Steve Braye from the Department of English; Bud Warner from the Department of Human Service Studies; April Post from the Department of World Languages and Cultures; and Carol Smith from the Department of Health and Human Performance, describe their Writing Excellence Initiative Grant Project.
Thursday, April 9, 4-6 p.m.
Global Commons 103
Primary Audiences
All Academic Programs [Leadership; Fellows; Service]; Residence Life; Service Learning
Open to all faculty, staff, and students
Coordinating the teaching of writing across any program can be a difficult task. What kinds of projects should be offered in what year? What kinds of writing are developmentally appropriate for which semester? How should faculty scaffold writing instruction and experiences across the length of the program? These questions, and more, apply to the Periclean Scholars Program.
A further complication? A rotating group of faculty mentors who progress through the program with the students. Unlike typical major sequences, where faculty may teach one course multiple times in order to develop their expertise, faculty design and teach each course one time, adapting their goals and objectives to their given cohort the best they can. No surprise that designing and teaching effective writing assignments consistently trouble Periclean faculty mentors.
This session will explore how the current group of faculty mentors worked to develop effective writing structures for the Periclean program. We will discuss the importance of writing to the program, and why faculty have found it so frustrating. Then we will share how we worked to develop systematic expectations for writing across all six semesters, using Dee Fink’s Integrated Course Design, and writing research on developing “expert” writers. We will share writing outcomes we developed for the 2014-15 year for each cohort and, finally, discuss how we access our work so far.