Teaching Writing in College

In this episode, I depart briefly from my series on ROCSS (to which I will return in the next episode) to share a fun experience I had with students today. We used David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon's "detect / elect / connect" framework to find opportunities to use skills from our writing class to assignments in their other classes. Writing courses, really, should be thought of as support for othe...

In the fourth episode of this multi-part series, I provide a classroom exercise I recently used to demonstrate how additional knowledge about writing can support students' use of ROCSS. In particular, I introduced students to causal arguments (from stasis theory) as a way to generate content for their current projects. Stasis theory can be particularly helpful for students because it is, to my min...

In the third episode in this series, I share a paragraph from Carolyn Miller's influential article titled "Genre as Social Action." It's a passage that has stuck with me for some time and informs my use of various genres--long and short, large and small--in my writing classes. I also go through various genre samples that I have collected over the years and can draw from as I match them up to stude...

In this second episode on a series about ROCSS, I use a page from the Merriam-Webster Children's Dictionary on my son's bookshelf to talk through the components of the acronym: Recurring Occasion, Content, Structure, and Style. ROCSS offers a powerful and memorable way to describe genres in the classroom, and varied practice with what I call a "ROCSS Analysis"--a brief genre analysis--can help lea...

In scholarship on teaching for transfer from writing studies, a strong emphasis has been placed on knowledge about genre. Arguably, it can be seen as a threshold concept that helps students (or any of us) gain access to knowledge about writing. In this episode, I offer some reasons why genre should be a dominant concept in most writing classes. I also introduce an acronym (ROCSS) that I developed...

Class time is precious, and it goes without saying that it needs to be dedicated to your curriculum. Although those minutes pass quickly, you can give students an extra benefit by dedicating about 10 minutes of class time to learning transfer. This episode offers some brief discussion and reflection prompts that any writing teacher can use to bookend whatever activities they already have planned....

This episode follows up on a discussion about the importance of practice--one of the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer's "enabling practices" that can help learners develop expertise and transfer knowledge. In this episode, I provide various examples of a skill I teach often. I call it "familiar to unfamiliar." After a brief background on where it comes from, I provide a variety of examples of ho...

In a recent episode, I covered how using AI can sometimes take the focus away from a learning task and thus short-circuit learning. In this episode, I follow up with the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer and its second "enabling practice": practice itself. Ample varied practice with a given skill can, over time, strengthen memory and aid learning transfer. Providing students with a variety of pra...

In this second of two episodes about artificial intelligence and teaching writing, I continue exploring an important concept in cognitive psychology about learning--that the mind must focus on what we want it to learn. The same is true of teaching--if we want students to learn something, we have to decide what we want the focus of our teaching to be. This episode provides a discussion of choices a...

In this first of two episodes about artificial intelligence and teaching writing, I explore an important concept in cognitive psychology about learning. This episode provides some brief  implications that could manifest as we consider encouraging students to use AI as a tool for learning or studying. The Teaching Writing in College podcast is available on Google or Apple Podcasts:Apple P...

In this episode, I share a lesson plan that helps students to use all three "dimensions" I see in the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer: Conceptual knowledge, practice, and metacognitive reflection. The lesson plan is about using PARC--proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast from The Non-designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. PARC is a very useful tool for helping learners with visual d...

In this episode, I review "Enabling Practice #1" in the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer. Enabling Practice 1 emphasizes conceptual knowledge about writing, as well as practice with that conceptual knowledge. This episode covers conceptual knowledge and how it can help learners gain expertise in writing. Enabling Practice #1 from the Elon Statement reads: "Constructing writing curricula and clas...

This episode covers one of the field's most important guiding documents: the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer. Tom provides a brief overview, along with brief thoughts about the Statement's main points. Additional episodes will break down parts of the Elon Statement, and Tom will likely refer to it often when sharing lesson plans in future episodes. The Elon Statement on Writing Transfer has bee...

In this episode on praxis, Tom shares a classroom activity that he calls a "Transfer Inventory": Students rehearse what they have learned in a writing course and then where they might apply it in their other classes. Watch Teaching Writing in College on YouTube: https://youtu.be/C8erj-r8BTk

Tom discusses "desirable difficulties," their benefits for students, and how ChatGPT responded to an assignment with desirable difficulties factored in. Desirable difficulties, as scholar Robert Bjork calls them, are forms of interference that teachers build into their teaching as a way to enhance student performance. They can be as simple as scrambling an outline or withholding feedback to allow...

Tom offers one path forward in the face of new developments in artificial intelligence: they can prompt us to hone our teaching practices, which could benefit all our students.

In this episode, Tom introduces himself, the podcast, and the direction he hopes it will take over time.