Chapter 9 - Instructional Media: Chalkboards to Video - CGISS

courses for art majors). No subject is too hard if students take the
time to read, think, and write clearly.
Teaching Writing
If you do include writing assignments in your course, you will be
teaching writing. Instructors tend to assume that their students
have learned to write somewhere else, but often they have not.
You may feel inadequate to teach writing, but, in fact, you are a
more experienced writer than your students and you know more
about the goals for your writing assignments than your students.
Two Types of Writing Assignments
It is important to take time during class to discuss writing strategies
and the thinking skills behind the writing.
• Writing Exercises -- Explanatory writing transmits existing
information or ideas. The central point of students’ writing
exercises is to find out what they know and how they want to say
it. The writing is linear and sequential. Students can make clear
to themselves a subject that they have previously known nothing
about by just putting one sentence after another, by reasoning
their way in sequential steps to its meaning -- if sentence B
logically follows sentence A, and if sentence C logically follows
sentence B, eventually the student will get to sentence Z.
Writing, thinking, and learning are the same process. Students
must first learn to reason well. Writing organizes and clarifies
thought -- how we think our way into a subject and make it our
own. Students do not know how to be precise, and are generally
guilty of fuzzy thinking.
Suggestion -- Assign a one-page paper on your subject that
will show students’ critical thinking skills. These writing exercises
should be graded on clarity, common sense, logic, plausibility,
and precision, not for the content of their views. Your subject is
important but not as important as clear reasoning, for without it,
students will not learn your subject. An idea can have value in
itself, but its usefulness diminishes to the extent that a student
cannot articulate it to someone else.
• Practice Writing About Your Discipline -- With this type of
writing assignment, students are entering the ongoing discussion
in your discipline. A piece of writing should be viewed as a
constantly evolving organism. Most students have been taught to
visualize a composition as a finished product, with topic
sentences in place, etc. Here, the shift is to process -- putting the
emphasis on rewriting and rethinking that mold a piece of writing
into its best form. One of the underestimated tasks in nonfiction
writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of
material. Students must do more than write with clarity; they must
organize their sentences into a coherent shape, taking readers
Section: Student Assessment 200 Chapter 13: Grading