Adventures in outcomes-based assessment

In spring term I’ll be doing several things I’ve never done before. I’ll be teaching online. I’ll be one of the Syracuse instructors who are piloting new learning outcomes for our Comp 2 (sophomore-level researched writing) course. I’ll be using McGraw’s Connect as host for the work on the writing assignments in this course. Blackboard [...]

This just in from Twitter, via Facebook: Privacy Unleashed

Over on my Twitter page and on my personal Facebook account, I’ve been soliciting recommendations for a film to be watched in my Comp 2 course this spring. The course is themed on privacy–perhaps privacy and identity. (The most vote-getting film right now is The Truman Show. I’m going to watch several of these films [...]

Ten principles of teaching with a handbook

This week I have the distinct pleasure of talking with four groups of instructors who have adopted Writing Matters and will be using it this fall. We’ve talked about the Citation Project: how that research has developed concurrently with the handbook and how Writing Matters responds to the pedagogical concerns raised by the research. We’re [...]

The recycled news story, yet again. Nauseatingly.

On July 5, the New York Times offered “To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery.” Exactly one week later, it was “Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name).” Thus does the Times publish two stories that, while they have been circulated widely among educators, actually set back the cause of good teaching. Like [...]

About those videos

The McGraw team has put a couple sets of videos online. Some of these were taken in a studio, using a script I had written in which I talk about Writing Matters. Some were taken during a keynote speech I made at Bridgewater State College for the Massachusetts CONNECT conference last spring; those are on [...]

Researching the researcher

Yesterday was the Syracuse Writing Program’s annual Fall Teaching Conference, which might well be called “old faculty reorientation.” Every year we get together and talk about pressing issues in pedagogy and curriculum. This year our topic was our second required writing course, a sophomore-level course focused on research. We convened to consider ways to increase [...]

Full circle

Like most compositionists, I taught writing for the first time as a graduate student. Like many, I taught a common syllabus that the course director had designed. Like many, I learned how to teach from that syllabus; from the textbooks chosen for the course; and from the weekly staff development meetings run by the director. [...]

Tweeting grammar

Demonstrating yet another use of social networking, the Twitter feed thatwhichmatter dishes up a steady diet of all things grammatical: guidelines and rules interspersed with links to online news about grammatical events. I’ve just found this site and haven’t had time to reflect on it, but it seems to me that if you’re wanting to [...]

Here comes the fall term!

In just a month, classes will start, so I’m thinking now about how to structure my first-year writing course (FYC). I’ve always taught summary as part of my writing courses–in everything from first-year writing to graduate courses. It’s important, I think, because it’s a way of thinking critically about a text. If you can summarize [...]

ABOUT

I’m Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University, where I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rhetoric, and authorship studies. I love to coach writers, and I’m fascinated by how our culture constructs Authors (capital “A”), writers (small “w”), students (small “s”), and plagiarists (very small “p”). The capitals and lower-case letters matter [...]