Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom

By Dan Melzer and John C. Bean

Use your course's big ideas to accelerate students’ growth as writers and critical thinkers

The newly revised third edition of Engaging Ideas delivers a step-by-step guide for designing writing assignments and critical thinking activities that engage students with important subject-matter questions. This new edition of the celebrated book (now written by the co-author team of Bean and Melzer) uses leading and current research and theory to help you link active learning pedagogy to your courses' subject matter. You'll learn how to:

• Design formal and informal writing assignments that guide students toward thinking like experts in your discipline
• Use time-saving strategies for coaching the writing process and handling the paper load including alternatives to traditional grading such as portfolio assessment and contract grading
• Help students use self-assessment and peer response to improve their work
• Develop better ways than the traditional research paper to teach undergraduate reading and research
• Integrate social media, multimodal genres, and digital technology into the classroom to promote active learning

This book demonstrates how writing can easily be integrated with other critical thinking activities such as inquiry discussions, simulation games, classroom debates, and interactive lectures. The reward of this book is watching students come to class better prepared, more vested in the questions your course investigates, more apt to study purposefully, and more likely to submit high-quality work. Perfect for higher education faculty and curriculum designers across all disciplines, Engaging Ideas will also earn a place in the libraries of graduate students in higher education.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jun 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781119705383

Book preview

ENGAGING IDEAS

The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom

Third Edition

John C. Bean

Daniel Melzer

Logo: Wiley

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THIRD EDITION

Preface

An important new feature of the third edition of Engaging Ideas is its coauthor team of Bean and Melzer. We'll begin by explaining how this coauthorship emerged.

John's Introduction of Coauthor Dan Melzer

The impetus for the third edition was an out‐of‐the‐blue email I received on the day before my seventy‐sixth birthday. It came from two Writing Across the Curriculum leaders at Sam Houston State University (Todd Primm and Carroll Nardone):

We use your superb 2nd ed Engaging Ideas workbook in our annual WID workshop for faculty on our campus. We are interested if there will be a third edition. It is such a powerful resource. Our faculty rave about it every year (this is our 19th year of the workshop).

I was buoyed by this email and happy to have confirmation of the usefulness of the second edition; however, I hadn't planned on a third edition. I retired from the classroom in 2013 (after forty‐five years of teaching), and although I continued with some of my scholarship, I felt I no longer had the currency I needed. But I was deeply grateful to Todd and Carroll for their gracious inquiry and for the subsequent helpful commentary from their Sam Houston colleagues about what needed to be updated.

Shortly thereafter, Riley Harding, my editor at Wiley, also began inquiring about a third edition and suggested that perhaps I could take on a coauthor—a younger scholar in writing across the curriculum with whom I could collaborate for the third edition and to whom I could pass on the book's legacy for a new generation. The idea intrigued me. After an extensive search, I am happy to announce my partnership with Dan Melzer from the University of California, Davis. (You can see his credentials and read his professional biography in the About the Authors section.) A deciding factor in my reaching out to Dan was his well‐reviewed book Assignments across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing (2014), which helped establish his reputation as a rising scholar in writing across the curriculum. I was grateful when he accepted my invitation to become a coauthor. Through telephone calls, Zoom meetings, and endless emails, Dan and I have established a mutual friendship and a collegial process of collaboration that has been more successful than I could have imagined or hoped for. (Dan and I have not been able to meet personally because of the COVID‐19 lockdown.) Dan's path toward scholarship in writing across the curriculum (which is different from mine) and his teaching experiences at large state universities give a richness to the third edition that would not have been possible if I had undertaken the revision by myself.

Dan's Perspective on the Third Edition of Engaging Ideas

My experiences with Engaging Ideas began long before John invited me to be his coauthor. In my first academic position after graduate school I was hired by California State University, Sacramento to develop a Writing Across the Curriculum program. One of my first goals was to move beyond the occasional professional development workshop and get teachers across disciplines involved in deep and sustained conversations that would have a transformative effect on their pedagogy—and I hoped, in the long run, on the campus culture of writing. I was already aware of the legendary Engaging Ideas—everyone involved in WAC knew of John's book, and every time someone posted a message to the Writing Program Administration or WAC listservs asking for a recommendation for help for leading a faculty development workshop, Engaging Ideas was always the first resource mentioned.

In my WAC seminars, I quickly learned why John's book was so popular. It had a transformative effect on the faculty I was working with. I saw their pedagogies moving toward more critical thinking and extended disciplinary research projects. They began developing a broad array of writing‐to‐learn activities. They began to teach critical reading and not just assign readings. They testified that their response to student writing was becoming more effective, and they created rubrics that clarified their assessment criteria. I've heard similar stories from other campuses. More than any other faculty development book, Engaging Ideas has played a central role in an educational movement that I'm proud to be a part of—Writing Across the Curriculum. I was honored when John invited me to collaborate with him on a third edition.

One final word about the opportunity to work with John. Although I had never worked with John before Engaging Ideas, his reputation as a warm, good‐humored, and collaborative scholar and teacher proceeded him. It was a delight to work with him, and we found that we were able to write with a single voice and a singular sense of purpose. Where our approaches do differ, you'll find that we describe our different pedagogies in detail in our own voices and we hope provide readers with a more multivocal book and an even richer menu of pedagogical options than those provided in the second edition.

Recent Developments Influencing the Third Edition

Before describing what's new in the third edition, we should summarize what has changed in the world of writing pedagogy since the publication of the second edition in 2011. In preparing this third edition of Engaging Ideas, we have tried to incorporate ideas and examples from the following recent developments in scholarship, pedagogy, and teaching practices.

Field‐Specific Scholarship in Writing and Pedagogy

When we began writing the manuscript for the third edition, ResearchGate had identified nearly seven hundred citations of Engaging Ideas in the pedagogical literature across the disciplines. Many of these citations came from articles in discipline‐specific pedagogical journals such as Journal of Economic Education, Teaching and Learning in Nursing, The American Biology Teacher, Communicating Science, Journal of Management Education, Physics Review, and Physics Education Research. Many additional citations came from general pedagogical journals associated with the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and from journals in writing studies. ResearchGate's technology made it possible for us to assemble a rich bibliography of these pedagogical resources across the disciplines—resources that might otherwise be known just in their specialized fields. The majority of these sources make significant disciplinary contributions to writing across the curriculum or other active learning pedagogies. Throughout the third edition, we draw on this body of research for ideas and examples.

The Writing about Writing/Transfer of Knowledge Movement in Writing Studies

Teachers in writing studies programs have long had theoretical disagreements about the content of first‐year composition—particularly about the subject matter of assigned readings and the consequent design of writing assignments. Recently a theoretical approach known as writing about writing or teaching for transfer has been increasingly influential for teachers of first‐year composition. Grounded in the work of scholars such as Kathleen Blake Yancy, Doug Downs, Elizabeth Wardle, Linda Adler‐Kassner, and many others, this movement makes writing studies itself the subject matter of first‐year composition. Courses typically guide students to think metacognitively about key threshold concepts in rhetoric/composition—concepts that illuminate how and why writing practices vary from discipline to discipline or across the spectrum from academic writing to professional writing to popular culture writing (newspapers, magazines, web genres, social media, and so forth). The goal of this approach is to promote transfer of learning from first‐year composition into a wide variety of writing situations that students will encounter in the future. In the third edition of Engaging Ideas, the influence of writing about writing can be felt in many of our chapter revisions, especially in our treatment of undergraduate research in chapter 10 and in our increased attention to genres and discourse communities throughout. The influence is also revealed in our attention to reflective writing, as explained in the next section.

Use of Metacognition and Reflection for Self‐Assessment and Improved Peer Review

Another recent development in writing studies has been scholarship across the disciplines showing the efficacy of reflective writing for increasing subject matter learning and for promoting mindful awareness of one's thinking processes while writing or reading. By encouraging metacognition, reflective writing can increase students' skills at self‐assessing their own drafts in progress and provide constructive help to classmates during peer review. The influence of this scholarship can be seen throughout the third edition, especially in our examples of reflective assignments from across the disciplines and in Dan's own experiences using reflections, self‐assessment, and peer review in his writing courses. Chapter 11, new to this edition, focuses explicitly on self‐assessment and peer review.

Emergence of a Translingualist Approach to Diversity in Language Practices, Media, and Genres

In 2011, writing studies scholars Bruce Horner, Min‐Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur published a landmark article entitled Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach. As Horner and colleagues explain, a translingual approach applaud[s] efforts to increase students' fluency in as many languages and varieties of language as possible (307). Instead of trying to eradicate error (often seen as deviations from Standard edited English), a translingual approach invites students to identify rhetorical contexts where it might be effective to break the conventions of Standard English or otherwise to draw on linguistic resources from other dialects or languages.

It should be noted that we wrote the manuscript for the third edition during the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality set inside the COVID‐19 lockdown and the approaching 2020 elections. At this time, many teachers, who have long valued diversity and social justice, were forced again to acknowledge white privilege and confront the biases of former practices. In this third edition, the influence of translingualism can be most noticed in our revision of the chapter on grammar and sentence editing. The translingual approach can also be felt in our examples throughout, which feature a wider range of ethnicities, media, genres, and audiences.

Growing Interest in Alternatives to Traditional Grading

In recent years, the increased emphasis on self‐assessment and peer review has opened up alternative methods for grading student writing such as portfolios or contract grading. Portfolios make it possible for students to demonstrate improvement from draft to draft, allowing for grading criteria that can include effort and growth of metacognitive practice of revision strategies. Contract grading goes further in that it can reward time on task in innovative ways, as explained in Asao Inoue's influential Labor‐Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (2019). Motivated by a desire to be equitable to his diverse students, Dan has experimented with alternative forms of grading and currently uses both portfolios and contract grading in his own classrooms. In the third edition we devote a new chapter (chapter 16) to these alternatives to traditional grading.

