Week 1: Monday, August 26th - Friday, August 30th
Goals for this Week
You have eight primary goals for this week:
- Take
care of the administrative work of making sure students are enrolled in
the course and aware of your course policies.
- Introduce
the overall goals of CO150 and make sure that your students understand
those goals and how the sequences of activities, homework, and assignments
will help them reach those goals.
- Provide
students with an overview of the primary concepts that will be used in the
course:
- the
writing situation model, which highlights the text, writers’ purposes,
readers’ needs and interests, limitations and opportunities, and
social/cultural/historical contexts
- the
notion of writing as participating in a conversation, with attention to
the need to be accountable to what others have written and the need to
offer something new to the conversation
- the
role of public discourse in society and the obligation to understand the
complexity of the writing situations shaping public discourse
- Introduce
students to the key instructional resources they will be using during the
course, including the Prentice Hall
Guide, the SyllaBase course page
(https://writing.colostate.edu/syllabase/), Writing@CSU
(https://writing.colostate.edu), and Research Assistant HyperFolio.
- Assign
a homework assignment, which students will post to the Class Discussion
Forum on their SyllaBase course page. You should read the work produced by
your students with attention to their overall writing abilities. If you
find students who have what appear to be fairly weak writing skills, pay
particular attention to subsequent homework and, if appropriate, meet with
them and develop a plan to enhance their writing skills. You might suggest
that the student work with consultants in the Writing Center or you might
set up individual meetings during your office hours.
- Introduce
students to critical reading strategies.
- Assign
the first Portfolio.
- Introduce students to summarizing. As you do
this, address the concept of “objectivity” in summarizing and discuss three
types of summaries: main point, key point, and outline summaries. However, it’s
critical that students understand that “objectivity” in an absolute sense is
difficult, if not impossible to attain, since the purposes for summarizing will
vary from writer to writer. It is more appropriate, as a result, to discuss the
concept of “fairness” in summarizing. Students should strive to fairly and
accurately convey the ideas and information in a text that are most appropriate
given their writing situations (purposes, readers, etc.). Consider, for
instance, two writers who are summarizing a particular scientific report about
recent advances in cloning. One writer is interested in what the study has to
say about the potential for applying these advances to a commercial venture.
The other is interested in the specific data discussed in the report. The two
summaries, as a result, would vary significantly, even though both might be
fair and accurate. Be sure to consult the teaching guide on summarizing and
responding at https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/summaryresponse/.
Activities for this Week
Detailed lesson plans are available for the first four weeks
of the course. Beginning in the fifth week, you will be expected to choose
activities from a set of suggested activities and/or develop your own
activities that will help you and your students achieve the course goals for a
specific week.