The Writing Across the Curriculum Steering Committee welcomes you back into the classroom and, we hope, back to promoting to your students the values of writing as a means of learning the course content. We wish to thank those who have officially designated their courses this semester as WR, and to nudge the rest of you to nonetheless make student writing a component of your classroom practices.
Incorporating writing into your classroom doesn’t have to mean more formal essays, more grading, more work. Consider informal Writing-to-Learn activities that are not always graded. Such writing won’t take away from course content because it becomes one way that students engage with content in order to draw connections and make meaning—all those things about active learning that all of us value. Also, when students do even just a little bit of writing in every course they take, it delivers an important message: written communication does not only matter for some disciplines; it matters for all. See “Writing as Instructional Practice” by Stephen A. Bernhardt [https://www.nea.org/home/34959.htm] for more.
Need inspiration? Here are some Writing-to-Learn ideas to try this semester:
Annotations
Blackboard discussions/blogs/wikis
Case studies
Drafting tasks
Entrance and Exit slips
Explanations [of concepts, problem-solving, etc.]
Freewriting
Graphic organizers
Handwritten note-taking
Journals
Learning logs
Letters
Micro-themes
Peer reviews
Post-discussion or -exam debriefing papers
Pre- and post-lecture activities
Pre-test warm-ups
Problem statements
Project notebooks
Reflections/responses
Short answer exams
Summaries
The WAC Steering Committee is here to assist and support you when it comes to the integration of writing in all disciplines. Please visit our website [https://www.monroecc.edu/depts/wac/] for more information, including who we are and how to reach us.
Here’s to a productive semester!
Amy Burtner English/Philosophy 01/26/2015 |