My Planning

I found a fifty-word teaching philosophy at So You Want to Teach?, and since I am working on my cv and philosophy and so forth, I decided I would try it. Here’s my first (and maybe last) attempt at describing my practical approach to teaching:

Learning is fun and reading and writing are essential skills. Because practice increases competence, students practice a lot. They read and analyze; they write and revise their work. Assignments have clear real-world applications and I model how to read or write the assignments. In addition, questions or prewriting helps guide them through the topic before they begin writing.

300 years afterAlexander Selkirk, the real-life model for Robinson Crusoe stayed an island after a disagreement with his sea captain, archaeologists think they have found his campsite.

Archaeologists have found evidence of what they believe to be Selkirk’s presence in a part of the island known as Aguas Buenas, uncovering the remnants of a campsite constructed by an early European occupant. An article published in the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology reports the discovery of a fragment of copper alloy from a pair of navigational dividers, which would have belonged to a ship’s navigator or master. Reports from the 18th century from Selkirk’s rescuer, Captain Woodes Rogers, suggest that Selkirk fulfilled one of these roles.

David Caldwell, Keeper of Scotland and Europe for National Museums Scotland and leader of the dig, said: “The evidence uncovered at Aguas Buenas corroborates the stories of Alexander Selkirk’s stay on the island. I am satisfied that this is the place where Selkirk set up his camp. The discovery of the divider was crucial.”

Other compelling finds include two holes for posts, which suggest that Selkirk constructed two shelters by a freshwater stream and set up a viewpoint to watch for — and assess the friendliness of — approaching ships. In the end, five years passed before an English ship visited the island.

I like this… I admire Daniel Defoe’s work and though I have not yet had the opportunity to teach a class with his writing in it, I hope to some day.

I had already been working on adding more “relevance” to the course. My project for this course is, at least right now, focused on making the play Everyman more accessible to my students by introducing the concept through modern film (thanks, Joe) with a clip from Forrest Gump and modern music, including “For Everyman” by Jackson Browne and “Every Man” by Casting Crowns.

I also want to place more of an emphasis on the theme of the work, having to meet Death unexpectedly.

In order to do all this in the course, though, I am going to have to leave some things out.

That’s going to be hard. I’ve already pared the course down as far as I can stand (”and I can’t stands no more”- Popeye), but to integrate the old literature with modern life, I am going to have to either drop out some of the old or give more at-home readings. And I have found those to be very difficult to get students to actually do… Also, as a historicist, I think that the works are “better” and more easily understood, if background information is provided before and during the reading. That doesn’t happen at home for the students.

(I wonder if this is a possibility of something to do. Create an interactive text where the asides that I would say in class are available in the text… Maybe. I’ve done my own translation of Beowulf from the Old English, though it is nowhere near as good as Seamus Heaney’s amazingly alliterative alternative, and I could use it without obtaining rights from anyone…. Something to think about.)

Objectives and outcomes for Brit Lit:

Objectives:
1 To read, discuss, enjoy, and write about early English-language literature as a means of introduction to their legacy of works, both prose and poetry.

2 To write about the literature, in essays, essay exams, and literary analysis and thus enhance the students’ repertoire of writing skills.

3 To sharpen students’ writing, thinking, listening, note-taking and research skills.

4 To continue improving students’ skills through Lab work. The lab is in SFA 215.

5 To enhance student vocabularies. The use of a dictionary may be necessary.

Learning Outcomes:

• Trace, interpret, and evaluate the cultural and literary development of English literature, both in form and content, from the Old English or Anglo-Saxon period through the Neo-Classical period.

• Interpret and evaluate a literary work through understanding of the theme, situation, tone, structure and style.

• Recognize the aesthetic, moral, and intellectual values of literature.

• Recognize some of the major themes of literature.

• Understand the distinguishing characteristics of various genres such as epic poems, sonnets, plays, odes, elegies, short stories, novels, and allegories.

