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Sample Lessons and Syllabi
This page contains documents associated with a midterm writing assessment activity, a few assignment handouts and syllabi from various courses, a few typical daily course presentations I offer my students, and a Web site that I developed and used to support a couple of my courses in the past.
Writing Assessment Activity
This midterm writing assessment activity asks students to complete a worksheet designed to get them to show and reflect on specific work they've done as writers and assessors in our course. Each student brings his/her completed worksheet to our midterm conference. The student then talks me through essay revisions, the competing assessments on the essay, and revisions made to his/her assessment of a colleague's paper. The sheet focuses on the following activities:
- revisions to a section of an essay already written,
- reasons for those revisions (discussion of improvement),
- assessors comments/judgements on the paragraph(s) revised,
- revisions to an assessment document written for a colleague,
- reasons for those revisions (discussion of improvement),
- future writing and assessment strategies.
This assignment is predicated on several interlocking, student-driven activities, typically revolving around one essay and several colleagues' assessments of it. Over a two-three week period, we do the following activities:
- construct and test an assessment rubric (sample rubric),
- assess essays using the rubric,
- conduct assessment dialogues in class,
- revise essays and discuss examples as a class,
- reflect on assessment (example of an Internet prompt),
- assess the essay revisions (example of assessment structure),
- discuss in class a formal assessment example,
- revise formal assessments.
This activity illustrates the way I approach writing/revising/assessment processes, collaboration, conflict/difference, and reflection. The goal is to get students to engage in a variety of meta-discursive and reflective activities that lead to critical praxis.
Sample Syllabi
Below are a few sample syllabi from recent courses I've taught, except for the CES 413. I
assissted Dr. Rory Ong in a similar course, and as part of an independent study I developed my
own syllabus for the course, CES 413, which is presented here. Each are Word documents.
Presentations
The following are typical of the daily presentations, done in PowerPoint, that structure activities in my classes. While certainly a lot more happens that is not discernable from slides and other class materials, you should get a sense of what typically happens in my classes, how students are encouraged to be in the center of all discussions and activities, and what my role as facilitator looks like. In addition to the Engl 301 course, I’ve also included one presentation from a condensed, four-week Engl 101 summer course.
Each presentation’s “Overview” slide provides the approximate time we took for each activity listed and covered in the presentation. These times were not included in the original, in-class presentation (I’ve included them here for your convenience); otherwise, all presentations listed are exactly as I used them in class. I’ve also included the important class documents, handouts, and other supporting materials mentioned in the presentations, or produced by that day’s activities.
NOTE: You will need PowerPoint or a PowerPoint viewer to view the presentation slides on this page.
This presentation was early in the semester. During this week we constructed our first version of a rubric, which this day’s activities initiated. We tested it on a paragraph assignment, written a few days later, then assess them using a revised version of the rubric produced on this class day.
This presentation provides the in-class prompts I ask my students to respond to for each essay students write and post for the class to read and provide assessments for. In this class, we responded to these prompts (in addition to writing up handwritten assessments of each paper in preparation for that day’s class), then discussed each as a class. The last four slides on the Omi and Winant reading were notes for my students to consider between this class and the next.
This presentation takes the class through some of their reflections, posted on the Internet a few days before, and Aristotle’s Poetics. Most of the class session was a discussion based on the final prompt on slide 9.
I developed this Web Site for two of my Engl 301 courses, as well as used it for general information purposes for students and others. It offers a comprehensive set of materials, class-developed rubrics, handouts, presentations and other course related materials. I've also used WebCT and Blackboard for similar purposes. This site might offer some additional contextualization for my pedagogy.
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