Blog Entry #8

The reading for this week was part 4 (Adding to Your Repertoire of Skills and Strategies for Facilitating Active Learning) in McKeachie's Teaching Tips. In this entry, I focus on just a few of the many things I found interesting from this section.

On page 205, author's Peter Elbow and Mary Deane Sorcinelli briefly discuss issues concerning spelling and grammar in student writing. I agree with the authors that it is not possible or appropriate for college instructors (outside of English departments) to teach spelling and grammar. Nonetheless it is important that students produce papers with appropriate spelling and grammar so that their writing is understandable. Writing centers like the one at NDSU may provide students with the assistance they need to produce writing that is free or nearly free of spelling and grammatical errors. I actually just took one of my own manuscripts to the writing center, and was surprised by how much their suggestions helped the clarity of my writing. Although I was fortunate to have the director of the center help me, I assume that the undergraduate and graduate assistants at the writing center are fully capable of helping students to improve their writing. I intend to require my students this Spring to write a paper, and I will encourage them to take their writing to the writing center.

These authors also suggest that instructors make writing assignments idiosyncratic so that students cannot easily plagiarize papers that have already been written. In a previous blog, I have mentioned that I intend to have my students write a paper in which they apply social psychological research in some way (a broad topic that allows students much flexibility). After reading this chapter, I have decided that I should at least consider narrowing the focus of this assignment to reduce the liklihood that students will plagiarize already written papers.

In chapter 16, McKeachie writes about cooperative and collaborative learning. I agree with McKeachie that group work should facilitate learning, and I intend to incorporate groupwork into my own course when possible. I acknowledge, nonetheless, that many instructors and students dislike group work. As an undergraduate, I had a philosophy instructor who told us that instructors who employ group work are lazy because they are trying to get out of developing lectures. Although I certainly agree that it would be problematic if an instructor overly used or only used group work, I disagree that group work is an ineffective teaching tool. As Mckeachie suggests, group work allows students to express their own ideas about course material and to do so in a low pressure situation.

Additional Resources

Facilitating group work in college classrooms

Information about plagiarism and its detection