Course & Unit Planning (Blog 5)

I think I'd like to plan out Unit 3 -- the collaborative project where students choose a book to read as a class, read and discuss in their groups, then design a group presentation AND write a group paper. I've never done a collaborative project quite this in depth before (and I think for a FYC class, as opposed to developmental, I'd require a group presentation but separate essay). And how to manage class time will be tricky because I want the groups to have time to meet and discuss during class, so that they can ask me any questions as they arise and I so I can monitor group dynamics (is everyone showing up? is everyone participating and contributing?). During this unit, however, there will also be outside readings that play off of the semester theme and hopefully speak to the different books being read in diverse and potentially interesting ways. I'll need to choose these readings carefully, so as not to overwhelm developmental students who may be reading a novel or story collection on their own for the first time. Anyway, since this is the trickiest unit of the semester and requires the most scaffolding, I think it's a valuable place to plan early (ie, now).

Course & Unit Planning (Blog 4)

Course Description Brainstorm

I really like the very-graphic course description from SUNY Suffolk (http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/eatonc/eg11-syllabus-villanti.pdf). The course description, which the instructor rightly calls a "course packet" is far more in depth than I'm used to seeing from a course description, but I imagine it was a very useful introduction for the class. Especially as it appears some sections are held online. Now that I've seen this, I'll consider something similarly graphic'd out and detailed in the future.

Course Description:
Welcome to Developmental Writing! This intensive, collaborative course is designed to prepare students for college-level reading and writing activities and is usually taken in preparation for English 1A (College Composition). This semester, we will tackle questions of place and identity--how is our identity shaped by the places we visit and live, and how might these places be changed and shaped by our presence? Our reading will include essays, news articles, fiction, memoirs and even a play. And of course we will write...a lot! Lists, free-writes, journal entries, narratives, proposals, definitions and analyses--bring plenty of paper and pens each day because nothing is too big or too small for us to write about.

Grading Methodology:
Participation: 10%
attendance, participate in discussion, classwork and peer review
Journal: 20%
reading journal, in-class prompts, pre-writing (collected and graded at midterm and two weeks before end of term)
Group Project: 20%
dialectical journal, discussion notes, group paper and class presentation
Portfolio: 50%   
4 essays taken through draft, mid-draft and revision, weighted as follows...

• narrative - 10%
• analysis/response - 10%
• proposal - 15%
• semester synthesis - 15%

Course & Unit Planning (Blog 3)

Okay, I'm going to re-vamp what I did last week to move from a very FYC course to something more appropriate for Developmental Writing at SJCC. We will still work with the theme of "Place and Identity."

Unit one:  Personal Narrative Essay (a place that has some significance for you)

Unit two:  Analysis/Personal Response (analyze The House on Mango Street for the role of place AND respond using your own experience of a place that impacted you)

Unit three:  Book Club (group presentation of a group-chosen novel, memoir or story collection--approximate length 250 pp--that includes themes of place and identity AND a synthesis essay on the role of place in the chosen book and other readings from class)

Unit four:  Proposal (argument assignment involving some research: propose a revitalization project or other new use of a space in your community; support your proposal with research about the space, the community, and readings from class about community spaces) 

Unit five:  Definition/Semester Synthesis (Synthesize semester readings and your own deep thinking about place and identity. What is your understanding of the role of place in the formation of your own identity? Can this be extended into a universal understanding or definition of the significance of place?)

Course & Unit Planning (Blog 2)

1. ·       Develop an organized essay reflecting sentence variety, syntactic complexity, and paragraph efficiency using expository or argumentative rhetorical modes
2. ·       State a thesis and support it with evidence drawn from personal experience, observations, and readings
3. ·       Generate, plan, and write impromptu essays and other in-class writing assignments within a limited amount of time
4. ·       Edit compositions in order to remove mechanical errors such as punctuation, spelling, and capitalization
5. ·       Demonstrate the ability to read and comprehend beginning college level reading materials and to use them as a springboard for their own writing
6. ·       Review and practice rhetorical modes with an emphasis on the argumentative essay
7. ·       Demonstrate control of the sentence
8. ·       Display vocabulary appropriate to beginning college level English.

SLOs vs My Philsophy 

I have posted above the SLOs for Developmental Writing at San Jose City College, where I teach. I am using these SLOs for my course design because I am more likely to teach Developmental Writing at SJCC in the future (and I have taught it there in the past). 

There are some obvious disparities between SJCC and SFSU when it comes to the conception of FYC.

The biggest discrepancy between SJCC and SFSU is a lack of true IRW thinking at SJCC, and I think this holds true for many of the San Francisco Bay Area community colleges. Community college districts simply lag behind universities and current research in their practice of reading and writing instruction. In fact, at SJCC, the Reading Department mandates the use of workbooks to teach reading skills. I bring this up because the entrenched separation of Reading and Writing at my college results in a pretty big area of concern. Were my syllabus audited in any serious way by the administration, they would discover a heavy reading load and students practicing reading skills that have been otherwise relegated to a Reading Class. My wiggle-room lies in SLO #5, that students in Developmental Writing should leave the class able to comprehend beginning (posh!) college-level materials and use these readings to generate writing.

Another area of friction between myself at the SLOs comes up in #6, that the class should emphasize the argumentative essay. This beast called the “argumentative” essay is not, I think, the primary mode of discourse that students will actually be required to write in their other disciplines (does one write “argumentative essays” in Science, Philosophy, History, Psychology? An argument might be made, but the genre assigned is much more traditional-academic than that). For my conception of "the argumentative essay," my syllabus includes a unit in which students write a “proposal” for the new use of an old space, and we will necessarily discuss pathos, ethos, logos and kairos in this context. The final essay, also, asks students to craft and defend an argument surrounding their conception of “place and identity.” Although this is not an argumentative essay in that it does not lobby for gun control or the legalization of marijuana using a 5-paragraph format, it requires a more sophisticated use of argumentation and essay crafting that I hope the students will be able to translate into other argumentative-style writing in their future coursework. 

Course & Unit Planning (Blog 1)

Draft Teaching Philosophy:

Reading: Reading is a complex process where students interpret texts through an individual lens to generate meaning. Learning to read is a process by which the reader discovers avenues for interacting with a variety of texts, including pathways for choosing texts and different modes of response.

Students should read an array of college-level texts that includes multiple genres (short fiction, memoir or literary non-fiction, academic articles and social commentaries or editorials from Salon, The Huffington Post, New York Times, etc.). Students are given avenues for choice throughout the semester, such as selecting a longer text to read with a group of peers and the format for an associated reading/writing project.

Writing: Writing is the action of expressing one's ideas and understanding of the world through a socially constructed system of symbols. Learning to write requires both the mastery of specific cognitive skills and interpersonal skills as they relate to the larger human conversation. Furthermore, learning to write requires practice of multiple forms in varying contexts for writing. 

Writing situations for FYC build upon one another, leading students toward mid- to late- semester assignments meant to synthesize personal experience, classroom inquiry and outside texts. Through writing, students are introduced to the dialectical nature of the academic community and “real world” contexts for writing. Formal writing assignments for Developmental FYC can be categorized as: narrative, analysis, synthesis (with and without personal response), and an argument or proposal.

IRW: Reading is beneficial both for modeling modes of writing and as a launching point for writing topics. Writing in turn can benefit the understanding of reading by activating schema (pre-writing) and synthesizing/funneling reactions to texts (post-writing). 

Reading is accompanied by annotation and dialectical journals. Pre-writing activates schema prior to reading and post-writing moves students into class discussion. Writing takes place in response to texts. 

Cognition:  Students develop cognitive skills by interacting with texts and with each other in order to deepen their understanding of what they think, how they think and why they have come to think in those ways. 

Academic Community: Developmental students become members of the academic community by learning the expectations of college-level courses, the language of the community and the dialectical nature of the classroom. 

Students will develop academic, college-level skills in reading, writing and citizenship through exposure to academic-level reading and writing assignments and clear classroom expectations. Class time will be spent on a mix of individual writing (freewriting, journal responses), small and large group discussion stemming from the course inquiry, and collaborative reading and writing projects.