Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons^™

Incorporating Academic Writing Into The Advanced Chinese Class, Li Wang

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

How to incorporate academic writing into the Advanced Chinese Class? My mini-study explores how to balance the grammatical aspect with the writing train in the fourth-year Chinese class. By dividing the argumentative essay into a beginning, a main body and a conclusion parts, students can practice how to write an argumentative essay step by step. By including revision into the writing process, students get more opportunity to reflect and rewrite their writing.

Peer Editing As Learning Tool, Warren Cornwall

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

Structured peer editing of student writing provides a valuable tool for teaching writing concepts and skills. This write-up describes a detailed process for teaching and using peer editing in a journalism class. The goal of the peer editing is to help students understand and apply concepts and skills used to craft engaging and informative news stories, and to develop skills providing and receiving feedback about writing.

Incorporating Exploratory Writing Assignments For An Intermediate Nutrition Class, Claudia Wang

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

Several exploratory writing assignments were developed and implemented in a 300 level nutrition class based on the Backward By Design Strategy. A weekly written reflection assignment was analyzed, summarized, and reflected for its strengths/weakness. Strategies were identified to use this assignment in the future better.

Improving Mba Students' Ability To Do Financial Analysis, Claire Lending

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

I restructured my graduate class, MBA 541, Managerial Finance with a focus on the core concept, company value maximization. The course was structured around assignments where the students would do research on a specific company for the whole quarter. These almost daily assignments all focused on value and I would specifically ask the students to make “refutable statements” on how the company was adding or detracting from value due to their financial decisions. The combination of frequent low stakes assignment and the explicit connection to value enhanced the students’ learning and improved class atmosphere.

Scaffolding Writing Assignments In Introductory Art History, Monique Kerman

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

As a result of my participation in WWU’s Backward by Design retreat in 2017, I sought to modify the written assignments of my introductory Art History course for pre-majors in order to better prepare students working towards a lengthy research paper. In course evaluations and anecdotally, students reported being intimidated by the size and scope of the final paper, and asked for more writing practice. I decided that instead of requiring a high stakes research paper as the culmination of the coursework, I would scaffold assignments throughout the course that would eventually lead students to composing a thesis around which …

Consensus To Co-Create Curricula And Build Community, Nini Hayes

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

This project was about using consensus to co-create curricula and build classroom community. I worked with students to narrow their study of focus to two concepts, Neoliberalism and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. This co-creating and buy in from students really encouraged them to be present and find the course relevant to their work as environmental educators.

Using Reflective And Meta Writing Practices In English 101, Michelle Runyan

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

This study examines the ways in which a low-stakes meta, reflective, and reflexive writing assignment has the potential to help students better understand the writing that they do in the classroom. This assignment allows students to think through threshold concepts in the course, to question course concepts, and to think through the areas they are struggling with. Additionally, students are encouraged to think through their own writing process and how the skills they learn in the course might transfer to other courses. Finally, it allows the course instructor to examine their course curriculum and to adjust lesson plans based on …

Course Revision Using Backward By Design, Rita Daniels

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

The purpose of this mini-study was to redesign a Research Methods in Communication course using Backward by Design (BbD; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). The first stage was to identify the desired results for the course and the second stage was to determine acceptable evidence for the desired results. The third stage was to plan learning experiences. Results of the study indicated that students found assigned course work to be challenging but the effective teaching of the course content, the relevance of the course to communication studies, and the instructor’s contribution to the course made the course overall worth taking. Having …

Unconference Faqs 2018, Shevell Thibou

Western Libraries Unconference

What is an unconference?

An unconference is an informal event where participants bring their ideas, thoughts, and experiences related to the selected theme. A loose agenda is provided, but attendees participate in determining the topics of discussion for the day. The overall goal is to foster collaboration and inquiry.