Expanding Affordances of Classroom Technology and Social Media

Since the second edition was published in 2011 there has been rapid growth in instructional technology, cell phone apps, multimedia web platforms, and social media affordances. Here Dan's expertise has been crucial. At the time of his retirement from teaching, John was still collecting stapled copies of student papers and cursing the disappearance of opaque projectors. Luckily for the third edition, Dan is at home with classroom technology, social media, and the various places where pedagogy and technology intersect. Readers will appreciate Dan's contributions throughout in our updated references to technology ranging from clickers in the classroom to conducting small‐group discussions on Zoom.

What's New in the Third Edition?

Given this background on new scholarship and evolving teaching practices, we can now provide a succinct description of what is new in the third edition:

A new chapter (chapter 11) on using self‐assessment, reflection, and peer review to promote revision. This new chapter reviews the scholarship on reflection and peer review and shows how instructors can shift some of the responsibility for responding to student writing from themselves onto students.

A new chapter (chapter 16) on alternatives to traditional grading. This chapter reviews long‐standing critiques of traditional grading in pedagogical scholarship and shows how portfolios and contract grading can be viable alternatives for overcoming inequities and increasing students' motivation, effort, and engagement.

A revised chapter 3 on helping students think rhetorically. Influenced by insights from the teaching‐for‐transfer movement in first‐year composition, our revised chapter 3 now covers genre in more detail and connects genres more fully to the concept of discourse community.

A revised chapter 4 on formal writing assignments. Our revision focuses more heavily on placing formal assignments within authentic rhetorical contexts that include purpose, audience, and genre. It also emphasizes the wide range of genres (from academic/professional to personal/expressive) that are appropriate for formal assignments.

A revised and relocated chapter on grammar and sentence editing (now chapter 15, previously chapter 5). Our revised chapter now takes a consciously translingual approach to linguistic diversity and moves the chapter toward the end of the book. The chapter still emphasizes careful sentence editing, but in the context of the writer's purpose, audience, and genre.

A revised chapter 7 on reading. Influenced by recent scholarship on the reading practices of disciplinary experts, our revised chapter focuses on reading mindfully across a range of reading purposes, which can vary depending on whether one's purpose is to formulate a deep response to a text (common in the humanities) or to advance mastery of content knowledge (common in the sciences and professional fields).

A revised chapter 10 on teaching undergraduate research. Arguing that undergraduates should be assigned authentic research projects written in appropriate disciplinary genres, this chapter now focuses on teaching metacognitive understanding of authentic research across the disciplines and provides many new examples of research assignments and teaching strategies.

Deletion of the second edition chapter on essay exams. The writing‐across‐the‐curriculum movement has always been troubled by timed in‐class essay exams—either because exam questions often ask for memorized information and thus are low on Bloom's taxonomy or they require a high level of critical thinking, but short circuit the process of revision where the work of critical thinking occurs. Rather than devote a chapter to essay exams, we have relocated much of the second edition's advice to other chapters.

Throughout the book, many new examples and updated references. In almost every chapter, the third edition contains new examples of assignments, critical thinking tasks, and teaching practices drawn from across the disciplines, as well as more ethnically and linguistically diverse examples.

Throughout the book, many updated applications of instructional technology and rhetorical uses of social media. Wherever appropriate we have updated and expanded our coverage of classroom technology and the affordances of social media ranging from the emergence of new genres to the uses of memes, podcasts, and other multimodal assignments.

What Hasn't Changed?

Throughout the third edition we have tried to retain the signature strengths of previous editions, with the continuing aim of integrating two important movements in higher education—the writing‐across‐the‐curriculum movement and the critical thinking movement. A basic premise, growing out of the educational philosophy of John Dewey, is that critical thinking—and indeed all significant learning—originates in the learner's engagement with problems. Consequently, the design of interesting problems to think about is one of the teacher's chief behind‐the‐scenes tasks. Equally important is creating a course atmosphere that encourages inquiry, exploration, discussion, and debate while valuing the dignity and worth of each student. Teachers of critical thinking also need to be mentors and coaches, developing a range of strategies for modeling critical thinking, critiquing student performances, and otherwise guiding students toward the habits of inquiry and argument valued in their disciplines.

Signature Features of Engaging Ideas

In keeping with these premises, therefore, the third edition retains—and in some cases improves or extends—the following signature features:

It takes a pragmatic nuts‐and‐bolts approach to teaching critical thinking, giving teachers hundreds of suggestions for integrating writing and other critical thinking activities into a disciplinary course.

It integrates theory and research from the writing in the disciplines literature with the broader literature from the scholarship of teaching and learning on critical thinking, intellectual development, active learning, and modes of teaching.

It gives detailed practical assistance in the design of formal and informal writing assignments and suggests time‐saving ways to coach the writing process and handle the paper load.

It treats writing assignments as only one of many ways to present critical thinking problems to students; it shows how writing assignments can easily be integrated with other critical thinking activities, such as use of small groups, inquiry discussions, classroom debates, and interactive lectures.

It has a separate chapter devoted to academic reading, exploring the causes of students' reading difficulties and offering suggestions for promoting more engaged and deeper reading.

It has separate chapters devoted to small groups and to increasing critical thinking in discussion or lecture courses.

It devotes a separate chapter to teaching undergraduate research and proposes alternatives to the traditional research paper.

It assumes that there is no one right way to integrate writing and critical thinking into a course; it therefore provides numerous options to fit each teacher's particular personality and goals and to allow flexibility for meeting the needs of different kinds of learners.

It emphasizes writing and critical thinking tasks that focus on the instructor's subject matter goals for the course, thus reducing, and in some cases perhaps even eliminating, the conflict between coverage and process.

It offers a wide array of ways to use writing in courses, ranging from short write‐to‐learn microthemes to major research projects and from formal academic writing to personal narratives; it also offers numerous ways to work exploratory writing into a course, including in‐class freewrites, blogs, and thinking pieces posted on class discussion boards.

It devotes a separate chapter to the creation of rubrics for grading student writing, discussing the upside and downside of rubrics. It also devotes a chapter to the art of providing effective feedback in ways that can minimize teacher time while maximizing helpfulness and care.

The third edition now contains two additional signature features: richer focus on self‐assessment, reflection, and peer review and alternatives to traditional grading (see the material noted in the What's New section).

Intended Audience

Something else that has not changed is our intended audience. Engaging Ideas is intended for busy college professors from any academic discipline. Many readers may already emphasize writing, critical thinking, and active learning in their classrooms and will find in this book ways to fine‐tune their work, such as additional approaches or strategies, more effective or efficient methods for coaching students as writers and thinkers, and tips on managing the paper load. Other readers may be attracted to the ideas in this book yet be held back by nagging doubts or fears that they will be buried in paper grading, that the use of writing assignments does not fit their disciplines, or that they will have to reduce their coverage of content. This book tries to allay these fears and help all professors find an approach to using writing and critical thinking activities that help each student meet course goals while fitting their own teaching philosophies and individual personalities.

We hope that for teachers one of the benefits of Engaging Ideas is greater enjoyment of teaching. Teachers should see writing assignments and other critical thinking activities as useful tools to help students achieve the instructor's content and process goals for a course. The reward of this book is watching students come to class better prepared, more vested in and motivated by the problems or questions the course investigates, more apt to study rigorously, and more likely to submit high‐quality work. A serendipitous benefit for teachers may be that their own writing gets easier when they develop strategies for helping students. Many of the ideas in this book—about posing problems, generating and exploring ideas, focusing and organizing, giving and receiving peer reviews of drafts, and revising for readers—can be applied to one's own scholarly and professional writing as well as to the writing of students.

Structure of the Book

Chapter 1, designed for the busy professor, provides a nutshell compendium of the whole book. It also addresses four misconceptions that tend to discourage professors from integrating writing and critical thinking assignments into their courses.

Part 1 (chapters 2 and 3) examines the scholarship and theory that links writing to thinking. Chapter 2 focuses on critical thinking and writing, arguing that good writing is a process and a product of critical thought. Chapter 3 examines the rhetorical dimension of thinking and writing, showing how writers must think rhetorically about purpose, audience, genre, and discourse communities. It argues that writing and critical thinking skills are enhanced when students are asked to write in different genres for different kinds of audiences and purposes.

Part 2 (chapters 4 and 5) focuses on the design of problem‐based writing assignments for promoting critical thinking. Chapter 4 covers the design of formal writing assignments that go through multiple drafts toward becoming a finished product. By contrast, chapter 5 explains the use of low‐stakes, exploratory writing inside and outside of class to enhance learning and promote critical thinking.

Part 3 (chapters 6 through 10) offers a compendium of strategies for coaching students as learners, thinkers, and writers. Using examples from across the curriculum, chapter 6 presents a heuristic for designing critical thinking problems that promote active learning. These problems can be used as prompts for formal or informal writing assignments, as tasks for small‐group problem‐solving, or as ways to stimulate class discussion or enliven lectures. Chapter 7, on mindful reading, explores the difference between surface reading and deep reading, showing how instructors can strengthen students' reading skills by helping them think rhetorically about texts and metacognitively about their own reading processes. Chapters 8 and 9 together discuss ways to use class time for active inquiry and critical thinking. Chapter 8 focuses on the use of small groups in the classroom, and chapter 9 suggests ways to make lectures more interactive and whole‐class discussions more productive. Chapter 10, on teaching undergraduate research, argues that the conventional research paper is an academic pseudo‐genre that needs to be replaced by authentic research projects written in appropriate disciplinary genres. It offers advice for helping students think metacognitively about the way different disciplines ask questions, gather evidence, make arguments, and position themselves in a conversation with other scholars. It argues that skills needed for advanced research writing at the end of the major are best taught through strategically designed scaffolding assignments earlier in the curriculum.

The final section of the book, part 4 (chapters 11–16), concerns strategies for responding to and grading student writing. Chapter 11, new to this edition, presents the happy news that students can use metacognitive reflection to self‐assess their own drafts in progress and can conduct effective peer reviews that match the quality of teacher reviews. Chapter 12 offers advice on creating and using rubrics, which can clarify an instructor's grading criteria and, in many cases, decrease an instructor's time spent grading and commenting on papers. Chapter 13 offers ten time‐saving strategies for coaching the writing process while avoiding teacher burnout. Chapter 14 focuses on ways to write supportive comments on students' work to promote significant revision rather than justify a grade. Chapter 15, on responding to grammar and other sentence‐level concerns, is a substantial revision of the second edition's chapter 5. While still focusing on the importance of careful sentence‐level editing it now tries to incorporate a more progressive, translingual appreciation of language diversity. Finally, chapter 16, also new to the third edition, explains alternatives to traditional grading through portfolio assessment and contract grading.

Thanks and Acknowledgments

We conclude with thanks and acknowledgments from John, from Dan, and then from the both of us.

From John

I have been fortunate over my teaching career to have generous colleagues who encouraged and supported my interest in writing across the curriculum and often shaped my thinking. I wish particularly to thank W. Daniel Goodman in the Department of Chemistry at the College of Great Falls and Dean Drenk, John Ramage, and Jack Folsom for our FIPSE‐grant days at Montana State University. At Seattle University, I thank my SoTL colleagues (many of whom have been coauthors with me on WAC or SoTL publications): economists Dean Peterson, Gareth Green, and Teresa Ling; finance professors David Carrithers and Fiona Robertson; chemists P. J. Alaimo, Joe Langenhan, and Jenny Loertscher; historian Theresa Earenfight; English professors Charles Tung, Nalini Iyer, June Johnson Bube, Sean McDowell, and David Leigh, S.J; and SoTL scholar David Green of Seattle University's Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Thanks also to Larry Nichols, director of the Writing Center at Seattle University, my longtime friend, workshop cofacilitator, and fellow advocate for good writing assignments and engaged learning.

A larger network of WAC friends has also nurtured and inspired my work: Joanne Kurfiss Gainen, former director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Santa Clara University; Linda Shohet, the Centre for Literacy in Montreal, Canada; Martha (Marty) Townsend at the University of Missouri, who spearheaded the development of her institution’s remarkable pioneering WAC program; John Webster, SoTL scholar and director of writing for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington; Michael Herzog, my Teagle Grant co‐investigator and longtime SoTL colleague at Gonzaga University; Carol Rutz, director of the writing program at Carleton College; Carol Haviland, former director of the writing center at California State University at San Bernardino; Paul Anderson, now retired from his important WAC work at Miami University and Elon University; and nursing professor Rob van der Peet of the Netherlands, who translated the first edition of Engaging Ideas into Dutch. I also owe a special debt of gratitude and warm thanks to pioneering SoTL scholar Maryellen Weimer, emeritus professor of teaching and learning at Pennsylvania State University, who wrote the foreword to the first and second editions of Engaging Ideas. Her faith in my work, her encouragement, and her extraordinary generosity of time gave me the confidence to produce the first and second editions.

I offer a special thanks to the Seattle University teaching community during the years 1988–1993, when I wrote the precursor to Engaging Ideas as an in‐house book for Seattle University's new core curriculum using examples from more than forty Seattle U faculty. As a Jesuit institution, Seattle University created a new core curriculum that reflected the Jesuit commitment to inquiry and debate along with a passionate belief that rhetoric, as eloquentia perfecta, should serve the common good. These beliefs, combined with the student‐centered ethic of cura personalis (care for the whole person) and mission commitment to social justice, created a teaching environment where faculty could develop and share the pedagogical practices that eventually emerged in Engaging Ideas. That remarkable Seattle U community discovered modern ways to enact the principle of active learning aimed at the growth of persons revealed in St. Ignatius's 1583 Ratio Studiorum, the originating plan of studies for Jesuit education. It took a village to write Engaging Ideas.

My deepest thanks and love go to my wife, Kit, who is also a professional writing teacher, and to our children—Matthew, Andrew, Stephen, and Sarah—who have grown to adulthood since I first started writing about Writing Across the Curriculum.

From Dan

I've had the good fortune of having many mentors in the field of writing across the curriculum who helped me along the way: Jon Leydens at Colorado School of Mines, Mike Palmquist at Colorado State University, Terry Myers Zawacki at George Mason University, Chris Anson at North Carolina State University, David Russel at Iowa State University, and Chris Thaiss at University of California, Davis, among others. These mentors became colleagues, and I have also been fortunate to have had wonderful English department colleagues at California State University, Sacramento, as I grew into my role as a WAC and writing center director: Amy Heckathorn, Linda Buckley, Fiona Glade, Cathy Gabor, Cherryl Smith, and Mandy Proctor, among many others. I have also been blessed with great writing partners. Working on a book about developing sustainable WAC programs with Michelle Cox and Jeff Galin had a tremendous impact on my thinking about WAC as a movement, and now I have the great fortune of having John Bean as a writing partner. I thank John for the invitation to join him in his good and important work helping all teachers become better writing teachers.

