Weekly Notes and Advice |
This week may be challenging while you are introducing the type of analysis we are asking students to do. Be sure to allow your class enough time to grasp analysis and, as with the previous weeks, connect the activities you do in class tightly to students' own writing (CSOW). Also note that the English Department's Reading Days are scheduled for this Thursday and Friday (October 14-15). You can use these days as outside of class time to meet with students, help them research in the library, or you may hold class for your students and wait until next week to give them a research day, etc. Try to avoid canceling one class for both weeks, however. |
Connection to Course Goals |
Collecting sources for the Annotated Bibliography will help students learn about the recent conversation surrounding their issue. Students' previous experience with research may have involved collecting and simply regurgitating information on a topic. Here, we are asking them to think critically about a) their role as researchers and b) the choices they make as writers, by evaluating their sources for a specified purpose. We hope that this approach gives them a better "real world" sense of how and why writers research and respond to public issues. |
Goals for this Week |
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Activity Ideas: Working Bibliography Feedback |
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Activity Ideas: Introducing Analysis |
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Activity Ideas: Personal Position Analysis |
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Activity Ideas: Applying the Personal Position Analysis |
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Required Readings and Assignments |
Assign the following to students this week:
Additional Teaching ResourcesCSU's guide Strategies for Teaching Internet Research effectively covers tips for students as well as teaching ideas and suggestions for helping students choose credible and effective sites of information, employ search engines, and avoide the over-use of Internet sources at the expense of what many "hard" sources have to offer. Morgan Library also offers a guide on How to Do Research at CSU and, while it is not necessarily geared toward the teaching of research, can be a very helpful place to generate ideas for talking about research in the classroom. Short exercises or lessons could be derived from this guide, or it could be offered to students as a resource during their research. |