Designing A Writing-Intensive Course

Kathy Miller, professor of biology, led a session at ITeach 2008 on the design of her writing-intensive course, Molecular Mechanisms in Development (Biology 3191). Miller noted that the writing-intensive format allows her to engage students in a form of active learning. More specifically, she requires students to study and write about primary literature in biology and biomedicine. As they do so, they learn the process by which researchers contribute to knowledge in these fields by interpreting and analyzing facts obtained in experiments. In other words, her students learn how to think, and to write, like practicing scientists. At the same time, because Miller's course is organized around the development of critical thinking and writing skills that are relevant across the disciplines, it provides an excellent model for any course in which students write analytical, thesis-driven papers.

At ITeach, Kathy described the sequence of assignments she has designed to help students build their skills, starting in class discussions and informal journal entries and working up to shorter analytical essays and a final 10-12 page research paper. Kathy also demonstrated how she uses PowerPoint slides and the SMART Board during class discussions to engage students in developing and answering questions about the primary literature that is the focus of their papers. She noted that the use of the SMART Board to prompt spontaneous discussions in this way has transformed student learning in this course, which she originally taught primarily via lecturing. She shared with the audience several of the documents through which she communicates to her students the defining features of the writing they are expected to produce and the criteria by which its effectiveness is evaluated: an essay assignment, a list of grading criteria associated with that assignment, and materials from class sessions devoted to revision and peer-review activities.

Each fall and spring semester, The Teaching Center offers a faculty workshop on Teaching with Writing. For more information, click here.