Cross-posted from the Digital Union blog.

A few weeks ago I facilitated a workshop on teaching with portfolios for Learning Technology. As much as we talk about the technology supporting e-portfolios, it’s good to step back and take stock of the pedagogical approaches behind them.

How can we empower our students to engage critically with our course materials? One of the most exciting results of teaching--but most challenging to achieve--occurs when students are able to express curiosity about your course’s subject matter. Check out the following ideas for using writing to encourage your students to think more critically about their work.

As we are planning ahead for a busy Autumn Quarter, how can we provide students opportunities to get perspectives on writing from outside the classroom? Writing for the classroom is very different from writing for the workplace or other public forums in context, expectations, and effect, and students can have a hard time adapting what they learn in the classroom to other settings. Student writers can benefit from hearing outside guests such as workplace professionals or scholars talk about their writing in the field.

How can I get students to engage with library research projects more effectively? Students frequently struggle with understanding how to conduct library-based research.

How can we use writing to help our students become better readers? Often a student’s first introduction to writing and thinking critically in our disciplines begins with how they read the texts in our courses.

As we move toward the end of the quarter, how can we use writing to assess student learning this quarter and help us plan for next quarter's teaching? Having students reflect on course materials and course activities can provide you with a picture of how students are learning as well as let you know if there are aspects of your course that might need fine-tuning. It can also help students to synthesize the work they've done over the quarter.

The Writing Across the Curriculum team provides services for instructors and faculty in any discipline who are incorporating writing into their teaching. Writing is a powerful and important tool for learning, and our multi-disciplinary WAC team can help you use it as effectively as possible. Keep your eye out for more e-mails this quarter to inform you about our services and to give you helpful tips for using writing in your classroom. How do you help students adjust to writing again after their summer sojourns?

Now that you may finally have a little bit of time this summer to rework some of your writing assignments, how might you design a series of assignments that your students will find interesting to write and you will find interesting to read? Summer quarter is an ideal time to look back at your writing assignments and consider how you might tweak them. Here are some tips for how you might make your writing assignments as effective as they can be.

Are you ever left class wondering whether or not students understand a course concept or a day's reading? Would you like students to think about course concepts and readings in a more sustained way? Would you like students to be more conscious about their writing process?

The Writing Across the Curriculum team provides services for instructors and faculty in any discipline who are incorporating writing into their teaching. Writing is a powerful and important tool for learning, and we can help you use it as effectively as possible. We will e-mail you a few times this quarter to inform you about our services and to give you helpful tips for using writing in your teaching. Here are some tips that can help you on your first day of teaching: