Institute/Session Summary:

This session will focus on five ways to engage students quickly and effectively in a developmental writing course. All five techniques are ways that the presenter has engaged her students over the past four years of teaching developmental writing and all the techniques have been found to be of use with different ability levels, learning styles, and student interests.

Learning objectives:

1. Participants will take away one or two ideas to invigorate their own teaching practice
2. Participants will consider alternative ways of approaching subject matter that might otherwise be off-putting for students (grammar, for example)
3. Participants will think outside the box in terms of incorporating various student learning preferences in classroom activities.

Content that will be covered include the following learning activities:

1. Setting the tone on the first day: icebreakers and expectations. The presenter will lead the group through a brief icebreaker that she uses on the first day of class, as well as briefly discuss the subsequent conversation that she has in the class about expectations for the course.
2. Acting out: students are invited to participate in a number of dramatization activities throughout the semester in the presenter’s classes. These activities include acting out action from poetry, participating in verb charades to gain a better understanding of the active role of verbs in sentences, acting out book scenes from the novel that’s read each semester, and being invited to dramatize short essays as part of a reading extension portfolio.
3. Reading presentations: students are invited to engage in short essays of their choosing from a textbook and then work in groups to find some creative and media based way to present the main ideas from the text. The presenter will share past examples from her course of student presentations of texts, which have included poster presentations, bookmarks, poetry and video as a way of going beyond the text.
4. Collaborative writing: students participate in a hands-on activity at the beginning of each semester to understand the writing process. The steps of this activity will be outlined and shared in the session.
5. Grammar presentations: students are required to participate in two grammar presentations each semester. The end product of the first is a grammar game focusing on a specific grammar issue (generally run-on and fragment sentences, subject-verb agreement, and noun/pronoun agreement), while the end product of the second is a visual metaphor that has some relationship to a grammar point. The presenter will share the assignment as well as an example from the second presentation of a grammar metaphor.

This presentation is relevant to the field because it touches on many of the major issues that practitioners face in working with writing students who are taking developmental level courses. Concerns about student motivation and lack of engagement are serious issues for instructors who are working with students for whom learning has previously resulted in disengagement. Students who have either been labeled or who have internalized labels as slow learners or poor writers find that by engaging with these activities, learning can actually be a fun process, which in turn leads to improvement in the students’ writing.

The presenter will lead participants in the session through several of the activities, including the first-day ice-breaker, and a dramatized poem/writing activity. Examples from students’ work in the presenter’s classroom will also be shared and discussed. Handouts for the session will include assignments from the presenter’s classroom as well as a poem from the book Old Faithful: 18 Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments, from which the poetry activity is borrowed.

Reference:

Statman, Mark. "Poetic Theory and the End of Science." Old Faithful: 18 Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments. Ed. Christopher Edgar and Ron Padgett. New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1995.

Presenter1 Name: Ali Mageehon
Presenter1 Institution: New Mexico State University - Alamogordo
Presenter1 Bio: Dr. Ali Mageehon is the Director of the Mary Virginia Brown Writing Center and Assistant Professor at NMSU-A. Her research and teaching interests include developmental writing and reading, supplemental instruction, and active learning and student learning style preferences.