• Write logical, well-organized, well-supported critical responses to a literary work.

• Appropriately document material used as the result of research.

I have a problem with these outcomes/objectives. They are not as measurable as they need to be. How do you get students to enjoy and appreciate the literature? And how would you assess whether that has happened? I will work on this more and maybe repost some

How can I identify “recognize” and “understand.” I can’t. So I need to change those. “Identify three major themes of literature and demonstrate how those themes are used in two works each.” That would work. “Explain how the distinguishing characteristics of various genres such as epic poems, sonnets, plays, odes, elegies, allegories, comedies, and tragedies can be seen in at least three works read this semester.” “Demonstrate an understanding of the aesthetic, moral, and intellectual values of literature by being able to present a reasoned response and evaluation of four of the works read this semester.”

So now it will say

Learning Outcomes:
• Trace, interpret, and evaluate the cultural and literary development of English literature, both in form and content, from the Old English or Anglo-Saxon period through the Neo-Classical period.
• Interpret and evaluate a literary work through understanding of the theme, situation, tone, structure and style.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the aesthetic, moral, and intellectual values of literature by being able to present a reasoned response and evaluation of four of the works read this semester.
• Identify three major themes of literature and demonstrate how those themes are used in two works each.
• Explain how the distinguishing characteristics of various genres such as epic poems, sonnets, plays, odes, elegies, allegories, comedies, and tragedies can be see in at least three works this semester.
• Write logical, well-organized, well-supported critical responses to a literary work.
• Appropriately document material used as the result of research.

That is much better. Of course, it gives an aware student a very clear picture of the final exam now.

Writing in the Social Sciences is a new course that I will teach in the spring. I am very excited about this course. My department is less thrilled. They see it as a service course for the social sciences rather than a writing course for writing majors. Nevertheless there are students wanting and needing to take the course and we have the ability to teach it, so we are going to.

I am online looking for ideas. If you know of any good readings, texts, or websites, please let me know.

I think I have found some useful ideas and websites.

Way to present the course
Science Writing Syllabus, complete with a Narrative Arc section entitled “The Story of the Course.” The course includes writing popular articles for the field. (And an ethnography and a controversies project.) I like the way he presented the course and I might look at that for the syllabus presentation.

Links

The Social Sciences Virtual Library includes a list of the disciplines, journals, and scholarly societies. I like the anthropology link, because it further divided anthropology into (applied, biophysical, cultural, and linguistic) fields.

There is also a page for Social Science Sites by subject. Biosciences is included, but nothing else that deals with nursing. (Nursing students are apparently taking the course as well.)

The University of Texas offers a page of links for writing across the curriculum, including specific disciplines of social science (such as psychology) and in the social sciences as a group. Most of the social sciences sites didn’t work.

Introduction to primary research
The OWL at Purdue offers a description of how to do primary research that is very good. I think that it might be something to take the students through to start so that they can see where you begin to do research.

Types of papers/presentations

The OWL at Purdue also has a whole section on Writing in the Social Sciences, including:
Writing Scientific Abstracts presentation
Sample APA lit rvw
Social Work lit rvw guidelines
Writing with Statistics

Types of psychology writing includes essays, lit reviews, and research papers. It includes a discussion of purpose, components, and suggestions.

For example:

Components:

A description of information with citations, related to your topic or research question
Identification of theoretical conflicts or controversies related to your research question
Any needs or questions for further research to address

I found this to be a good beginning resource. It might help me create my own documents for the course, by reminding me what needs to be in the descriptions.

An excellent Power Point Presentation on how to create a poster for the social sciences is available from George Mason U.

What if my students had to make a poster presentation on the work of one article? It would be interesting, would start them on the path, and would get some discussion going. I like that idea. It would let them know that there is a wide array of information out there (by seeing other students’ posters) and it would get them involved… Now where are those used? I don’t know. Maybe I need to ask a sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist.

