Reading Group Meeting--1/5/12

While we discussed many ideas at the reading group meeting, we wanted a major focus to be practical tips/new ideas that we could integrate into this upcoming semester. Here are some of the ideas that I wrote down (and others who were there are free to add to this list in a comment, another post, or in an addition to this post if that's possible):

• Teach students the importance of writing an effective, professional email. Take class time to do this.
• Choose a reading that you haven't read before, so you can model how to make sense of a (difficult) reading.
• First-day activity: ask the students what kind of major is likely to have the least amount of writing, then discuss (and surprise the students) with how important and awesome writing is.
• Analyze a film/tv show as a cultural artifact. This has the benefit of taking something the students are already comfortable with ("expert" at) and adding a level of analysis they usually don't get. I'm partial to in-class analyses of award-winning animated shorts, but I like the idea of a writing assignment.
• The I-Search essay as a Unit One essay.
• Have students write for thirty minutes on the back of their essays before they hand them in: what was a strong aspect of their essay, what was a weak one, and how would/will they fix it when/if they revise?
• Have students write a response to a long reading. Then have students exchange responses outside of class both as a way to test document exchanging, and as a way to respond to each others' work. This could pave the way for a out-of-class peer review.
• Have a class peer review for a sample paper. Model comments, and ask, "what if you would have gotten that comment? Would it have been helpful if you would have gotten the 'great paper' type comments?"
• After peer review, dedicate significant time to have the writers interrogate reviewers about their paper (so there's no/limited dissatisfaction with peer review).
• Have students write a reflection on the comments you made on their paper. Responding to those would be comments on comments on comments--I love it!
• Have students do a reflection on how they could have done better on peer-review/in-class discussions.