Baruch Writing Program Resources

Digital Annotations
This document from Dan Libertz offers sample instructions for how students can annotate readings digitally, including through the VitalSource interface used by the online version of the First-Year Writing Program’s textbook Join the Conversation, through Microsoft Word, and Adobe Reader/Acrobat.

12 Lessons I Learned while Teaching in Summer 2020
Seth Graves outlines takeaways from his experience teaching Writing II online and working on a team producing COVID-era teaching materials.

Baruch Resources

Assessment in Online Classrooms
Just like in a face-to-face class, online classes require frequent assessment to determine what students have understood. However, unlike in the face-to-face environment, some of your traditional cues for assessment disappear. For example, you can’t read a puzzled student’s face and ask if they need help. Developing an assessment method for an online class generally requires some different strategies. This link explores a few possibilities.

Defining Attendance and Participation in an Online Class
Moving online recontextualizes the ways in which we engage with our students and facilitate their course participation. The above page considers ways we can define and count “meaningful participation” as course attendance.

Fostering Classroom Community in an Online Environment
This link considers ways we can listen to our students and offer space for peers to connect with each other on intellectual and social levels.

Humanizing Your Class
Online classes require special attention to create environments where all feel comfortable engaging. How do you want to present yourself synchronously as well as asynchronously? What types of interactions will you encourage? When can you bring out your expert-self, your facilitator-self, or your mentor-self? When do you need to make yourself invisible? How will you invite students to bring their whole selves into the online class? How can you leverage online tools to build and enhance your classroom community?

Online Course Prep Checklist
The Baruch Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) offers a “last-minute” oriented online teaching checklist.

External Resources

Check out Cathy Davidson’s article for HASTAC, “The Single Most Essential Requirement in Designing a Fall Online Course,” which encourages us to take on an especially empathetic role in creating our teaching materials for the fall.

Check out this theoretical text (online and interactive) on the scholarship of participation: The Rhetoric of Participation: Interrogating Commonplaces In and Beyond the Classroom, co-edited by Baruch First-Year Writing Program Director Lisa Blankenship.

Some other popular readings in the teaching of writing:

Anne Lamont, “Shitty First Drafts”
Class essay on the power of starting the writing process with low—and then incrementally raised—expectations.

Richard Straub, “Responding–Really Responding–to Other Students’ Writing”
Straub’s go-to essay on quality peer-review practices.

Brock Dethier, “Revising Attitudes”
Seminal work on the power of revision, offering various strategies and ways of conceiving of the revision process.