Reading… abstract… poster… annotated bibliography…. literature review… research paper…

This is a hypertext guide to writing in psych. It has good information on Latin, abbreviations, and old usage in texts.

Note that (except for et al.) these abbreviations are only used in parenthetic material. In non parenthetic material, use the English translation.
Do not use E and S as abbreviations for experimenter and subject. This was done in articles written many years ago.
Note the following common abbreviations and note also that you do not use periods with them.

He also has a long and specific section on writing research and on research reports (lit review type).

Errata

A series of weblinks and exercises on Visual thinking, visual computing has some interesting things. I like the exercise where the Japanese topography is illustrated through 15 woodblocks. It is the first one.

from the National Writing Project

They have thirty, but I am only going to put down the ones I think I might use. Some of them I already use, so those aren’t in here. Examples of that are creating a real-world application of the students’ writing and modeling writing for our students.

Writing about Writing

8. Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing.
Douglas James Joyce, a teacher-consultant with the Denver Writing Project, makes use of what he calls “metawriting” in his college writing classes. He sees metawriting (writing about writing) as a way to help students reduce errors in their academic prose.

Joyce explains one metawriting strategy: After reading each essay, he selects one error that occurs frequently in a student’s work and points out each instance in which the error is made. He instructs the student to write a one page essay, comparing and contrasting three sources that provide guidance on the established use of that particular convention, making sure a variety of sources are available.

“I want the student to dig into the topic as deeply as necessary, to come away with a thorough understanding of the how and why of the usage, and to understand any debate that may surround the particular usage.”

JOYCE, DOUGLAS JAMES. 2002. “On the Use of Metawriting to Learn Grammar and Mechanics.” The Quarterly (24) 4.

I am going to be doing a journal portfolio and an essay portfolio in one set of classes and an essay portfolio in the others. I like the idea of having them write about their writing. Perhaps I could do this as part of their final?

I found a connection between the metawriting and having the students questions.

Students Asking Questions about their Writing

21. Help students ask questions about their writing.
Joni Chancer, teacher-consultant of the South Coast Writing Project (California), has paid a lot of attention to the type of questions she wants her upper elementary students to consider as they re-examine their writing, reflecting on pieces they may make part of their portfolios. Here are some of the questions:

Why did I write this piece? Where did I get my ideas?
Who is the audience and how did it affect this piece?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
Was this piece easy or difficult to write? Why?
What parts did I rework? What were my revisions?
Did I try something new?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
What elements of writer’s craft enhanced my story?
What might I change?
Did something I read influence my writing?
What did I learn or what did I expect the reader to learn?
Where will I go from here? Will I publish it? Share it?
Expand it? Toss it? File it?

Chancer cautions that these questions should not be considered a “reflection checklist,” rather they are questions that seem to be addressed frequently when writers tell the story of a particular piece.

CHANCER, JONI. 2001. “The Teacher’s Role in Portfolio Assessment.” In The Whole Story: Teachers Talk About Portfolios, edited by Mary Ann Smith and Jane Juska. Berkeley, California: National Writing Project.

I like giving the students questions and having them think about them or talk about them. Perhaps this could be part of the preparation for the final?

And maybe I could incorporate this suggestion as well:

Grade persuasion

23. Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final grade.
For a final exam, Sarah Lorenz, a teacher-consultant with the Eastern Michigan Writing Project, asks her high school students to make a written argument for the grade they think they should receive. Drawing on work they have done over the semester, students make a case for how much they have learned in the writing class.

“The key to convincing me,” says Lorenz, “is the use of detail. They can’t simply say they have improved as writers-they have to give examples and even quote their own writing…They can’t just say something was helpful- they have to tell me why they thought it was important, how their thinking changed, or how they applied this learning to everyday life.”

LORENZ, SARAH. 2001. “Beyond Rhetoric: A Reflective Persuasive Final Exam for the Writing Classroom.” The Quarterly (23) 4.