From Both of Us

Finally, we would like to thank Riley Harding, our editor at Jossey‐Bass/Wiley, for the skillful way she encouraged John to seek a coauthor for the third edition and for her talent at managing the logistics. We would also like to thank Christine O'Connor and her team at Wiley for the smooth production process from manuscript to published book. For their insightful reviews of the second edition with advice for the third edition, we thank Todd P. Primm, Carroll F. Nardone, and faculty workshop participants at Sam Houston State University; Pamela Flash, University of Minnesota; Brian Hendrickson, Roger Williams University; Jessie L. Moore, Elon University; and J. Michael Rifenburg, University of North Georgia.

John C. Bean

Vashon Island, Washington

October 2020

Dan Melzer

Sacramento, California

October 2020

About the Authors

John C. Bean is an emeritus professor of English at Seattle University, where he held the title of Consulting Professor of Writing and Assessment. He has an undergraduate degree in English from Stanford University (1965) and a PhD in Renaissance literature from the University of Washington (1972). He has been active in the Writing Across the Curriculum movement since 1976—first at the College of Great Falls (Montana), then at Montana State University (Bozeman), and, since 1986, at Seattle University. Besides Engaging Ideas, the first edition of which has been translated into Dutch and Chinese, he is the coauthor of four composition textbooks with varying focuses on writing, argumentation, critical thinking, and rhetorical reading. He has also published numerous articles on writing, writing across the curriculum, and discipline‐specific pedagogies to promote students' growth from novice to expert. He has done extensive consulting across the United States and Canada on writing, critical thinking, and university outcomes assessment. In 2001, he presented a keynote address at the first annual conference of the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing (EATAW) at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. More recently, he and his wife Kit (who is also now a retired college teacher of writing) have facilitated workshops on writing and critical thinking for BRAC University in Bangladesh, Ashesi University in Ghana, and Charles Lwanga College of Education in Zambia. In 2010, his article Messy Problems and Lay Audiences: Teaching Critical Thinking within the Finance Curriculum (coauthored with colleagues from finance and economics) won the 2008 McGraw‐Hill–Magna Publications Award for the year's best scholarly work on teaching and learning.

Dan Melzer is a professor in the University Writing Program of University of California, Davis, where he directs the First‐Year Composition program. He was formerly director of Writing Across the Curriculum and coordinator of the University Reading and Writing Center at California State University, Sacramento. He has an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Florida (1993) and a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Florida State University (2002). He has been active in the Writing Across the Curriculum movement for two decades as a cochair of the International Network of Writing Across the Curriculum Programs, chair of the mentoring committee of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum, and a board member of the WAC Clearinghouse. He is the author of the monograph Assignments Across the Curriculum and coauthor of the monograph Sustainable WAC. He has also published numerous articles on writing across the curriculum and writing program administration. His articles have been reprinted in Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2017 and 2020 and Writing Across the Curriculum: A Critical Sourcebook. He has done extensive consulting across the United States on writing across the curriculum. He presented keynote talks at the 2019 TYCA West conference, the 2017 All Write Symposium at Finger Lakes Community College, and the 2017 Writing Pathways to Disciplinary Learning conference at IUPUI. His current research interests focus on peer and teacher response to college writing and student self‐assessment.

1

Using Writing to Promote Thinking : A Busy Professor's Guide to the Whole Book

In his now classic study of pedagogical strategies that make a difference, Richard Light (2001) examined the connection between writing and student engagement. The results are stunning, he claims:

The relationship between the amount of writing for a course and students' level of engagement—whether engagement is measured by time spent on the course, or the intellectual challenge it presents, or students' level of interest in it—is stronger than the relationship between students' engagement and any other course characteristic. (55)

More recent research, conducted jointly by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), has shown that for promoting engagement and deep learning the number of writing assignments in a course may not be as important as the design of the writing assignments themselves (Anderson, Anson, Gonyea, and Paine, 2009). Good assignments, this research has shown, give students opportunities to receive early feedback on their work, encourage meaning‐making, and clearly explain the instructor's expectations and purpose. (We discuss this research in depth in chapter 4.) The aim of this book is to give professors a wide range of options for bringing the benefits of engaged learning to students. Our premise, supported by an increasing body of research, is that good writing assignments (as well as other active learning tasks) evoke a high level of critical thinking, help students wrestle productively with a course's big questions, and teach disciplinary ways of seeing, knowing, and doing. They can also be designed to promote self‐reflection, leading to more integrated, personally meaningful learning. Moreover, the benefits do not accrue only to students. Professors who successfully integrate writing and other critical thinking activities into their courses often report a satisfying increase in their teaching pleasure: students are better prepared for class, discussions are richer, and student performance improves.

