Last week Diana and I ran our first faculty development workshop of the semester. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it was on helping students develop thesis statements. We both are pretty content with the turnout as well as the level of engagement. We found it especially helpful to keep the content of the workshop limited to a few major points and as many hands-on exercises as possible. In a workshop last semester we were so eager to give as much information about high-stakes writing as we could that we ended up overwhelming our participants a little. This time we decided to focus on one very specific but important issue (thesis statements) and go into more depth with it. First, we presented the faculty with examples of good and weak thesis statements and asked them to formulate essay questions that would generate each example. Then, we worked with their existing assignments by asking them what would be a good thesis statement that they would like to read in students’ papers and how they can revise their questions to generate that statement. We were all quite engaged in the exercises and even had fun.
Next one is on responding to students’ writing. Any suggestions?
Nida and Diana,
Do you already know John Bean’s excellent book *Engaging Ideas*? It’s addressed to faculty across the curriculum. His chapter 14, Writing Comments on Students’ Papers, is excellent, as is chapter 4, Dealing with Issues of Grammar & Correctness. I particularly like the section from chapter 4 on p. 59 titled “What Teachers Across the Curriculum Need to Know about Recent Studies of Errors” and have proferred photocopies of it to faculty whenever I sensed an opening, no matter how narrow.
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