If I put those three things together, both during the presentation of the final and the final, the students might come out with some excellent final writing pieces about their work and their learning. I think this would be especially useful in the basic writing class.

Despite my personal expectation that students ought to know grammar by the time they get to college, I know that often they don’t. One of the things I do with grammar is assign homework based on the grammar they missed in their papers. I think that it would also be fun to incorporate these next two ideas.

Acting out grammar

19. Make grammar instruction dynamic.
Philip Ireland, teacher-consultant with the San Marcos Writing Project (California), believes in active learning. One of his strategies has been to take his seventh-graders on a “preposition walk” around the school campus. Walking in pairs, they tell each other what they are doing:

I’m stepping off the grass.
I’m talking to my friend.

“Students soon discover that everything they do contains prepositional phrases. I walk among my students prompting answers,” Ireland explains.

“I’m crawling under the tennis net,” Amanda proclaims from her hands and knees. “The prepositional phrase is under the net.”

“The preposition?” I ask.

“Under.”

IRELAND, PHILIP. 2003. “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.” The Quarterly (25) 3.

Another grammar exercise, example, suggestion was

Using real-world examples for grammar

26. Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.
Suzanne Cherry, director of the Swamp Fox Writing Project (South Carolina), has her own way of dramatizing the comma splice error. She brings to class two pieces of wire, the last inch of each exposed. She tells her college students “We need to join these pieces of wire together right now if we are to be able to watch our favorite TV show. What can we do? We could use some tape, but that would probably be a mistake as the puppy could easily eat through the connection. By splicing the wires in this way, we are creating a fire hazard.”

A better connection, the students usually suggest, would be to use one of those electrical connectors that look like pen caps.

“Now,” Cherry says (often to the accompaniment of multiple groans), “let’s turn these wires into sentences. If we simply splice them together with a comma, the equivalent of a piece of tape, we create a weak connection, or a comma splice error. What then would be the grammatical equivalent of the electrical connector? Think conjunction - and, but, or. Or try a semicolon. All of these show relationships between sentences in a way that the comma, a device for taping clauses together in a slapdash manner, does not.”

“I’ve been teaching writing for many years,” Cherry says. “And I now realize the more able we are to relate the concepts of writing to ‘real world’ experience, the more successful we will be.”

CHERRY, SUZANNE. “I Am the Comma Splice Queen,” The Voice (9) 1.

I have been trying to think of how we could start the class writing, when I don’t really want to assign another writing assignment. And I think that this might be an interesting punctuation to beginning the courses. I don’t think I would talk about them as a drum and river, but maybe a dripping faucet and a wide open one.

Or maybe a postcard and a novel.

Hmm. Maybe I should actually have the students write postcards. That would be a fun assignment. I could buy a bunch of Houston postcards and get some soldiers’ addresses and have the students write postcards. They would have to have a short, focused thought for that. Maybe as part of the narrative paragraphs. Are we doing that assignment? I think we are.

Sentence Length

20. Ask students to experiment with sentence length.
Kim Stafford, director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark College, wants his students to discard old notions that sentences should be a certain length. He explains to his students that a writer’s command of long and short sentences makes for a “more pliable” writing repertoire. He describes the exercise he uses to help students experiment with sentence length.

“I invite writers to compose a sentence that goes on for at least a page - and no fair cheating with a semicolon. Just use ‘and’ when you have to, or a dash, or make a list, and keep it going.” After years of being told not to, they take pleasure in writing the greatest run-on sentences they can.

“Then we shake out our writing hands, take a blank page, and write from the upper left to the lower right corner again, but this time letting no sentence be longer than four words, but every sentence must have a subject and a verb.”

Stafford compares the first style of sentence construction to a river and the second to a drum. “Writers need both,” he says. “Rivers have long rhythms. Drums roll.”

STAFFORD, KIM. 2003. “Sentence as River and as Drum.” The Quarterly (25) 3.

