Purpose: This evening when you go home, please do an inventory of the course you’ve decided to enhance with writing. Use the questions in Engaging Ideas, p. 78, to help you formulate your inventory. You’ll be asking yourself, “What kinds of writing tasks could I add to or change in this course, to enhance my students’ critical thinking?” You purpose is only to speculate about some of the possibilities that Engaging Ideas suggests, NOT to come up with a fully developed plan. So write informally.
Keep the questions on p. 78 in mind as you skim through Chapter 6 (“Informal, Exploratory Writing” 97-118) and Chapter 12 (“Engagement and Inquiry in Research” 197-214). Please take a look as well at setting up a collaborative paper, 180-81 in Chapter 10. These two chapters and the Chapter 10 excerpt suggest how to design writing tasks that help your students think through course content and do research more critically, while not increasing your workload.
Role and audience: Address your inventory to your workshop colleagues, who are considering their own courses. You should include an interactive component. Feel free to express concerns or raise questions that you think your colleagues might be entertaining about their courses as well. You can point out ideas and rationales for writing activities that you’re speculating about, but want feedback on. You should see your inventory as a stimulus to workshop discussion. But play the “believing game” as well. Consider that Engaging Ideas has many potentially useful techniques. In sum, your task is to figure out which ones make the most sense to try--especially if you want to build upon or tweak good ideas that you already use.
Format: The questions on p. 78 provide a basis as well as a format for thinking through the ideas you consider from Chapters 6 & 12. But feel free to use bulleted lists, charts, or whatever else that helps organizes your inventory and makes it easily read by others. Restrict the inventory to 1 or 2 typed pages. ALSO!! Bring copies (for you, for readers in your group, for me).
Expectations: So here, in sum, is what you’ll do—
We’ll get into small groups to share your inventory. You might want to bring along any notes you jotted down in the process of reading the chapters and formulating your piece. It would be especially useful to make marginal notes in the chapters so that we can also refer to them when we talk about “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts.”
- Read the questions, p. 78
- Skim through Chapters 6 &12 & the Chapter 10 excerpt
- Determine how you’ll format your inventory
- Compose your inventory
Criteria for Evaluation: Of course there won’t be any attempt to grade this inventory, but after tomorrow’s group work, you’ll evaluate how useful it was for you to: