tailieunhanh - BUILDING ORAL AND WRITTEN COMMUNICATION INTO YOUR CLASSROOM

Writing and speaking activities offer students the opportunity to engage with course materials and develop both communication and critical thinking skills. As an expert in your discipline, you can help students develop both disciplinary literacy and critical thinking through regular high and low stakes writing and speaking activities. | BUILDING ORAL & WRITTEN COMMUNICATION INTO YOUR CLASSROOM Writing and speaking activities offer students the opportunity to engage with course materials and develop both communication and critical thinking skills. As an expert in your discipline, you can help students develop both disciplinary literacy and critical thinking through regular high and low stakes writing and speaking activities. As John Bean notes, “The use of writing and critical thinking activities to promote learning does not happen through serendipity. Teachers must plan for it and foster it throughout the course” (p. 1). (Bean’s Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom informs many of the ideas presented in this handout and represents a terrific resource for university faculty.) We know that students develop disciplinary literacies when they have varied opportunities to communicate their academic understanding and when they receive feedback from professors and other students. For students to become literate in civil engineering or history, for example, they need to practice communication in that particular discipline. The professor in the discipline, who has the truest insight into that discipline, is well positioned to nurture student communication skills. KEY PRINCIPLE—PROCESS AND PRODUCT Writing and speaking reflect both process and product. Importantly, the best instruction in communication demands attention to both process and product: how to think through a problem or assignment methodically and how to express the results of that critical thinking in clear communication. As Bean notes, “Writing instruction goes sour whenever writing is conceived as primarily a communication skill, rather than as a process and product of critical thought” (p. 3). The same applies to oral communication. Other important understandings about fostering communication in the disciplines are these: • Communication must be clear and follow .