Teaching Writing in College

For episode 36, I share a helpful acronym from Richard Fulkerson called the STAR criteria. STAR can prompt learners (or all of us) to ask: is my support sufficient, typical, accurate, and relevant? STAR can also be helpful for writing transfer. While I've used the STAR criteria to help students make decisions about support or evidence they might use in an essay, Substack, report or any other writt...

Questions about whether and how AI is used in writing and other communication seem to be an important part of the writer/audience relationship. In this episode, I walk through my effort to include transparency as a form of knowledge about writing. With transparency as a frame, this semester I have shared two strategies with my students that can help them be transparent in their use of AI.Teaching...

In episode 34, I consider another way of looking at my success with AI in the classroom: through assessment. To my mind, AI has imposed a great deal of guesswork into assessment of student writing: "Did my student write this, or was it written by AI?" Since AI is here to stay as part of just about anyone's writing ecosystem, it's important to focus on what really matters: "Is writing being written...

In this episode, I share a short lesson plan I used to begin a conversation with students about AI on the first day of classes. I showed them an AI-generated ad that stirred some controversy, we had a brief discussion regarding students' judgments about the ethics of AI use, and then I also introduced some of my own. I hope you find this short(er) episode helpful!

In this long overdue episode, I'm excited to share my own recent classroom success. After coaching and encouragement on my part, notetaking on my students' part, and then asking students to pull their laptops out periodically for several drafting sessions for their rhetorical analysis papers, the result was very little AI use. On this episode, I'll talk through how I feel I know and how I went abo...

After my first week of teaching this semester, it's time for a report. I promised to share my AI policy, which will be first up in this episode. I'll also share my classroom "coaching" report. Earlier this summer, I discussed the possibility of adapting the way in which my favorite workout trainers try to motivate me to stay focused for the duration of my workouts. Did I do a good job during the f...

Electronic technologies have been embedded in classrooms for decades, but the emergence of genAI has prompted some professors to resort back to handwritten assessments, such as bluebooks and notes. The concern, of course, is cognitive offloading--that an overreliance on genAI for learning tasks short-circuits the learning process by taking away opportunities for cognitive processing.  In this...

As a follow up to episode 28, I made a plan to introduce reflection about genAI on my first day of classes. I start by reviewing a post I encountered on social media that got me thinking in more detail about asking students to reflect on genAI. From there, I present the new lesson plan and then offer several more ideas for learning about genAI as the semester progresses. And, let's face it: I'll b...

As my start date for fall semester draws nearer, I've started thinking in more detail about the kinds of knowledge students need to help them with writing. The distinction Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle made in 2007 concerning the need to *learn about* writing--as opposed to *learning to write*--has resonated with me for a long time. And now, I'd argue that the same idea applies to AI--it's not t...

In this continuation of reflection on my teaching, I present (briefly) the basic routine I use for developing lesson plans: review, launch, deliver, apply, and close (RLDAC). From there, I share two full lesson plans that I described in episode 26: one that I have traditionally used to introduce learners to the rhetorical concept of presence from Chaim Perelman, and the other an adjusted version t...

As a follow-up to episode 25, I outline changes to one of my existing lesson plans to keep student learning focused on the rhetorical strategy of presence. This episode includes a brief rehearsal about how context is central to writing, a brief anecdote of successful teaching with the rhetorical concept of presence, and a before/after explanation of how I plan to adapt an existing lesson plan to s...

Parsing the differences between writing from genAI and writing from people can be frustrating or intimidating. But it can also be fruitful for thinking about how humans and machines handle (or don't handle) context. In this episode, I use the rhetorical concept of "presence" from Chaim Perelman to compare a piece of my own writing to a piece from ChatGPT. This comparison helps highlight different...

In this first episode of my summer reflection series, I explore the need for both learners and teachers to position themselves as "accomplished novices"--people who are not complete novices, but also who are not absolute experts. In the space between those two extremes, one can develop a fruitful mindset for learning by acknowledging and valuing prior knowledge and experiences while also recognizi...

Teaching Writing in College is now available on Spotify! (Please see below.)Episode 23 is a continuation of a discussion in Episode 21 about what I call the "Penny Principle"--a name I have given to a method for learning (and teaching) source citations that I derived from Nickerson and Adams' 1979 study in the journal Cognitive Science. In this episode, I walk through a few lesson plans I've used...

In this long overdue episode, I offer thoughts in response to a recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education called "In the Age of AI, Is Education Just an Illusion?" In the article, author Dan Sarofian-Butin compares the current state of teaching in higher education to the concept of kayfabe in the world of pro wrestling, in which fans and wrestlers alike pretend that it's real but know...

Earlier this week, I came across a discussion on Facebook that questioned assumptions about citing sources--especially in an academic way. Importantly, a lot of students who take our classes might not cite sources in an academic setting once they leave college, so why all the (sometimes intense) emphasis on academic formats like MLA or APA? This episode introduces a skill I call "The Penny Princip...

For a while now, I've thought of metacognition as something that can and should be taught as a skill. (I was reminded of this by a podcast episode from The Happiness Lab.) In this episode, I share a reflective exercise based on some of the 8 subcomponents of metacognition that were developed by Gwen Gorzelsky, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Joe Paszek, Ed Jones, and Carol Hayes in Chris Anson and Jessie Moor...

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...