CO150 College Composition: Daily and Weekly Lesson Plans

Welcome to the CO150 lesson plans. These plans are designed to support your teaching in CO150 College Composition, the required first-year composition course at Colorado State University. CO150 is equivalent to most “second-semester” composition courses. It focuses on academic writing (including summary, response, analysis, and argument), source evaluation, and source-based writing. The course is heavily influenced by theories of rhetorical situation derived from Lloyd Bitzer and others. It also relies heavily on technology, including the SyllaBase course management system (https://writing.colostate.edu/syllabase/) and an interactive “Writing Room” in the Writing Studio on Writing@CSU (https://writing.colostate.edu/studio).

In addition to online resources, CO150 makes use of two print texts: the Prentice-Hall Guide, 6^th Edition, and the New York Times, daily national edition. As an instructor for the course, you will be provided desk copies of both texts.

This set of lesson plans provides overall goals for each week of the course. Additionally, each lesson is conceptually linked to the course goals with a paragraph at the beginning. The first month of the course includes daily lesson plans for courses taught on Monday-Wednesday-Friday and Tuesday-Thursday schedules. The specificity of the lesson plans declines as the semester progresses. The purpose of this arrangement is to encourage you to take ownership of the course through the development of your own lesson plans that meet the goals of the course and reflect your strengths and philosophies as a teacher.

Resources that support the teaching of CO150 are discussed in the following materials. In addition to materials found in the textbook, many of the resources are available on the composition section of the Writing@CSU Web site (https://writing.colostate.edu/comparchive/). Others are available in print form in the appendix of the hard-copy version of this set of lesson plans.

You will find the complete set of assignments, including overviews of each portfolio, at the start of each portfolio.