Creating Effective Assignments for the First-Year Seminar What makes an assignment clear, engaging, and intellectually challenging? We will look at the various components of writing assignments: key terms, task, format, requirements, audience, purpose, and process. We will spend most of the time critiquing and offering feedback to each other on assignments. Please send a copy of one (or more) of your FYS assignments to Noreen Lape (lapen@dickinson.edu) prior to the workshop.
Assessing Essays in the First-Year Seminar: An Interactive Workshop
What is the best that we can expect from an FYS student when it comes to writing? For that matter, what makes an essay mediocre? We will practice assessing and responding to FYS essays using an FYS rubric and writing samples from former FYS students. Besides developing a better understanding of FYS grading criteria, we will also discuss how we might respond to the writers in margin and endnotes in order to provoke revision.
Using Low-Risk, (Ungraded), Exploratory Writing to Enhance Student Learning
Exploratory writing brings depth to the writing process and clarity to the learning experience. Exploratory writing can help blocked writers discover ideas and sediment knowledge; it can help anxious writers free up the working memory needed to concentrate on a task. In this workshop, we will examine several types of exploratory writing and share tips on how to integrate such assignments into a course. We will also hear from faculty panelists, Amy Wlodarski (Music) and Sarah Bryant (Mathematics), who will speak to the benefits of exploratory writing assignments.
First-Year Writers and Writing Pedagogy
In this workshop specifically designed for new faculty orientation, Noreen Lape, Director of the Writing Program/Norman M. Eberly Multilingual Writing Center, will give an overview of the support services that the Writing Program offers new faculty. She will then explain the writing challenges first-year writers face and discuss the learning outcomes of the First-Year Seminar Program.
When Writing Prompts Lead to Paralysis: A Conversation with Writing Center Tutors
How is it that our students misconstrue the simplest of our instructions? What is it about some of our assignments that, at times, lead students astray? How can we make our writing prompts any clearer? If the cardinal rule of assignment construction is “you get what you ask for,” this workshop is for those of you who thought you asked for one thing but got something totally unexpected. Experienced Writing Center tutors, who have worked with students across the disciplines on all kinds of assignments, will offer their insights into the minds of writers as they process writing prompts.
Spring 2011
Crash Course in Teaching Writing for WR Instructors
This half-day workshop will help you prepare to teach writing in the spring. We will discuss creating effective assignments, sequencing assignments, delivering mini-lessons, prompting revision, and responding to student writing. Stay for lunch and leave with a plan to teach writing in your courses!
Podcast Assignments: A Faculty Panel
Why assign podcasts as opposed to traditional essays and research papers? How is writing incorporated into podcast assignments? How do students benefit from doing podcast assignments? What podcasts assignments are particularly successful and what makes them successful? Three colleagues – Chris Francese (Classics), Sheri Lullo (Art History), and Kristi Humphreys (Chemistry) will share their podcasts assignments and the examples of the final product created by students. If you assign or are thinking about assigning a podcast project, this workshop is for you.
Working with ESL Writers
How can we help ESL students grow as writers? How does culture shape the way they approach writing tasks? Is it useful, or even helpful, to line-edit their work? When it comes to grammatical correctness, do we hold ESL writers to the same standards as native speakers? For this workshop, we will view the thirty-minute movie, Writing Across Borders, which addresses all of these questions through interviews with ESL students, teachers , and researchers. Dickinson’s own ESL Specialist, Lisa Wolff, will be on hand to facilitate our discussion, answer questions, and offer practical tips from her years of experience teaching ESL writing courses.
Preparing to Teach Writing in the First-Year Seminar
What should FYS students be taught about writing? This workshop explains writing instruction in the First-Year Seminar. We will discuss the APSC-legislated goals of FYS, sequencing assignments, incorporating mini-lessons on writing, and designing the syllabus. By the end of the workshop, you will have ideas about course design as you head into the summer. The two sessions are repeats, so you should choose to attend one or the other.
