Professional Development Meeting Notes from November 8-9, 2011

1. Announcements

--If you are using FA 742 to meet with students, please let us know so that we can ensure that office space is being utilized for its intended purpose.

--We possibly may be piloting John Goshert's text Entering the Academic Conversation: Strategies for Research Writing for English 2010 and 2020 next semester. If you are interested in participating in the pilot, please let us know.

--The Faculty Center for Teaching Excellence have recently made some funds available to help adjunct faculty pay for travel expenses to give presentations at conferences. (NOTE: This does not apply if you are merely chairing a session.) These funds might not be available next year and they are probably only available on a first-come-first-serve basis so it's best to get your application in to the Faculty Center soon.

--In that same vein, if in the future the English Department offers lecturer positions, all adjuncts are eligible to apply. It will look especially good on your CV if you have recently read a paper at a conference.

--The English Department has added a new Writing Studies emphasis to the English major (in addition to the emphases on Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and English Education that are currently offered). This major will focus on rhetorical theory, preparation for grad school, etc. Please encourage any students in your classes who seem like good candidates to talk to an adviser and pick up brochures in the front office. As part of this new emphasis, next semester the Department be offering Intro to Writing Studies (which requires 1010 and 2010/2020 as a prerequisite).

2. Norming our Grading Criteria

For the remainder of the meeting, we participated in an activity that would help us engage in a discussion about how to evaluate student papers. Gae Lyn handed out a copy of the AACU's rubrics for Written Communication and Critical Thinking. We briefly skimmed through these rubrics. Then we each read 3 different papers: one that was an excellent paper, one that was an average paper, and one that was a poor paper (but we weren't told which was which right away). Working in groups, we discussed which papers were better than others, applying the AACU rubrics to the papers.