for coaching students as writers and thinkers, and tips on managing the paper load. Other readers may be attracted to the ideas in this book yet be held back by nagging doubts or fears that they will be buried in paper grading, that the use of writing assignments does not fit their disciplines, or that they will have to reduce their coverage of content. This book tries to allay these fears and help all professors find an approach to using writing and critical thinking activities that help each student meet course goals while fitting their own teaching philosophies and individual personalities.
We hope that for teachers one of the benefits of Engaging Ideas is greater enjoyment of teaching. Teachers should see writing assignments and other critical thinking activities as useful tools to help students achieve the instructor's content and process goals for a course. The reward of this book is watching students come to class better prepared, more vested in and motivated by the problems or questions the course investigates, more apt to study rigorously, and more likely to submit high‐quality work. A serendipitous benefit for teachers may be that their own writing gets easier when they develop strategies for helping students. Many of the ideas in this book—about posing problems, generating and exploring ideas, focusing and organizing, giving and receiving peer reviews of drafts, and revising for readers—can be applied to one's own scholarly and professional writing as well as to the writing of students.
Structure of the Book
Chapter 1, designed for the busy professor, provides a nutshell compendium of the whole book. It also addresses four misconceptions that tend to discourage professors from integrating writing and critical thinking assignments into their courses.
Part 1 (chapters 2 and 3) examines the scholarship and theory that links writing to thinking. Chapter 2 focuses on critical thinking and writing, arguing that good writing is a process and a product of critical thought. Chapter 3 examines the rhetorical dimension of thinking and writing, showing how writers must think rhetorically about purpose, audience, genre, and discourse communities. It argues that writing and critical thinking skills are enhanced when students are asked to write in different genres for different kinds of audiences and purposes.
Part 2 (chapters 4 and 5) focuses on the design of problem‐based writing assignments for promoting critical thinking. Chapter 4 covers the design of formal writing assignments that go through multiple drafts toward becoming a finished product. By contrast, chapter 5 explains the use of low‐stakes, exploratory writing inside and outside of class to enhance learning and promote critical thinking.
Part 3 (chapters 6 through 10) offers a compendium of strategies for coaching students as learners, thinkers, and writers. Using examples from across the curriculum, chapter 6 presents a heuristic for designing critical thinking problems that promote active learning. These problems can be used as prompts for formal or informal writing assignments, as tasks for small‐group problem‐solving, or as ways to stimulate class discussion or enliven lectures. Chapter 7, on mindful reading, explores the difference between surface reading and deep reading, showing how instructors can strengthen students' reading skills by helping them think rhetorically about texts and metacognitively about their own reading processes. Chapters 8 and 9 together discuss ways to use class time for active inquiry and critical thinking. Chapter 8 focuses on the use of small groups in the classroom, and chapter 9 suggests ways to make lectures more interactive and whole‐class discussions more productive. Chapter 10, on teaching undergraduate research, argues that the conventional “research paper” is an academic pseudo‐genre that needs to be replaced by authentic research projects written in appropriate disciplinary genres. It offers advice for helping students think metacognitively about the way different disciplines ask questions, gather evidence, make arguments, and position themselves in a conversation with other scholars. It argues that skills needed for advanced research writing at the end of the major are best taught through strategically designed scaffolding assignments earlier in the curriculum.
The final section of the book, part 4 (chapters 11–16), concerns strategies for responding to and grading student writing. Chapter 11, new to this edition, presents the happy news that students can use metacognitive reflection to self‐assess their own drafts in progress and can conduct effective peer reviews that match the quality of teacher reviews. Chapter 12 offers advice on creating and using rubrics, which can clarify an instructor's grading criteria and, in many cases, decrease an instructor's time spent grading and commenting on papers. Chapter 13 offers ten time‐saving strategies for coaching the writing process while avoiding teacher burnout. Chapter 14 focuses on ways to write supportive comments on students' work to promote significant revision rather than justify a grade. Chapter 15, on responding to grammar and other sentence‐level concerns, is a substantial revision of the second edition's chapter 5. While still focusing on the importance of careful sentence‐level editing it now tries to incorporate a more progressive, translingual appreciation of language diversity. Finally, chapter 16, also new to the third edition, explains alternatives to traditional grading through portfolio assessment and contract grading.
Thanks and Acknowledgments
We conclude with thanks and acknowledgments from John, from Dan, and then from the both of us.
From John
I have been fortunate over my teaching career to have generous colleagues who encouraged and supported my interest in writing across the curriculum and often shaped my thinking. I wish particularly to thank W. Daniel Goodman in the Department of Chemistry at the College of Great Falls and Dean Drenk, John Ramage, and Jack Folsom for our FIPSE‐grant days at Montana State University. At Seattle University, I thank my SoTL colleagues (many of whom have been coauthors with me on WAC or SoTL publications): economists Dean Peterson, Gareth Green, and Teresa Ling; finance professors David Carrithers and Fiona Robertson; chemists P. J. Alaimo, Joe Langenhan, and Jenny Loertscher; historian
