collaboration

Show Students Your Own Work

Guinea Pig

The best thing I did last semester was to show my students some of my own shitty writing. Previously, I had avoiding putting up any of my own work, not out of some kind of fear of student reactions, but because I didn't want to make the class all about me.

Still, about halfway through last semester, I got the impression my students were feeling all downtrodden and dismal about their writing. I wanted them to see that even though we grade "final" drafts, none of us, their teachers, think about writing purely in terms of product, either.

The Adapted Lesson Plan

Whiteboard and posters

I love borrowing and tweaking a good lesson plan to meet my own students’ needs. From my first formal teacher training, when I received an enormous binder of lesson plans ready to adapt, to the DWRL’s encouragement to check out its amazing database of lab member-generated plans, I’ve been lucky enough to have regular access to other teachers’ excellent ideas.

The Modified Jigsaw Classroom

jigsaw classroom

Last spring I participated in a seminar through the Center for Teaching and Learning, and one of the biweekly sessions was on effective classroom organization. I resolved to try the Jigsaw Classroom model for my Fall 2013 class.

Collaboration and Chaos

Text reading collaboration in chaos in a GoogleDoc

As long as I’ve had the pleasure of teaching in one of the DWRL class rooms I’ve flirted with the idea of using Google Docs in a classroom setting.  In-class writing assignments are certainly nothing new, but Google Docs made it possible to transform what was a space for quiet reflection into one that demanded open collaboration.

Social Writing: Done with the One-on-One

Image of journalists in the Radio-Canada/CBC newsroom in Montreal, Canada

It’s been a few months since we had Criterion co-founder and innovator extraordinaire, Bob Stein, on campus, and since his visit I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the things he had the say. For those of you who missed it, Stein was showcasing a few new projects related to the future of the book, centered on the idea of social reading (you can hear Zeugma’s great interview with him here.

Game Controllers and Course Design

Black Playstation controller

So, I've been thinking this week about controllers and controls. The Playstation 4 controller was announced, and there are some significant changes in the design that speak to the changing nature of gaming in general. The new controller has a touch screen and a color-coded light bar to identify different players. Most significant to this post, though, is the missing 'Select' and 'Start' buttons. Since the 1980s, these buttons have been standard on most game controllers, and Sony's decision to replace them with the 'Share' and 'Options' button signals a shift in video games' focus.

Class Discussion and Writing Due Dates

New Yorker cover featuring a blurry drawing overlaid with a graphic indicating the image is loading

This semester I’m teaching a composition class centered around The New Yorker magazine. The impetus for this course was that I wanted my students, who grew up with the immediate culture of the internet, to spend hours musing over longer arguments, and then try and rearticulate those arguments in a critical manner. This is a difficult task when one’s being bombarded with tweets and texts all the time from friends, as I know most twenty-first century students are.

Encouraging Class Participation with Google Docs

Graphic comparing Google Docs and Enterprise 2.0 platforms

Classroom dynamics can vary widely from one group of students to the next. This fact has really struck home now that I’m teaching two sessions of Rhetoric and Writing: “Disability in Pop Culture.” I walk into both classes with the same lesson plans, with (one of) the same interpreters, and with the same kinds of technology available. Many variables are different; different buildings, different classroom space (in terms of size), one interpreter is different, different days, different time of day (although both take place in the afternoon).

Hidden Collaboration: The Internet, Syllabi-Making, Assignment-Planning, & YOU!

Standing among bookshelves, a woman holds an open book with bright lights shooting out of it

We’re a few weeks into the fall semester now, and I’ve just finished hammering out my assignments for E 314L: “Banned Books” using lots of in-person feedback from my peers and my teaching mentor, along with tons of help from resources on the internet. While talking about assignments and syllabi over a hot beverage with friends and colleagues is my cup of tea, the online resources I used were absolutely indispensible for coming up with the specifics of my assignments.

Distributed Peer Review

A student peering at the work of another student

What is the purpose of peer review? Whom is it meant to benefit? 

Blogging in the Classroom: Peer Review Plus Camaraderie!

Screenshot of course blog for Rhetoric of Suburbs and Slums

As a student myself in Dr. Lester Faigley’s Visual Rhetoric class four years ago, we used Blackboard’s “Forum” feature to initiate online discussions about our readings while sitting in front of computers in the same classroom. I remember how invigorating it was to respond to my classmates’ posts as they wrote them. I also found that having a written record of my thoughts on the readings served as great review for when I wanted to refer to theories from these readings later in the course. In Dr.

Communication in the Classroom

Two woman conversing in an art gallery

This semester I wanted to develop the Mass Effect lesson I devised in the fall.

Licensing

Creative Commons License
All materials posted to this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. We invite you to use and remix these materials, but please give credit where credit is due. In addition, we encourage you to comment on your experiments with and adaptations of these plans so that others may benefit from your experiences.

 

User login