Fall 2010
Creating Effective Assignments for the First-Year Seminar
What makes an assignment clear, engaging, and intellectually challenging? We will look at the various components of writing assignments: key terms, task, format, requirements, audience, purpose, and process. We will spend most of the time critiquing and offering feedback to each other on assignments. Please send a copy of one (or more) of your FYS assignments to Noreen Lape (lapen@dickinson.edu) prior to the workshop.
Assessing Essays in the First-Year Seminar
What is the best that we can expect from an FYS student when it comes to writing? For that matter, what makes an essay mediocre? We will practice assessing and responding to FYS essays using actual samples from last year’s FYS students. We will develop an FYS rubric (or tweak the one I wrote up last year), apply the rubric to several sample essays, and discuss our assessments. This process, known as “norming,” will enable us to see what we emphasize (and downplay) when grading, and how our colleagues read student writing. Besides developing a better understanding of FYS grading criteria, we will also discuss how we might respond to the writers in margin and endnotes in order to provoke revision.
Responding to Student Writers
Special Guest Facilitator: Dr. Nancy Sommers,
Sosland Chair in Expository Writing, Harvard University
In this workshop, we will reflect on what it means to be a thoughtful reader of student work. Research on responding has shown that teacher commentary, more than any other form of instruction, shapes the way students learn to write. To our students, it isn’t just that without a reader “the whole process is diminished”; rather, it is with a thoughtful reader that the whole process is enriched and deepened. Yet most teachers acknowledge that they don’t know how students use their comments or why students find some comments useful and others not. As we examine the ways we comment, we will discuss a wide range of teaching topics—creating and sequencing assignments, motivating students to become responsible writers, and teaching academic writing—and we’ll take time to talk about how to use A Writer’s Reference as a teaching tool.
Working with ESL Writers
How can we help ESL students grow as writers? How does culture shape the way they approach writing tasks? Is it useful, or even helpful, to line-edit their work? When it comes to grammatical correctness, do we hold ESL writers to the same standards as native speakers? For this workshop, we will view the thirty-minute movie, Writing Across Borders, which addresses all of these questions through interviews with ESL students, teachers , and researchers. Dickinson’s own ESL Specialist, Lisa Wolff, will be on hand to facilitate our discussion, answer questions, and offer practical tips from her years of experience teaching ESL writing courses.
Making Peer Review Work: A Conversation with Writing Associates
How do we facilitate a successful peer review? How do we teach writers to become revisers? Many of us recognize the importance of students receiving feedback from peers as they write; yet we also struggle to make peer review productive, often wondering if it is a waste of time. This workshop is for those of you want to make peer review work in your classroom. Writing Associates, who have facilitated FYS peer review groups all semester, will offer their insights on how students learn to offer quality feedback, what causes peer review groups to stagnate or falter, and what kind of professor support contributes to a successful peer review environment.
Spring 2010
Crash Course in Teaching Writing
An abridged version of the fall workshop series, this half-day workshop will help you prepare to teach writing in the spring. We will discuss creating effective assignments, sequencing assignments, prompting revision, designing rubrics, and responding to student writing. Stay for lunch and leave with a plan to teach writing in your courses!
Reflections on the Fall Workshops/Teaching Materials Exchange What ideas and techniques from the fall workshops (or the January “Crash Course’) did you incorporate into your approach to teaching writing? What revisions did you make to your assignments and syllabi? What worked well with students? What did not? We will reflect on the changes you made to your teaching, share both successes and challenges, and bring to the table some revised teaching materials (assignments, rubrics, peer review prompts, etc.) that we can share with each other. This workshop is open to all faculty, regardless of whether you attended any fall workshops or not.
Writing in the Disciplines: The Making of a WR Course
How does your discipline shape the way you teach writing? How do you teach your students the language and conventions of your specific academic discipline? What constitutes revision in your discipline? Do you have to offer feedback on every rough draft written by every student in the class? Or are there other ways to help students re-see their ideas? We will look at these questions and more over three separate workshops facilitated by faculty from each of the three divisions.
Regardless of your division, you are welcome to attend any and all of these sessions.
How to Create a Rubric