LibGuides: SPH Writing Support Services: Faculty Resources

Using Active Learning and Flipping Courses

Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom
Bonwell and Eison (1991) describe "the nature of active learning, the empirical research on its use, the common obstacles and barriers that give rise to faculty members' resistance to interactive instructional techniques, and how faculty, faculty developers, administrators, and educational researchers can make real the promise of active learning."
Active Learning by Design: An Undergraduate Introductory Public Health Course
Yeatts (2014) describes the course assignments, lessons learned, and student successes of an introductory public health course at Gillings School of Global Public Health.
Classroom Activities for Active Learning
UNC Center for Faculty Excellence (2009) provides research-based strategies to actively engage students.
Flipping Classrooms in a School of Public Health
Howard, Scharff, and Loux (2017) provide a rationale for flipping, course descriptions, and lessons learned based on "three successfully flipped courses" taught at Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice.
Flipping the Classroom and the Pedagogy: Using Active Learning Principles to Bring Leadership Training in Affirmative Sexuality to Public Health Education
Austin (2016) describes a graduate-level, introductory, elective course on sexuality and public health that she designed and teaches at Harvard Chan School.
Using Active Learning Instructional Strategies to Create Excitement and Enhance Learning
Eison (2010) describes the use of instructional strategies grounded in active learning in the classroom context.
Writing and Learning in the Health Sciences: Rhetoric, Identity, Genre, and Performance
Clark and Fischbach (2008) describe a "successful linkage between a writing class and a class in Health Sciences that used rhetoric ... to help students gain insight into the role of writing in the field of Public Health and understand what it means to be a Public Health professional."

Designing Writing Assignments

1. Web sites on how to design writing assignments to elicit effective student writing:

Crafting Effective Writing Assignments (Duke Thompson Writing Program)
Creating Assignments (Carnegie Mellon's Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation)
Creating Writing Assignments (MIT Writing and Communication Center)
Designing Writing Assignments (Stanford Teaching Commons)
Designing Writing Assignments (Writing@CSU)
Designing Writing Assignments (The WAC Clearinghouse's NCTE on WAC)
How Do I Create Meaningful and Effective Assignments? (Texas Tech Teaching, Learning & Professional Development Center)
Keys to Designing Effective Writing and Research Assignments (Magna Faculty Focus)
Teaching Students to Write Good Papers (Yale Center for Teaching and Learning)

2. The Faculty Innovation Center at UT Austin offers QUICK FIC Solutions, "a curated toolkit for instructors," that includes teaching tips, learning tools, etc.

3. The HarvardWrites Instructor Toolkit is "a toolkit for assigning, teaching, and evaluating writing with in-class exercises to help students understand your feedback and improve their writing."

4. The Consortium on Graduate Communication has created the following bibliography "to support instructors who are selecting textbooks or creating or revising curricula or materials for their graduate communication courses."

Bibliography of Textbooks and Readings on Course and Materials Development

Responding to Student Writing

There are many approaches to commenting on student writing, with different effects on students and different requirements of faculty. Ideally, responding to student writing offers constructive feedback to students without being burdensome to faculty.

Web sites on how to respond to student writing:

A Toolkit for Assigning, Teaching, and Evaluating Writing (HarvardWrites/Harvard Writing Program)
Diagnosing and Responding to Student Writing (Dartmouth's Institute for Writing and Rhetoric)
Responding to Student Writing -- and Writers (Harvard Graduate School of Education)

Articles:

When Less Is More: Principles for Responding in the Disciplines
In this article, Ronald Lunsford argues that "teachers’ comments should reflect their instructional goals for individual students. Fewer, and more carefully designed, comments are likely to be more effective than a large number of unfocused responses."
Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers
In this classic essay in the field of composition, Nancy Sommers reports her study examining the revision process of student writers and experienced writers to determine what role revision -- a sequences of changes in a composition -- played in their writing processes.
Responding to Student Writing
In another classic essay in the field of composition, Nancy Sommers reports her study of teachers’ comments at New York University and the University of Oklahoma.
Re-Visions: Excerpts from "Responding to Student Writing," Nancy Sommers, CCC, 1982
Excerpts from Nancy Sommers’s 1982 essay, followed by commentaries from Nancy Sommers, Carol Rutz, and Howard Tinberg.

Handouts & guides:

About Responding to Student Writing
Memo by Peter Elbow, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
A Brief Guide to Responding to Student Writing
From the Harvard Writing Project Brief Guide Series.
Responding to Student Writing - Handout
By Kerry Walk, former director of the Princeton Writing Program.
Responding to Student Writing - Workshop
Handout from WAC/WID Faculty Workshop, University Writing Program, University of Washington.
Responding to Writing - Handout
Handout by Laura Brady, Department of English, West Virginia University.
Response to Student Writing: 13 Ways of Looking at It
Handout by Doug Hesse, Director of University Writing Programs, The University of Denver.