Teaching, Learning, and Thinking through Writing

There are many reasons why writing is an indispensable avenue to education. Writing allows students to monitor learning and simultaneously engages the kinesthetic, visual, symbolic, and reflective portions of the learner’s brain. Through written assignments, instructors can embed metacognitive activities within content-rich lessons.

ISU’s Writing Center is housed in the Center for Teaching and Learning. It provides services at no charge to ISU students, staff, and faculty and employs tutoring (see NN v. 10 n. 6) as its primary method. Certified tutors will help with any writing project at any stage of the writing process. The Writing Center (1) assists students in improving the quality of any endeavor involving academic writing and (2) serves as a collaborative resource for faculty development. These services help students to write and reason effectively, and strongly support the development of writing abilities as a university-wide endeavor.

Student Support

Writing Center tutors work collaboratively with individual students. Examples of collaboration are

— discovering topics and generating ideas
— finding supporting materials
— developing and organizing
— revising
— polishing and editing.

In addition to meeting the needs of students’ course writing, the Writing Center also offers focused collaborative assistance with a range of writing problem areas such as mechanics, writer’s block, essay test taking, and preparing statements for graduate and professional school applications.

The Writing Center also offers student tutoring online via our OWL (Online Writing Lab). The OWL is a virtual writing center where students can meet with a certified tutor in a chatroom and work on writing issues and writing projects. Access the OWL through http://webct.isu.edu/public/OWL/.
Writing Center hours in Museum 434 are Monday through Thursday, 9 am — 8 pm, and Friday, 9 am — 2 pm. OWL hours vary and are available by appointment as needed. Clients should call the Center at 282-3662 to make appointments for both face-to-face and online tutoring.

Faculty Development

The Director of the Writing Center provides collaborative expertise to help faculty with the following:

— development of writing assignments appropriate to specific course objectives
— creation of accurate and efficient instruments for evaluating student writing;
— introduction of collaborative learning/writing strategies for students;
— presentations and workshops to classes on writing strategies relevant to a given assignment;
— workshops for departments or other faculty groups. Examples follow.

I. Lessening the Paperwork of Grading

This workshop assists faculty in developing their ability to assess and evaluate student writing. It demonstrates how the ease and often the fairness of paper grading are largely dependent on the design of an assignment and its criteria for grading.

II. Linking Critical Thinking Skills to Learning Through Writing

This workshop explains how writing shapes thinking and learning, and illustrates why it is important to design good writing lessons to advance critical thinking skills. Participants learn to use general principles for teaching through writing in the context of actual assignments. The workshop provides examples from across the disciplines and culminates with the design of a goal-specific writing assignment for one of their courses.

III. SAGA: Short, Audience-Directed, Goal-Oriented Writing Assignments

The SAGA workshop incorporates the evaluative aspects of Workshop #1, as faculty discuss the ways in which short, directed writing assignments help their students meet goals and objectives for their courses.

Contact Steve Adkison, Writing Center Director, at
282-4024 or at adkistep@isu.edu for further information.

   

ACCESS ISU’S ONLINE SUBSCRIPTION for the latest issue of NATIONAL TEACHING and LEARNING FORUM (v. 11, n. 6)

at http://www.ntlf.com/restricted/

(contents description below is from James Rhem in NTLF v. 11, n. 6.)

   

Editor’s note--

If variety does form the spice of life, this issue of the FORUM qualifies as spicy. It has more voices in it than most—faculty and student—and a broader range of comment and inquiry into a life in teaching and learning. That said, all these voices blend around a common stock, one made from equal parts of compassion, intelligence, and a desire to be helpful even at the risk of being wrong.

Linc. Fisch’s AD REM . . . “The Case for Failure” offers the clearest view of the commonalities I see in this issue’s contents. Of course we can learn from our mistakes, but we must have the courage to risk making mistakes, big ones, if we’re to learn the important lessons about teaching and learning. Linc. recalls the oft-cited example of Thomas Edison’s regarding his 1,000 failed experiments as triumphs in that he’d learned from them 1,000 things that did not work. Kenneth France has been luckier than Edison. In his research into what constitutes a truly “beneficial course” (research he’s been doing for 14 years now), he’s learned some fundamental elements that profit him every time he makes them the center of his reflection on his own teaching. At the same time, he’s learned in a concrete way that no single teaching technique guarantees success. In a way, one of the things I like best about France’s work is the way his findings duplicate or echo those of others. One of the criticisms often leveled against “the scholarship of teaching” is that the results are seldom replicable in the way that science experiments are. France’s work suggests that criticism has demonstrable limits.

In this issue’s CARNEGIE CHRONICLE José Alfonso Feito explores the elements of the social environment of a seminar that contribute to deep understanding. Not surprisingly many of them center on matters of trust and closeness, a sense of safety and support, things not very different from the themes common to “beneficial courses.” Now the question (or a question) becomes how to create some of these elements in all courses.

“Fun” isn’t something faculty normally see as an index of good teaching. Joe Untener disagrees. His essay on thinking about the fun he should be having leading a class touches on notions of reciprocal relationship and issues of “engagement,” now discussed with increasing frequency as essential to learning. Anna Lowe, a woman of color in a largely white school, offers a personal essay that underscores the importance of engagement by reminding us how challenging isolation can be. In many current discussions of pedagogy, we’ve come to focus on what some regard as the “softer” emotions. Whether they are in fact soft or not, Lowe’s essay again reminds us of the courage it takes to teach, as well as sheer stubborn, committed persistence.

I don’t know about you, but after I’ve done my morning routine there doesn’t really seem to be any time left for self-improvement: I’ve got work to do. And while the sense that I could always do it better, always live my life better, more happily and healthfully, there just don’t seem to be enough time and will coming together in the same moments. Ed Nuhfer’s DEVELOPER’S DIARY will come as a hopeful and helpful guide to faculty who feel about their lives as teachers as I do about mine. Ed breaks it down: if you’ve got ten minutes, here’s something positive you can do to effect improvement in your teaching; if you’ve got an hour . . . and so on. And since the good feelings that grow from small successes seem to create time (and since, as we’re told, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step), Ed’s guide may show many of us the bypass to the high road we’ve been searching the map of our days to find.

-- James Rhem