Workshops & Consultations
Writing Instruction Workshops
To help faculty in addressing questions about the teaching of writing, we would be happy to schedule a workshop on any of these topics:
Reflecting on writing goals and designing assignments to meet them: Assists faculty in making explicit their own goals and standards for student writing. Explores the potential uses of writing to achieve learning goals. Helps in the design of assignments directly linked with learning goals and feasible in terms of time to assign and evaluate.
Responding to student writing: Brings faculty together to read and discuss sample student writing, and to share opinions about criteria for excellence in discipline-specific genres. Introduces faculty to various kinds of response, including strategies for time-efficient evaluation and grading.
Writing assignments for high-enrollment classes: Introduces a range of short writing assignments designed for large lecture sections. Emphasizes uses of writing for communication between students and teacher and for student reflection on course material.
Process writing and peer editing: Introduces process-writing practices, including sequencing short writing assignments and breaking longer projects into small parts. Also presents ways to use collaborative peer groups to manage process writing effectively.
Collecting print and electronic resources for researching and writing in specific fields: Enables faculty to share resources for student research and discover new sourcesósome geared toward the teaching of writing in specific disciplines and others created especially for students.
Individual, Group, or TA Consultations
In addition to group workshops, we would be happy to meet with individual faculty members, administrators, TAs or students in one-on-one or small group consultations. The Campus Writing Coordinator offers consultation in the following areas:
1. working with departments (or other units) to develop coordinated writing plans for undergraduate majors;
2. assisting individual faculty in the disciplines with writing instruction in any upper-division course (both “W” courses and others), including help designing assignments, sequencing long writing assignments, responding to student writing, coordinating TA support, and organizing in-class writing activities (such as peer review); and,
3. assessing upper-division writing.
In a long-term consultation, the Writing Coordinator or Writing Consultant may attend class sessions (at the instructor’s request) in order to
*make suggestions about ways to incorporate writing into the syllabus (from small write-to-learn assignments to more substantial projects),
*provide feedback on the design of existing writing assignments,
*work with students (one or one, in small groups, or the whole class) on drafts, peer review, writing techniques, and grammar and mechanics.
Our staff is happy to carry out research tasks related to writing instruction, seeking out resources on writing in a particular discipline at the instructor’s request (pedagogical articles, textbooks, exercises, etc.) and reviewing or annotating them, suggesting which ones might be most useful for the particular context of that