A Unique Opportunity > Tara King, Professor in Legal Studies

We are very fortunate at Kaplan to have many faculty and adminis-trators who understand what the WAC program provides. Our students recently named the KU Writing Center as one of the most useful resources available to them. In addition, the WAC-GEL program will be instrumental in building the writing skills of our students to help them apply appropriate writing skills in their chosen professions. By 2009, all of our courses will contain a writing component that will be approved by the Communications Literacy Committee to more effectively bring written communication to our students in all of their courses, and not merely in the composition courses. This represents a significant shift that fulfills part of the promise we made to potential students in our recent advertisements; however, we have a unique opportunity to make these writing assignments more meaningful for our students.

Most writing instructors would agree that writing skills cannot be effectively learned in one or two courses, which is one of the reasons that WAC and WID programs have become so popular in colleges and universities across the country. However, traditional colleges and universities have a wide variety of instructors and philosophies that can often deter students from building upon their writing skills because of the confusion that these differences bring. At Kaplan, we can use our centralized course development to improve writing instruction. We could also improve retention in our composition courses because students would not be expected to learn everything about writing in one or two courses, so the pressure would be lessened.

Currently, the majority of our writing assignments focus on content and development, which is the generally accepted composition standard. Unfortunately, there is no developmental writing course on the horizon, which leaves many of our students scrambling to learn too many skills all at once. Instead, we could use our WAC GEL program to bring some of those developmental skills to the forefront in earlier writing assignments. For instance, in the first two or three blocks of classes, some of the most common grammar errors (fused sentences, comma splices, fragments, subject-verb agreement) and paragraph development could be the focus. Classes that aren’t necessarily writing intensive could include quizzes to emphasize and build upon these skills. Though other skills, such as introductions, thesis statements, and transitions would still appear in the rubric, students would be scored more rigorously on these basic skills, providing an opportunity to build those skills and to focus on them more within those courses. Assignments, lectures, or discussions could be structured around what it means to build different paragraphs for different situations. Then, of course, in the next two or three blocks of classes, we could build on these skills, adding a few more grammar concepts and other writing elements. Much like their math classes, students would start to see more clearly the differences in the types of writing as well as the building blocks of effective writing overall.

Finally, instructors would have an opportunity to focus on specific skills in specific courses. Knowing that students are being taught a wide variety of skills would allow instructors to be more focused in a 100-level course, and it would also give them a particular set of expected standards for students in a 200-level course or higher. No other school that I know of has been organized in such a way with regard to writing skills. To use our organization and the wide array of talents that exist at Kaplan to create such a program could truly change the way that we teach and the way that students learn.

[This article was originally published in our July, 2009 issue.]