Best practices for teaching writing (Fenrich, Weinberg First-Year Dean)
Based on his experience in coordinating the FS program, Lane Fenrich offers the following advice as best practices for teaching writing in first-year seminars.
1. Don’t assume anything. Believe it or not, eighteen-year-olds (and even many older folk) don’t understand what we mean by “making an argument.” Many aren’t clear either on what it means to cite sources. And so on. It’s up to us to walk them through our process from the ground up.
2. Keep reading assignments manageable. Your goal should not be cultivating mastery over a particular topic so much as honing students’ critical skills and introducing them to the art of academic conversation. Shorter readings are often far more successful in this regard than lengthier ones—although “short” doesn’t have to mean “fluffy.”
3. Shorter, more frequent writing assignments often work better than longer, less frequent ones. The more students write—and the more often they engage their professors’ minds via written and oral feedback—the more their writing improves and the more they take away from the seminar. Of course, this only works if feedback is timely…
4. Build in opportunities for revision. The Writing faculty is insistent on this point: students need to be taught to think about writing in terms of subsequent drafts. (Revision means many things: it’s important to be clear--and realistic—about your expectations. If a student needs to work on grammar, syntax, sentence structure, or paragraphing don’t also expect her to make major substantive changes.)
5. Consider building in peer review. Some instructors ask students to trade papers with one or two other students and then identify what they think best about each paper and what could be improved. (It’s often best to start by asking students to identify one another’s thesis statements…) Others have had luck requiring one or more students a week to post their papers on blackboard for the group to read before one of the sessions. Whatever the strategy, there is perhaps no better way to train student writers to think about audience than to have them read and react to one another’s writing.
