Of all the courses I teach in all the various English tracks, none are more challenging from a pedagogical perspective than the two course, First Year Composition Sequence (ENGL 1100 & 1120). There are several situational factors that make these courses far more demanding on instructors and students than other kinds of classes: the fact that most students are new to higher education when they take these courses, the fact that English majors generally test out of these classes so resistance to the subject is often significant, the amount of writing and grading students and instructors must complete, the divergent nature of the subject (there is no single "right" answer so assessment is subjective but feedback must be communicated in objective ways), and so on.

Since becoming a Lecturer I have devoted a significant amount of time to redesigning my Comp I and II courses in order to maximize my efficiency and to improve the experience for students. More specifically, my goals have been to increase the amount of feedback students receive on their writing and to clarify objectives for improvement for each writer. For myself, my goal has been to implement Dee Fink's principles of backward design in order to ensure outcomes are met while allowing greater creativity and innovation in designing projects. On a more practical level, my goal has been to invest my time spent teaching this class in the most effective ways possible, to shorten my grading time while improving the quality and clarity of the feedback students receive.



So what's changed?
I now use Active and Team Based Learning in my Composition Courses. Not only have these practices increased Attendance and Participation, student feedback indicates that Peer Reviews in this model were more enjoyable and produced some of the most valuable writing instruction. In other words, students were able to generate more and better feedback as a team than I have ever been able to do by myself as an instructor.

I have spent a lot of the past year learning and implementing new Instructional Technologies in the classroom. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to teach in the EASL (Engaged and Active Student Learning) Classrooms this year which has made using technology--especially the iPad and its numerous instructional applications--easy and meaningful for myself and my students.  

Another big change in the way I teach Composition is the implementation of an ePortfolio project in both Comp I and Comp II. In Comp I, I adapted and implemented the Integrative Knowledge Portfolio Process (IKPP) from Melissa R. Peet's original project design. Students used the ePortfolio tool here in Canvas.

 

In Comp II, students create ePortfolios using a website building platform called WIX. These portfolios showcase artifacts documenting the semester long research project students conduct and include a diverse archive of genres and texts: an audio essay, multi-modal annotated bibliography, and links to Wikipedia content they generate to share with the world (instead of just me) their developing expertise and research on a particular topic.

This summer I  volunteered with the Wikipedia Foundation to beta-test the new Wikiedu LMS and am piloting this new software into the iPad Course.

 

This is a video of a lesson introducing a project to my Composition II students. It was delivered as a micro-teaching presentation at the Biggio Center, summer 2015.