Fall semester, 2008: English 624, Teaching College Composition

This course is designed for second-year M.A. students who have been assigned to teach their first (solo) sections of ENG 101, our first-year writing course. As preparation for this experience, the TAs take a course in the theory and research of composition (ENG 511) during their first year. In the second semester of that year, they are assigned to an experienced composition teacher who they "shadow" and who serves as a mentor. They learn about the mentor's course, watch how they plan daily activities, look at samples of students' writing with them (and sometimes help with grading or commenting), occasionally run a class session with the teacher supervising, and engage in other ways in the course.

ENG 624 begins with a pre-fall-semester workshop that meets all day for an entire week. The workshop helps the TAs to design their courses and syllabi, write assignment sheets, plan entire units culminating in the major writing projects, and work on many aspects of teaching such as deciding on a role and demeanor, dealing with problem students, and creating "deep" rubrics that have both formative and summative value in their teaching.

The course itself, which meets weekly throughout the semester, continues to focus on the TAs' experiences as teachers and helps them to take on an attitude of "reflective practice" in their work. There is lots of discussion about the TAs' impressions and continued strategic focus on class planning, assignment design, coaching students, reading, responsing to, and evaluating writing, and the like. The TAs create online teaching portfolios that contain required entries such as peer-observation reports and a reflection on their evaluative style based on the analysis of a batch of graded papers, as well as several entries of their choice.

This is an exciting and pragmatically valuable course because of the way it ties the students' learning of theory and research in composition with their gaining of expertise as classroom instructors of composition. There are 14 students registered in the current section. Eleven are M.A. students in the English Department, and three others are students in the interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media.