But the use of writing and critical thinking activities to promote learning does not happen through serendipity. Teachers must plan for it and foster it throughout the course. This chapter suggests a sequence of steps that teachers can take to integrate writing and critical thinking into their courses. It then addresses four negative beliefs that often discourage teachers from taking these steps—the beliefs that integrating writing into a course will take time away from content, that writing assignments are not appropriate for some disciplines or courses, that assigning writing will bury a teacher in paper grading, and that assigning writing requires specialized expertise. Because these beliefs raise important concerns, we seek to supply reassuring responses at the outset.

This chapter provides, in effect, a brief overview of the whole book; subsequent chapters treat in depth each of the suggestions or issues introduced briefly here.

Steps for Integrating Writing and Critical Thinking Activities into a Course

This section surveys seven steps teachers can take to integrate writing and critical thinking activities into a course.

Step 1: Become Familiar with Some of the General Principles Linking Writing to Learning and Critical Thinking

To appreciate how writing is linked to learning and critical thinking, we can begin with a brief discussion of how we might define critical thinking.

Critical Thinking Rooted in Problems

Although definitions in the pedagogical literature vary in detail, in their broad outlines they are largely elaborations, extensions, and refinements of the progressive views of John Dewey (1916), who rooted critical thinking in the students' engagement with a problem. Problems, for Dewey, evoke students' natural curiosity and stimulate learning and critical thought. Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding [their] own way out, does [the student] think (188).

Part of the difficulty of teaching critical thinking, therefore, is awakening students to the existence of problems all around them. Meyers (1986), who agrees with Dewey that problems are naturally motivating, argues that teachers ought to begin every class with something that is a problem or a cause for wonder (44). Meyers quotes philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi, who claims that as far down the scale of life as worms and even perhaps amoebas, we meet a general alertness of animals, not directed towards any specific satisfaction, but merely exploring what is there: an urge to achieve intellectual control over the situations confronting [them] (41).

Presenting students with problems, then, taps into something natural and self‐fulfilling in our beings. In his fifteen‐year study of what the best college professors do, Ken Bain (2004) shows that highly effective teachers confront students with intriguing, beautiful, or important problems, authentic tasks that will challenge them to grapple with ideas, rethink their assumptions, and examine their mental models of reality (18). Set at the appropriate level of difficulty, such beautiful problems create a natural critical learning environment that engages students as active and deep learners. Similarly, Brookfield (1987) claims that critical thinking is a productive and positive activity. Critical thinkers are actively engaged with life (5). This belief in the natural, healthy, and motivating pleasure of problems—and in the power of well‐designed problems to awaken and stimulate the passive and unmotivated student—is one of the underlying premises of this book.

Disciplinary versus Generic Domains for Critical Thinking

Not all problems, however, are academic problems of the kind that we typically present to students in our classrooms or that we pose for ourselves in doing scholarly research. Academic problems are typically rooted within a disciplinary conversation: to a large extent, these problems are discipline‐specific, because each discipline poses its own kinds of questions and conducts inquiries, uses data, and makes arguments in its own characteristic fashion. As Anne Beaufort (2007) has shown, to think and write like a disciplinary expert, students must draw not only on subject matter knowledge but also on knowledge about the discipline's genre conventions, its methods of argument, its typical kinds of evidence, its ways of referencing other researchers, and its typical rhetorical contexts and audiences. Chapters 3 and 4 develop strategies for helping students think rhetorically about their purpose, audience, genre, and discourse community. Chapter 10 addresses Beaufort's novice‐expert schema in more detail by drawing on rhetorical understanding to teach undergraduate research.

Although academic problems typically have discipline‐specific features, certain underlying aspects of critical thinking are generic across all domains. According to Brookfield (1987), two central activities define critical thinking: identifying and challenging assumptions and exploring alternative ways of thinking and acting (71). Joanne Kurfiss (1988) likewise believes that critical thinkers pose problems by questioning assumptions and aggressively seeking alternative views. For her, the prototypical academic problem is ill‐structured; that is, it is an open‐ended question that does not have a clear right answer and therefore must be responded to with a proposition justified by reasons and evidence. In critical thinking, says Kurfiss, all assumptions are open to question, divergent views are aggressively sought, and the inquiry is not biased in favor of a particular outcome (2).

The Link between Writing and Critical Thinking

Given this view of critical thinking, what is its connection with writing? Quite simply, writing is a process of doing critical thinking and a product that communicates the results of critical thinking. As we show in chapter 2, writing instruction goes sour whenever writing is conceived primarily as a communication skill rather than as a process and product of critical thought. If writing is merely a communication skill, then we primarily ask of it, Is the writing clear? But if writing is critical thinking, we ask, Is the writing interesting? Does it show a mind actively engaged with a problem? Does it bring something new to readers? Does it make an argument? As chapters 2 and 3 explain, experienced writers begin by posing two kinds of problems—what we might call subject matter problems and rhetorical problems. Subject matter problems drive the writer's inquiry. The writer's thesis statement (or hypothesis to be tested in empirical research) is a tentative response to a subject matter problem; it poses a contestable answer or solution that must be supported with the kinds of reasons and evidence that are valued in the discipline. But writers also think critically about rhetorical problems: who is my audience? What genre should I employ and what are its features and conventions? How much do my readers already know about and care about my research question? How do I want to change my audience's views? What alternative views must I consider? Writers produce multiple drafts because the act of writing is itself an act of problem‐solving. Behind the scenes of a finished product is a messy process of exploratory writing, conversation, and discarded drafts. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with these issues in depth.

