One thing that I hear from instructors who do not teach writing courses is that they sometimes don’t know how to help their students improve their writing skills. Even as a composition instructor, I have had students for whom I have struggled to find the right method, the technique that finally “clicks.” As instructors, we don’t have to do and be everything to our students, and pointing our students to resources outside of our classes is one of the best and most useful techniques we can add to our teaching arsenals.
The Writing Center has a host of terrific resources that instructors can incorporate into their courses and their feedback. Though it may take some time in the initial stages to set up these comments and links, once it’s set up, it takes just a click of the mouse or a couple of keystrokes to insert them into a student’s paper as one grades.
First, it’s important to know just what the Writing Center offers and where to find each resource. The Writing Center’s home is linked under “My Studies” on KU Campus. From there, students can access Live Tutoring services, a Q & A Center, Paper Review, Writing Workshops and Recordings, and the Writing Reference Library. Instructors can link to these services through Announcements and the Webliography in their courses. I also regularly mention the Writing Center in discussion boards to remind students that the resource exists. I always post a PDF file that explains to students how to access these different services, as well. Students can print the file so that it is at hand as they navigate the site. Seeing instructors promoting the Writing Center’s services will bring them to the attention of students. It will also tell students that their writing is important and that the instructor encourages improvement.
Too, we want to do more than just send students to the Writing Center to get paper reviews. Though it is an invaluable tool that we should encourage our students to use, paper review can be a passive activity. Students’ writing improves more when they become active participants in their learning, as they do with anything. Promoting the other services of the Writing Center encourages active engagement from our students.
Encouraging other, more interactive, services can foster a sense of responsibility in students for their own education. The Q & A Center allows students to post questions about any writing related topic. The service works much like a message board, and students receive answers to their questions quickly. With Live Tutoring, students chat with a tutor in real time to get help with any writing issues they may have. They can get help with thesis statements, APA formatting and documentation, or any other writing related issue. Tutors will work with students until they are more comfortable and confident. They will also direct students to helpful resources through the Writing Reference Library. Reminding students that these services exist by linking to them in our announcements and mentioning them in discussions and paper feedback helps students realize that we value these tools and that they can and will benefit from them. The more students see and hear something, as we all know, the more likely they are to eventually use it.
While we should support our students seeking help from the other services, the Writing Reference Library is the easiest of the resources to incorporate into feedback on student writing assignments. Divided into four areas—Writing Types and Tools, The Writing Process, Research, Citation and Plagiarism, and Writing Mechanics—the tutorials involve any number of writing issues. There are also tutorials to help students create effective PowerPoint presentations and make use of the formatting features in Microsoft Word. I link to the tutorials in all of my feedback to students, in fact. They offer such thorough explanations and step-by-step instructions and guidance that they provide some of the best instruction on writing that I can imagine.
To link to these resources, I use a clipboard utility that allows me to save innumerable clips to simply paste into papers when needed. A quick Internet search will return several different programs, many of which are free. I took a few days to typeup comments to go along with the links, copied the links, and added an appropriate title and category. Now, whenever I grade student papers, I can simply paste the appropriate clip into the student paper. All the student needs to do to access the tutorial is to click the link in his or her paper.
Paper feedback is also a place where I draw students’ attention to the other resources that are offered through the Writing Center one more time. I refer them to the services, include a bit of information about each, and encourage them to make use of those services before the next paper is due. Including these links and this encouragement to use the Writing Center has resulted in far more of my students doing so and in a great deal of improvement in student writing. I have also had students reach out to me to tell me about how useful both the feedback I offer and the help they receive from our Writing Center has been.
Many times, our students are unaware of the many services and opportunities available to them as Kaplan University students. If we can make them aware of the Writing Center and encourage its use, many students will use it. In turn, they will tell their classmates. In my own classes, it’s the word of their classmates that really makes a difference to some students, and if I can get even a couple of students to use the Writing Center through my feedback, announcements and links, I will end up with a large number eventually using it based on the positive reviews of others. For instructors, these small steps will save time and headaches.
Did you know…
Robin Nicks is an avid Vampire Wars player on Facebook? She has a real live 13.5 year old black cat. Halloween is her favorite day of the year...okay, we’re getting the picture. And the title of her dissertation was Fairy Tales and Necrophilia: A New Cultural Context for Antebellum American Sensationalism. Now we’ve got the whole picture! Robin is a Composition Professor in the School of Business and Management at Kaplan University.
[This article was originally published in our September, 2009 issue.]
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment