CV

Recent Faculty Workshops

See Other Faculty Workshops for brief descriptions of the first five workshops listed.

I am eager to tailor faculty workshops to the specific needs and interests of the teachers that I am working with. I offer the following list to suggest the range of workshops I have led in recent years. Please email me to talk about ways I might help your faculty make stronger use of writing in the courses they design and teach.

Bringing Student Texts to the Table

While many teachers ask students to edit their writing in pairs or small groups, they still often feel unsure about how to lead a whole-class discussion of a student essay. In this workshop, I outline several ways of "bringing a student text to the table," of asking a class to talk about and learn from a draft written by one of their peers. Using examples from both recent films and my own classroom, I show teachers how to help students rethink their own work as writers through looking, in a critical yet sympathetic way, at a text written by one of their classmates. Participants leave this workshop with a new approach to using and talking about student writing in class.

Teaching the Moves of the Critical Essay

This hands-on workshop offers faculty a set of strategies for helping students make stronger use of the texts they read in the essays they write. Building on my recent book, Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, we begin by defining four key moves in writing a critical essay: coming to terms, forwarding, countering, and taking an approach. We then discuss several examples of scholars, critics, and undergraduates from various disciplines using these moves in their writing.  And we conclude by talking about how students can apply these same concepts to rethinking and revising their own work-in-progress. Faculty leave the workshop with a set of stategies for helping students make active and critical use of the materials they are asked to write about.

Making Writing Visible in the Disciplines

This workshop helps faculty across the disciplines use writing to teach the subject material of their courses. I begin by arguing that the goal of teaching writing in the disciplines (WID) is not to re-teach basic skills or grammar but to help students use writing to learn how the members of a field think and work. To do so, WID courses ask students to take on the role of apprentices in the fields they are studying. This involves making writing visible in two ways: (1) Showing students the kinds of writing—articles, reports, proposals, etc.—that members of their fields actually do; and (2) Taking time in class to talk about the writing students are themselves doing in the course. Making the writing of professionals visible changes what gets taught in a course; making the writing of students visible changes how it gets taught.

In a series of guided exercises, I help faculty define apprentice-level writing tasks in their fields, design assignments that direct students’ work on these tasks, and build the time and space into a semester needed to teach writing as a form of inquiry. Faculty leave the workshop with a sense of how to use writing to better achieve their own goals as teachers.

Responding Effectively and Efficiently to Student Writing

How do you offer advice to student writers in ways that are both efficient and effective? In this workshop, I outline an approach to responding to student work that does not require long and tedious hours of marking papers, but still offers students useful help towards revision. I describe a method for teaching students how to identify and correct errors in their writing, and I suggest some alternatives to traditional written comments on student texts—including one-on-one conferences, guided group workshops, and audio feedback. Working with a series of student drafts as examples, I help faculty learn how to respond in a focused and efficient form to the writing they assign.

Sponsoring Writing in the Undergraduate Curriculum

This workshop is designed for adminstrators or faculty who want to establish or re-energize an undergraduate writing program at their school. I outline a three-pronged approach to designing a sustainable writing curriculum: (1) reforming first-year writing, (2) making the teaching of writing part of the culture of the departments, and (3) offering support to both writing teachers and students. Drawing on our innovative work with teaching writing at Duke, I argue that developing a set of incentives for faculty to teach writing is a crucial underpinning of any successful curricular reform.