I like this idea as well, even though I hadn’t thought of it as a way of introducing introductions and conclusions. But I think it might be a good idea. When I am explaining about the five-paragraph essay to my basic writing students, this could be very helpful to them.

25. Encourage the “framing device” as an aid to cohesion in writing.
Romana Hillebrand, a teacher-consultant with the Northwest Inland Writing Project (Idaho), asks her university students to find a literary or historical reference or a personal narrative that can provide a fresh way into and out of their writing, surrounding it much like a window frame surrounds a glass pane.

Hillebrand provides this example:

A student in her research class wrote a paper on the relationship between humans and plants, beginning with a reference to the nursery rhyme, ‘Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies…’ She explained the rhymes as originating with the practice of masking the stench of death with flowers during the Black Plague. The student finished the paper with the sentence, “Without plants, life on Earth would cease to exist as we know it; ashes, ashes we all fall down.”

Hillebrand concludes that linking the introduction and the conclusion helps unify a paper and satisfy the reader.

HILLEBRAND, ROMANA. 2001. “It’s a Frame Up: Helping Students Devise Beginning and Endings.”The Quarterly (23) 1.

Syllabus
Usually my syllabus is done far in advance of school because I don’t like to leave things till the last minute for fear that nothing will get done.

But this time that didn’t work out since I have to do my syllabus following general department guidelines and I was not given those until Friday.

Sunday I was sick. (Yep, that happens when you wait till the last minute.)

But I have completed one of the two syllabi I need to work on.

The real problem with the second is that I am attempting to combine the best of three different syllabi to come up with a single syllabus at CC1. I’m just not sure how I am going to do that. Still working on that one.

However, my syllabus for the New School is complete. I didn’t have a lot of choices on what to do, so I mostly carefully followed the syllabus I was given as an “example” of what we had to do. I did make a minor adjustment that I may have problems about later. We’ll see.

Going to HR
I had to go by HR to fill out paperwork. But HR wasn’t there today. I made a long and special trip across town, for free (meaning the school didn’t have to pay for it), and I will have to make another one tomorrow. I’m not too thrilled about that. If they had told me, when they sent me the six emails about the meetings, that I needed to go by HR that day, I could have gone before I went to all the meetings and I could have gotten what I needed that day. They fell down on their job, imho, and now they are sending me emails telling me to get with the program because they need to “fill in their slots.”

Oh well. Perspective. Think of all the things they were trying to get done for all the new faculty. So they assumed we would all know we should go by HR, even though they hadn’t told us…. Or maybe they did and they lost my email address. That is certainly possible, since they told me they had lost it earlier this summer.

Offices are not ready.
Our building isn’t finished yet. I don’t know if it will be by next week. Where will I hold office hours if there is no office? If it were the north (or substantially cooler), I could hold them out in front of one of those gorgeous trees. But it’s not and I don’t want to be melting before class.

Other information is not available.
We are supposed to put our email address on our syllabus. I don’t have one. (See HR above.)

We are supposed to put our phone number on our syllabus. I don’t have one. (See Offices above.)

Final word
I am just not ready for school to start and I am hoping that someone will add an extra ten days to this week so that everything that needs to be done will get done.

An article to read later. “Rhetoric of Science, Rhetoric of Inquiry, and Writing in the Disciplines”

Wikipedia has a good introduction, including important works and authors in the field of study.

Another article to read later. Rhetoric, Science, and the Rhetoric of Science: An Exercise in Interdisciplinarity

And yet another article. This one is from The Writing Instructor and was pubilshed in 2007. Science and Rhetoric: A Changing Relationship

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of teaching a course. So while I’m surfing the net, I am going to note some interesting things I’ve found.

