UW-Madison teachers learn to assign, evaluate writing assignments

Matthew Pearson absolutely loves teaching teachers.

“As a rule, they are thoughtful and engaged people,” he says. “Those who come to my classes want to get better as teachers and are open to changing or at least tweaking their pedagogy.”

The classes Pearson means are for faculty, academic staff and teaching assistants interested in making the most of written class assignments. Toward that end, these teachers have enrolled in one of Pearson’s courses, offered through the Department of English Writing Center.

Pearson teaches Designing Effective Writing Assignments, and Responding to and Evaluating Student Writing. There are others, too, including a workshop on Writing Letters of Recommendation, taught by Greg Galica, who has been teaching at the Writing Center for more than 20 years. He says that often, it’s less the mechanics of a certain type of writing than the issues surrounding a particular situation that fuels spirited debate.

“While we focus on content and format for letters of recommendation, there’s always lively discussion about the ethics behind those letters, especially when we’re asked to recommend someone who’s not a star student. That’s the kind of discussion that usually ends without any real answer — I think people just want to see what others would do in that particular situation. One of the main things I always stress in that class is that a person writing a recommendation has to understand the situation he or she is in: We need to know what the student is applying for, and what role we are playing in the application process. With those thoughts in mind, we can ask ourselves what it is that we can add to the application package,” Galica says.

Pearson says that sometimes, a group of teaching assistants and faculty from a particular course come to the training together.

“This gives a nice dynamic and specific focus to the class, and allows the group attending together an opportunity to reflect on the kinds of assignments and evaluation they use in their course,” he says, adding that he addresses the special kinds of writing instruction that takes place in specific disciplines.

“During the fall semester we had a lot of faculty and TAs from the humanities and social sciences, but also some from chemistry, physics and nursing. The writing assignments they give in their classes are not always similar, of course, but we had thoughtful discussions about such things as foregrounding learning and teaching goals in designing writing assignments, and about how to comment on student papers so that the students can improve their writing over the course of the semester,” Pearson says.

Galica says that depending on the class, between five and 12 people enroll, including TAs, lecturers, instructors, professors in every stage of tenure, and, in his recommendation class, “even people who have had students working for them in an office on campus,” he says. “We try to get a good grasp of the role we’re playing and what we can say in that role.”

The next session of Writing Letters of Recommendation will be at 3 p.m. on Monday, March 14. Another section of Responding to and Evaluating Student Writing is offered at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 4. In addition, a course on Writing with PowerPoint will be held at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 23. All workshops are held in Helen C. White Hall. For more information, or to register, visit http://www.wisc.edu/writing.