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Volume 2 Number 10

Some Ways to Teach Content through Writing - I

Each discipline has its own unique concepts, techniques of investigation, modes of posing questions and problems, and ways of using data to work toward conclusions and interpretations. As professors, we use writing to profess our disciplines and to make our contributions to special areas of knowledge, and as teachers we are really introducing our students into the conversation of our disciplines. We can appreciate the power of writing as a means to learn when we reflect upon how our own understanding of our discipline deepened through writing about some aspect of it. We can help our students to use writing as a means to learn in many ways. A few examples follow.

(1) Writing of abstracts. Most of us have written abstracts as submissions for presentations at formal meetings and as essential synopses of our publications. After one learns the nature of abstracts and gains some experience in writing a few of them, it becomes easy to appreciate the level of mastery of material that is required to produce a really good abstract. The writer must not only recognize the most important points, but must be able to prioritize them and organize the writing from major concepts to specific details. It is a challenge to produce a solid rendition of significant content in 250 words or less. Some uses of abstracts as teaching tools follow. (a) Require an abstract as an alternative to the traditional laboratory report. (b) Require an abstract to be submitted for each text chapter as it is covered in class. Later post your own abstract of "chapter of the week" on your office door and have students compare theirs with it. (c) For courses that use journal sources, give your students the required article but with the abstract, the author's name and identifying markings cut off. Have the students write the abstract. Then post the original by the authors.

(2) Peer review editing. Provide a checklist and further reference to the appropriate style manual. Before you grade any submitted paper, have the students exchange their drafts and have each serve as an editor of another student's paper. Have each editor "sign off" on the reviewed paper and return papers to original authors to allow them to make corrections. Afterwards students submit their final draft with both their names and the names of their editors. Make editing a small part of the grade of each peer-reviewed assignment.

(3) Learning more from quantitative problems. Writing can be used to advantage in quantitatively based classes. Students often look for a formula or pattern through which to "plug and chug" to get the "right" answer. One can do many problems in this manner and learn very little of consequence. Consider how the gain in learning from assigned problems might be enhanced by the following: (a) "For each problem you worked in this assignment, describe, in three sentences or less, the pattern of logic required to solve the problem;" (b) "Last week you answered problems x, xx and xxxx in chapter n__. For each of these problems write one sentence that describes the major concept that you believe the author wanted to convey with the problem. Then write one sentence that describes what you learned by solving it."

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