Sample "Writing Proficiency in the Major" Workshop Agenda

        Writing Proficiency in the Major requirements need careful attention to insure the curriculum properly prepares majors to meet their departments' expectations.  This process works best if all faculty who have a stake in the major's quality take part in a workshop in which they seek consensus about what currently is happening and what can be done to improve the current system.  If you are interested, the Writing Program would be happy to participate in or to help plan such a meeting.  Before you meet, gathering some reliable data on graduation rates and grade trends in writing-intensive courses will help you to avoid being overly influenced by startling anecdotes about individual students' performance.  In the meeting, answering the following questions will help you to evaluate your current strategies and to plan improvements.

Writing Proficiency in the Major Department Assessment and Support

1)  Generally speaking, how are we currently dealing with WPM and how well is it working?  What do we know and what do we only suspect about our majors' writing abilities?  Can we find ways to validate our suspicions with empirical data?

2)  What are our shared standards for judging the features that good writing in our major ought to have?  What do we think is most important and how do we communicate that to students?  Do we need any common documents to teach students our WPM standards?  If we have them, how should we make students aware of them (departmental style sheets, sample papers, "how-to" web pages or public folder postings, attachment to syllabi, discussion at annual new-majors meetings, etc.)?

3)  What genres or kinds of writing do we want our majors to be capable of, and what sub-skills does success in those genres require?  Are there any new writing trends in our field?

4)  Which courses currently require those genres or kinds of writing, and when in their educational careers do students typically take those courses?  Have we properly synchronized teaching the skills required before the need to measure them is required?

5)  Which of those genres and skills have most students already mastered, and which have most of them never before attempted or succeeded in mastering?

6)  Of the second group in #5, can we modify existing courses in the major which require those genres/skills so they can teach any of the skills or genres, or does that require a separate course?

7)  If additional instructional components are required, how long will it probably take to teach the average major and does the teaching have to be done by a member of the department?  If the department cannot support the needed instruction, can it be done by any of the following methods?

• a 200-level Writing Program course specially dedicated to that purpose taught by half-time faculty (the most experienced writing instructors in the department);
• a Writing Center tutor, preferably a major in your department, meeting with other majors in a "supplemental instruction" setting;
• a Writing Center tutor in a routine tutoring session with the aid of a handout from the department and/or a meeting to guide the tutor;
•  a department member (major advisor?)  in a tutoring session as part of a mentoring plan.

8)  If we are reassigning teaching objectives within existing courses to teach some writing skills, how will we incorporate that instruction within the course content?  If we are designing additional instructional components as in #7 above, what staffing and funding resources should we seek?