Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education

 

Date of this Version

2009

Citation

Essays on Teaching Excellence: Toward the Best in the Academy (2009) 20(2)

A publication of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education

Comments

Copyright 2009, Eric LeMay. Used by permission

Abstract

The specific critical moves and writing conventions of your discipline probably differ from mine, but your discipline certainly has them and when teaching them to students becomes your aim, your responses to their writing will take less time and be more effective. No longer will you have to transform novice papers into expert ideas. Instead, you can focus on the novices themselves. You can use their writing to teach them the next thing they need to know as novice historians, philosophers, or anthropologists. Given that they’re novices and you’re an expert, that thing is almost always obvious to you, although not to them. And instead of feeling disappointment and exhaustion with your students and their writing, you can see this next step in their learning and them as full of promise, the promise of novices learning to think and write as experts do.

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