Writing Across the Curriculum and

College Reading at SDC

Faculty and Staff Session ThreeSaturday, July 19, 2014

Session Facilitators:

Dr. Judith Smith

Mrs. Janice Williams

Overarching Question

How can we Assist the Adult Learner

at Sojourner Douglass College

in Mastering Writing Skills While

Developing Critical Thinking Skills?

Approach for Implementation

Design and Implement a College-wide

Writing Across the Curriculum

Initiative that Integrates

Critical Thinking Skills and Meets the

Unique Needs of the Students at

Sojourner Douglass College.

Session Three Goals

•Provide a liaison between reading and writing skills addressed in the Common Core State Standards and the writing and thinking skills addressed in the General Education Core Competencies and major content courses. •Explore the connection between reading and writing strategies that incorporate abstract conceptualization skills in formal academic writing.

•Explore options that promote the reading - writing connection in solving real world problems.

Review: WAC Has Two Major Categories

Review: Writing-To-Learn…

• Fosters critical thinking that requires analysis, application and other higher order thinking skills;

• Uses short or informal writing tasks to help students think through key concepts or ideas;

• Uses journals, logs, responses to questions, summaries, free writing, and other writing assignments to learn ideas and concepts.

• http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mde/Science_WAC_2_3_264454_7.pdf

Review: Sensory Cortex

Concrete Experience

• Watch a Film• View a Demonstration • Play a Game• Conduct Field

Observation

(David Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory, 1985)

Non-Graded Writing

Personal writing that records

observations, thoughts, and

feelings during the initial

experience and raise

questions and expresses

puzzlement

(James Zull, Art of Changing the Brain, 2002)

Review: Temporal Integrative Cortex

Reflective Observation

Learners consider the

concepts and issues

after reading, listening

to lectures, participating

in class discussions,

and hearing different

points of view.

Personal Exploratory Writing

*Journal entries that connect new material to personal experiences and precious knowledge;

*Personal pieces based on autobiographical experiences with a topic or concept;

*Personal reflective papers that encourage questioning, open-ended approach rather than thesis-with–support writing.

Focus: Writing-To-Demonstrate Knowledge

• Students synthesize information and explain their understanding of concepts and ideas.

• Students write for an audience with a specific purpose.

• Students use inquiry-based writing to connect with real-world experiences.

http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mde/Science_WAC_2_3_264454_7.pdf

Session Three Focus: Frontal Integrative Cortex

Abstract Conceptualization

Learners try to achieve abstract

understanding of the concepts

and issues by mastering and

internalizing their components

and seeing the relationship

between new material and other

concepts and issues.

Formal Academic Writing

Thesis-based analyses and arguments written in an impersonal and dispassionate tone, targeted for a critical and informed audience, based on closely investigated knowledge, and intended to reinforce or challenge concepts.

Session Three Focus: Motor Cortex

Active Experimentation

Learners actively use the new concepts to solve problems by

applying them to new situations.

Position Papers

(Based on cases that use the new concepts)

Write-ups of a student’s laboratory or field research using the concepts;

Proposals applying new concepts and knowledge to solve real-world problems;

Creative pieces demonstrating understanding of new materials.

Summary: The Relationship Between Thinking and Writing

• Informal exploratory writing in an expressive mode: journals, in-class free writes though letters, reflections, electronic postings to class discussion board, reading responses

• Closed-form thesis-governed academic or professional writing: analysis, arguments, proposals, research reports.

• Writing Alternative genres and styles: Open-form personal Essays reflections, blogs, posters, experimental pieces, dialogs, interviews, articles, pamphlets, white papers, opinion-editorials (op-ed) pieces. web pages, multimodal projects

John Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2011.

Operationalize UsingBloom’s Taxonomy Revised

Verbs for Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised

• Remembering - define, duplicate, list, memorize, recall, repeat, reproduce state

• Understanding - classify, describe, discuss, explain, identify, locate, recognize, report, select, translate, paraphrase

• Applying - choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, schedule, sketch, solve, use, write

• Analyzing - appraise, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, test

• Evaluating - appraise, argue, defend, judge, select, support, value, evaluate

• Creating - assemble, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, write.

Challenge for WAC in College

Writing to Read Difficult Texts

Successful reading at the

college level involves an array of practices and skills, which vary across

disciplines, and which are not always

made explicit to students.

Brooklyn College http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/faculty/wac.php

Challenge for WAC at SDC• Accelerate reading and writing instruction that scaffolds or

provides supports for our adult learners:

• Reading: Students must grapple with works of exceptional craft and thought whose range extends across genres, cultures, and centuries.

• Writing: Students have to become adept at gathering information, evaluating sources, citing material accurately, and reporting findings from their research and analysis of sources in a clear and cogent manner.

Common Core State Standards for Literacy in all Subjects: Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

Teaching and Fostering Deep Reading

• Barrier: School culture rewards surface reading.

• Solution: Teachers evaluate student performance at the levels of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

• Barrier: Students are resistant to time-on-task for deep reading.

• Solution: Help students understand that experts are not necessarily speed readers and that time is needed to read a text deeply.

John Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2011.

Teaching and Fostering Deep Reading

• Barrier: Many teachers lecture over reading material therefore students rely on this crutch.

• Solution: Cease this practice so that students can practice, be challenged and grow as readers.

• Barrier: Students fail to adjust reading strategies for different purposes.

• Solution: Help students learn levels of reading comprehension: gist, main ideas, detail, and inference and application.

John Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2011.

Teaching and Fostering Deep Reading

• Barrier: Students fail to adjust reading strategies to different genres and structures.

• Solution: Help students understand the context of the reading (writing) assignment especially with primary and secondary research texts.

• For Example: An empirical research study in the social or physical sciences requires a different strategy than that of a theoretical/ interpretive article in the humanities.

John Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2011.

Teaching and Fostering Deep Reading

• Barrier: Students have a lack of connection with the author, how they themselves are similar to or different from the author, with regard to cultural literacy (codes), political biases, or philosophic views.

• Solution: Acknowledge with students the difficulty of the text, identify the target audience, encourage the use of a dictionary, and show students your personal note-taking and responding processes.

John Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2011.

Students as Thoughtful Readers

• Marginal Notes Approach• Reading Logs• Summary Writing Approach• Summary/Response or Double-Entry Notebooks• Graphic Organizers• Imagined Interviews with the Author• Writing “Translations”

John Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2011.

Key Ideas and Details

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.1Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.2Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.3Analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

Craft and Structure:• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.4

Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.5Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.6Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas:

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.7Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.8Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.9Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

Reading and Writing Connection and the Common Core

• Writing Standard Nine requires that students be able to write about what they read.

• Research and media skills and understandings are embedded throughout the Standards rather than treated in a separate section.

Source: Common Core State Standards Initiative: Preparing America’s Students for College & Career

Reading and Writing Connection and the Common Core

To be ready for college, workforce training, and life in a technological society, students need the ability:

•to gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, report on information and ideas,

•to conduct original research in order to answer questions or solve problems,

•and to analyze and create a high volume and extensive range of print and non-print texts in media forms old and new.Source: Common Core State Standards Initiative: Preparing America’s Students for College & Career

Reading and Writing Connection and the Common Core

• The grades 6-12 standards are divided into two sections, one for English Language Arts (ELA) and the other for history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. 

• This division reflects the unique, time-honored place of ELA teachers in developing students’ literacy skills while at the same time recognizing that teachers (across the curriculum) in other areas must have a role in this development as well.

Source: Common Core State Standards Initiative: Preparing America’s Students for College & Career

Reading Writing Connection And the Common Core

• Literacy promulgated by the Standards is extensive research establishing the need for college and career ready students to be proficient in reading complex informational text independently in a variety of content areas.

• Most of the required reading in college and workforce training programs is informational in structure and challenging in content;

• Postsecondary education programs typically provide students with both a higher volume of such reading than is generally required in K-12 schools and comparatively little scaffolding.

Source: Common Core State Standards Initiative: Preparing America’s Students for College & Career

Generic Reading Strategies

• Monitor comprehension

• Pre-read

• Set goals

• Think about what one already knows

• Source: Carnegie Report, (2010)

• Ask questions

• Make predictions

• Test predictions against the text

• Re-read

• Summarize

Discipline-Specific Reading Strategies

• Build prior knowledge• Build specialized vocabulary• Learn to deconstruct

complex sentences• Use knowledge of text

structures and genres to predict main and subordinate ideas

• Map graphic (and mathematical) representations against explanations in the text

• Pose discipline relevant questions

• Compare claims and propositions across texts

• Use norms for reasoning within the discipline (i.e. what counts as evidence) to evaluate claims

Source: Carnegie Report, (2010)

Text Structures and Graphic Organizers

Main Idea and Details Similarities & Differences

Text Structures (Continued)

Thesis and Support Classification and Criteria

Text Structures (Continued)

Sequence of Events Argument

Text Structures (Continued)

Cause and Effect Mathematics Word Problem

Mathematics Concept Four Step Problem Solving

Application to Coursework • Select a passage or word problem from a current text.

• Identify the text structure that applies to the passage or word problem.

• Graphically organize the content using one of the graphic structures presented.

• Compose a summary of the passage or word problem.

Update of WAC at SDC

• Design and Implement an Assessment and Evaluation Model (Ongoing)

√ Use WEAVE to Organize and House the Initiative

(Google Docs)

√ Determine Goals, Objectives, Inputs, Timelines, and Expected Outcomes

√ Identify Faculty Representatives from each

Department (Ongoing)–Help coordinate the initiative across all sites–Serve as Liaison to the Departments–Provide Faculty Support and Professional Development

Update for WAC at SDC

√ Review English Composition I, Communication Skills I, and Reading Comprehension Syllabi

– Select core Writing-to-Learn Strategies and Rubrics to Pilot

– Revise Syllabi

_____________

√ Review and determine resources and needs of the Writing Center to Support WAC across all campuses;

√ Provide WAC professional development to Writing Center Tutors on providing assistance to faculty

Department Representatives

Sign the Interest Sheet to Serve as a

Writing Across the Curriculum

Department Representative.