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

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.

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 and a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature from the University of Washington.  He has been active in the writing-across-the-curriculum movement since 1976.  Besides& Engaging Ideas, he is the co-author of three widely-used composition textbooks--Writing Arguments, The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing, and Reading Rhetorically.  He has done extensive consulting across the United States and Canada on writing across the curriculum, critical thinking, and university outcomes assessment. 

Dan Melzer is a professor in the University Writing Program and Director of First-Year Composition at the University of California, Davis. He has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from Florida State University. He is the author of the monograph Assignments Across the Curriculum and co-author with Michelle Cox and Jeffrey Galin of the monograph Sustainable WAC: A Whole Systems Approach to Launching and Developing WAC Programs. He has also published two textbooks, Exploring College Writing and Everything's a Text (with Deborah Coxwell Teague). He frequently gives keynotes and is a guest lecturer and workshop leader at universities across the country.

Preface

About the Authors

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

PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THINKING AND WRITING

2 How Writing Is Related to Critical Thinking

3 Helping Students Think Rhetorically

PART 2 DESIGNING PROBLEM-BASED WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

4 Formal Writing Assignments Situated in Rhetorical Contexts

5 Informal, Exploratory Writing Activities

PART 3 COACHING STUDENTS AS LEARNERS, THINKERS, AND WRITERS

6 Designing Tasks to Promote Active Thinking and Learning

7 Helping Students Read Mindfully across the Disciplines

8 Using Small Groups to Coach Thinking and Teach Disciplinary Argument

9 Bringing More Critical Thinking into Lectures and Discussions

10 Designing and Sequencing Assignments to Teach Undergraduate Research

PART 4 RESPONDING TO AND GRADING STUDENT WRITING

11 Helping Students Use Self-Assessment and Peer Review to Promote Revision and Reflection

12 Using Rubrics to Develop and Apply Assessment Criteria

13 Coaching the Writing Process and Handling the Paper Load

14 Providing Effective and Efficient Feedback

15 Responding to Grammar and Other Sentence-Level Concerns

16 Alternatives to Traditional Grading: Portfolio Assessment and Contract Grading

References

Index

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