Millennial Learning: April 16-17, 2009
Michael Reder
Creating Active Student Learning Across the Disciplines:
How to Design Low-Stakes/Informal Writing Activities

Michael Reder directs the Joy Shechtman Mankoff Faculty Center for Teaching & Learning at Connecticut College, where he teaches recent English fiction, culture, and theory in the Department of English.
He has published a variety of articles related to teaching and learning and faculty development, including a recent essay for Essays in Teaching Excellence entitled “What Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Student Writing (But Are Afraid to Ask)” (2007). A former director of the college’s Writing Center and coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum, he now runs workshops for faculty on topics as diverse as the appropriate use of technology, course and syllabus design, grading, creating active classrooms, and using writing as a tool for learning.

Creating Active Student Learning Across the Disciplines:
How to Design Low-Stakes/Informal Writing Activities

Active learning is self-reflexive, process-oriented, and personal, and should provide students the opportunity to assess their own learning. Such learning also creates the chance for instructors to become learners themselves: about the material, about students, and about teaching & learning. How can we create such self-reflexive learning experiences? One simple and adaptable method is by using low-stakes, informal writing. This interactive workshop will serve as a primer to the benefits of using informal writing as a tool to enhance student learning and to the many options for designing such assignments. Such informal (often non-graded or evaluated) writing assignments can improve student learning across all levels and abilities, in a variety of courses (seminar, large lecture, lab/studio), and in any discipline. Participants will engage in a brainstorming writing assignment, work in small groups, participate in a large-group discussion, and finally, using the ideas they have gained during the workshop, design a writing-to-learn assignment they can use in a course.

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to (based on these activities):

1. identify a specific area in which their current students can improve their own learning (a “teaching challenge”);
2. appreciate, based on the experiences of the other participants and the workshop leader, the range of options for using informal, low-stakes writing (“writing-to-learn”);
3. apply a framework to design effective low-stakes writing activities;
4. create an assignment they can use immediately to address their specific teaching challenge;
5. leave with a list of resources related to using writing effectively in the classroom to improve student learning.