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Premise:
Writing promotes active learning. Courses that regularly give students
opportunities for ungraded, impromptu, low-stakes writing give them opportunities
to rephrase course content in their own words, to make tentative connections,
to hypothesize, to inventory current knowledge, to make ultimately useful
mistakes, and to articulate questions. Ungraded writing also relieves obsession
with surface correctness. Students therefore begin to see writing as a
tool they can use, rather than as just an occasion for numerous small failures.
Two key factors: regular opportunities
to write (once a week?); regular use of some in-class time devoted to this
writing.
Generic Examples
Note: These examples lend
themselves to brief, in-class writing, as well as to longer discussions
written out of class.
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Based on your reading or on this lecture,
write one thing (notion, concept, idea, or part) which you are sure about
right now. Continuation: Talk about what makes you sure of this one thing.
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Write one question that you still have.
Continuation: Write one way/process/procedure you could follow to try to
answer this question.
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Write all the questions you have at
this point. Continuation: Talk about which one(s) you should answer first.
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Write the story of your thinking on
this particular concept or idea or paradox. What did you first think when
you were exposed to this notion? Then what did you think? Then what? Try
to get everything down here - your confusions as well as your understandings.
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Explain how X is different from (or
similar to) Y.
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Draw some visual picture or representation
(a graph or diagram or flow chart or ?) of this concept or notion or process.
Continuation: Explain how the pictorial representation should be "read."
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Explain concept A to a student who missed
class or couldn't do the reading because of illness. Write as you'd talk,
and try not to be long-winded.
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Predict what a reading might say based
on its title and on your previous experience.
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Predict the results of a process or
procedure. Explain what goes into your educated guess. Continuation: Explain
what could throw off your educated guess.
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