Step 2: Design Your Course with Critical Thinking Objectives in Mind

Once teachers are convinced of the value of critical thinking, the next step is to design a course that nurtures it. What is such a course like? In her comprehensive review of the literature on critical thinking, Kurfiss (1988) examined a wide range of successful disciplinary courses devoted to the teaching of subject matter and critical thinking. In each case, she explains, the professor establishes an agenda that includes learning to think about subject matter. Students are active, involved, consulting and arguing with each other, and responsible for their own learning (88). From this review, she derives eight principles for designing a disciplinary course that supports critical thinking:

Critical thinking is a learnable skill; the instructor and peers are resources in developing critical thinking skills.

Problems, questions, or issues are the point of entry into the subject and a source of motivation for sustained inquiry.

Successful courses balance challenges to think critically with support tailored to students' developmental needs.

Courses are assignment centered rather than text and lecture centered. Goals, methods, and evaluation emphasize using content rather than simply acquiring it.

Students are required to formulate and justify their ideas in writing or other appropriate modes.

Students collaborate to learn and to stretch their thinking, for example, in pair problem solving and small‐group work.

Several courses, particularly those that teach problem‐solving skills, nurture students' metacognitive abilities.

The developmental needs of students are acknowledged and used as information in the design of the course. Teachers in these courses make standards explicit and then help students learn how to achieve them. (88–89)

This book aims to help teachers develop courses that follow these guidelines. Of key importance are Kurfiss's principles 2, 4, and 5: a good critical thinking course presents students with problems, questions, [or] issues that make a course assignment centered rather than text [or] lecture centered and holds students responsible for formulating and justifying their solutions orally or in writing. This book particularly emphasizes writing assignments because they are perhaps the most flexible and most intensive way to integrate critical thinking tasks into a course and because the writing process itself entails complex critical thinking. But much attention is also given to class discussions, small‐group activities, and other teaching strategies that encourage students to work collaboratively to expand, develop, and deepen their thinking. Attention is also given throughout to the design of problems at appropriate levels of difficulty, to the developmental needs of students, and to the importance of making expectations and criteria clear (principles 1, 3, and 8).

Step 3: Design Critical Thinking Tasks for Students to Address

A crucial step in teaching critical thinking is to develop good problems for students to think about. Tasks can range from enduring disciplinary problems to narrowly specific questions about the significance of a graph or the interpretation of a key passage in a course reading. The kinds of questions you develop for students will depend on their level of expertise, their current degree of engagement with the subject matter, and the nature of question asking in your own discipline.

When we conduct workshops in writing across the curriculum, we like to emphasize a disciplinary, content‐driven view of critical thinking. One of John's workshop strategies is to ask faculty to write out one or two final examination essay questions for one of their courses—questions that they think assess subject matter knowledge and a desired level of disciplinary or generic critical thinking. Participants then discuss the kinds of thinking needed and possible ways to revise the questions to increase or decrease the level of complexity. Once participants have revised their questions, John suggests that it is a shame to waste them on an in‐class exam, where students are graded on a hasty, unrevised rough draft. More learning might emerge if such questions were integrated into the fabric of a course, where the question could keep students longer on task, stimulating deepened and more complex thought, engagement, and disciplinary learning. Chapters 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9 focus specifically on the design of critical thinking tasks to serve as formal or informal writing assignments or as starting points for other critical thinking activities.

Step 4: Develop a Repertoire of Ways to Give Critical Thinking Tasks to Students and to Coach Critical Thinking

Once you have developed a stockpile of critical thinking problems based on your course's subject matter, you can choose from dozens of ways to integrate them into your course. This book presents numerous options for giving critical thinking problems to students. These include the following:

Problems as formal writing assignments. Formal writing assignments, which require revision and multiple drafts, keep students on task for extended periods and are among our most powerful tools for teaching critical thinking. They can range in length from one‐paragraph microthemes (see chapter 4) to major research projects within a disciplinary genre (see chapter 10). As these chapters show, effective academic assignments usually require that the student develop and explore a disciplinary problem or propose and support a thesis or test a hypothesis in response

Reviews for Engaging Ideas

[ltitc · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

No matter what course you teach, you will always teach writing (unless you are an acting teacher, I guess) and at least one learning goal has to focus on helping students express their thinking about their course of study well...and in writing. To reach that goal, you'll need writing activities and a plan for strengthening the writing skills of your students throughout the semester. This book will take any instructor from any discipline through the process of incorporating more and better writing assignments/activities in a classroom, categorizing them by the type of skill represented. Necessary chapers--engaging all learners, dealing with grammar issues, how to design types of assignments, and how to coach students toward your ideal vision of writer. Definitely read this book before planning (or when revising) your course.