Monthly Archives: August 2005

First Blush

Leave a reply



First Blush

Originally uploaded by mebertolini.

As the leaves begin to change here at the end of August, I’m finalizing plans for my first-year seminar. For the first time, I’ve added a summer assignment to my class, and almost all of my student have responded on-line to date. They are also responding to each other and back again. I’ve asked them questions about their knowledge and opinions about Jane Austen and her works and to tell us a bit about themselves and their backgrounds. What a motivated and interesting class they are already!

Building Assignment Sequencing

1 Reply

I’m preparing a presentation on Sequencing Assignments for our Annual Writing Retreat. I plan to chart the Trajectory of an Assignment,
which shows an assignment starting at the informal writing phase and moving through multiple drafts to self-critical awareness on the part of the student. I will, also, demonstrate Building an Assignment Sequence by showing five increasingly difficult First-Year Seminar paper assignments building.jpgI have used with my Jane Austen & Film First-Year Seminar.

My best advice for Assignment Sequencing:

  • Start at the back end: know your goals.
  • Build forward, adding challenges and difficulties to achieve goals.
  • Make pedagogy transparent by discussing with students the reasons behind the assignments.

This last is often overlooked, but I find when I share with students the deliberate reasons for my assignments, they become more deliberate in their decisions about their own papers.

Still Green

Leave a reply



Green

Originally uploaded by mebertolini.

Leaves are still green here, but not for long. I have not made all the decisions about my class yet, but I have decided to do another hybrid Movable Type/ Segue Course Management mix, and so I have begun to build my sites. My class will be getting their first assignment from me in the next few days. I hope to see their responses on line before many of the leaves have turned.

Simmering Summer Slips Away

Leave a reply

Yesterday, as I drove the back roads that meander through the green mountains of Vermont, I spied the first leaves turning from green to gold. Everything is still green in the valley where I live, but the turning leaves at that higher elevation remind me that I need to turn my mind seriously to the coming fall semester. This fall I teach again a course I love, a Jane Austen & Film first-year seminar. I last taught this course in fall 2001, and used a class server to share drafts and house handouts and links. Since then I have added blogs, course management tools and digital stories to my classes. Now, I work on retooling my course to use the new technologies I’ve learned and used in other courses, so I must make hard choices about what stays and what goes from my old syllabus.