A syllabus for a seminar in literature and science

Selzer, Jack (ed). Understanding Scientific Prose. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993. Thirteen critical studies, by separate hands, of a single scientific paper (Stephen Jay Gould & Richard Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: a Critique of the Adaptationist Programme”). Illustrates a number of approaches to critical study of “the rhetoric of science.”
from a rhetorical analysis syllabus

MIT’s open source syllabus which includes:

We will start with discussions about the nature of science and rhetoric. Then, we will turn our attention to texts written by scientists and use rhetorical theory to analyze those texts. We will look at the professional scientific research articles and other genres of scientific writing. Finally, we’ll investigate the way that rhetoric plays a role in the everyday life of scientists. Throughout the class, we will wrestle with questions, such as:

How is science rhetorical?
What can rhetorical analysis tell us about the ways that scientists use persuasion?
How does rhetorical analysis not help us understand science?

Here are the assignments for the course above and here are the readings.

Found “Strategies for Teaching the Rhetoric of Written English for Science and Technology” but while it’s on JSTOR it’s not on our JSTOR.

First, Syllabus and Assignment Design from Dartmouth.

The best writing classes consider the students’ experiential learning in their course design. To accomplish the aims of experiential learning, it’s important to come up with a course question that can bring together the many smaller questions of the course and that can engage students intellectually and experientially. For instance: What is happiness? What are the roots of violence? What is the nature of the self? Technology: friend or foe?
…
goals for our first year courses…
Bring students into the ongoing conversation of scholarship
Teach students the elements of argument
Improve students’ critical reading and thinking skills
Instruct students to find, use, and cite sources
Teach students to write clear and effective prose

And there is much more.

Second, Syllabus templates from the University of Central Florida.

This actually has templates for a minimal syllabus, a more involved syllabus, and a complete syllabus. If you are totally on your own as a new teacher or with a new course, these can help you fill in the blanks for this teaching test.

Third, Iowa State offers a learning-centered syllabi workshop including citations for their recommendations.

Under “Critical Thinking,” this website says:

Kurfiss (1988) has devised eight principles for designing a course that supports the development of critical thinking.

1. Critical thinking is a learned skill. The instructor, fellow students, and possibly others are resources.
2. Problems, questions, issues, values, beliefs are the point of entry to a subject and source of motivation for sustained inquiry.
3. Successful courses balance the challenge of critical thinking with the supportive foundation of core principles, theories, etc., tailored to students’ developmental needs.
4. Courses are focused on assignments using processes that apply content rather than on lectures and simply acquiring content.
5. Students are required to express ideas in a non-judgmental environment which encourages synthesis and creative applications.
6. Students collaborate to learn and stretch their thinking.
7. Problem-solving exercises nurture students’ metacognitive abilities.
8. The development needs of students are acknowledged and used in designing courses. Standards are made explicit and students are helped to learn how to achieve them.

The syllabus is a good opportunity to further explain the process of critical thinking.

Fourth, Danielle Mihram, of the Center for Excellence in Teaching from the University of Southern California offers a unique presentation which includes:

Develop a well-grounded rationale for your course
 What are its core scholarly or scientific findings and assumptions?
 What are the main points of arguments? What are the key bodies of
evidence?
 What is the course’s scope? (How does your course begin? Why does
it begin and end where it does?)
 What do you and your students do as the course unfold? (What do you lecture about or lead discussions around?)
 What are the key assignments or student evaluations?

Fifth, Creating a Syllabus from the Learner-Centered Classroom out of the University of Oregon is NOT pretty. It’s got some issues with spacing that occasionally make it hard to read.

If you like to know where ideas come from, if you need some theory to go with your practice, this is a good, short form which gives you just that.

The site includes the best description of a way in which students can be involved in creating a syllabus that I have ever seen. (Usually I think that seems a bit ridiculous. Didn’t I go to school forever for this?)

Allow students to have input into entire syllabus. Students interview each other about what they want to learn and
teacher puts that information on the board/newsprint. Teacher brings a DRAFT syllabus to the class and distributes.
Given all this, how should the course be revised?