combine the smaller assignments they’ve done to a larger assignment.

Providing my students with samples of what that formal assignment should look like has produced very good results in my students’ writing, and they have found the experience to be much less frustrating.

February 4, 2014February 19, 2014

Writing in the Disciplines – A Case for Multiple Drafts

Writing in college-level courses (especially in the STEM fields) is often assigned by asking students to mirror professional scholarly writing. For example, students are often required to compose assignments following the format and style of those we read in the professional literature – a journal article. In other courses, writing may take the form of proposals or literature reviews. Asking students to learn to write this way is immensely useful to inuring them to the thought-process of the discipline they are studying. This kind of modeling encourages critical thinking, precise word use, and command of the field’s vernacular. There is just one problem.

In such classes, students are generally required to write multiple papers on widely varying topics. For example, in an experimental psychology class, students might write separate papers on a perceptual, learning/memory, cognitive, and/or social processes study that they conducted in class. Students are often given feedback on these papers (let’s avoid a conversation about the nature of instructor feedback for now), which they are then expected to read, understand, and then incorporate into the next paper they write, which will often cover an entirely different topic. Transferring comments about the content and writing of one paper does not always easily transfer to a paper on a novel course topic.

If we want students to model our discipline’s writing process, asking students to write this way may be detrimental to the learning objectives we set for our courses. As professionals, when we compose a draft of a manuscript/proposal, we undoubtedly receive feedback from others – coauthors, advisers, peer reviewers, other colleagues – before submitting a final product for publication. Rarely (if ever) are these comments incorporated into a new manuscript that addresses a completely different question or topic. While they may inspire us to begin a new project or paper, they rarely result in abandonment of the entire manuscript. We spend much of our time incorporating these comments towards improving the original manuscript. One technique we can employ as instructors may be to require students to submit multiple drafts of their papers in our courses. Allowing students to write multiple drafts and experience the process of professional scholarly writing (and, therefore, the discipline’s thought process) is an immensely useful tool for teaching both writing and course content to our students, just as it is for our professional development as scholars.

Any course that wants students to learn course content and improve their writing skills will find that requiring multiple drafts of a paper will lead to better student learning outcomes. Personally, I would rather my students write one or two solid papers on fewer topics (incorporating multiple drafts) than three or four mediocre papers on more topics.

Tag: professional writing

Guiding Students Toward Successful Discipline-Specific Writing

Utilizing WAC Pedagogy to Support Your Professional Development

Why Using Samples?

Writing in the Disciplines – A Case for Multiple Drafts

The OpenLab at City Tech:A place to learn, work, and share

Support

Accessibility

Copyright

Creative Commons

The OpenLab at City Tech:A place to learn, work, and share

Support

Accessibility

Copyright

Creative Commons