By Sylvie Thode, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 Skimming can get a bad rap, especially in the literature or composition classroom. In reading too fast, the story goes, students risk missing the point of a text or blazing past the wonders of its language. But for many…
By Anahit Manoukian, Spanish and Portuguese Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 One of the most challenging aspects of teaching a second-semester reading and composition course is introducing students to secondary sources. When I designed my “Letters from the Hispanic World” course, I intentionally focused on primary texts to…
by Katherine Bruhn, South and Southeast Asian Studies Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2021 A key learning outcome in Reading & Composition courses is the ability to identify original research topics. For most students this can be daunting. In order to structure this task, I require my students to center their…
by Kate Driscoll, Italian Studies Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2019 In teaching Reading and Composition courses, I have found that students—many of whom come from disciplines outside the humanities—often search for the “right” answer to literature, expecting the black and white colors on the page to correspond to black and…
by Erin Bennett, Comparative Literature Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2019 One of my primary goals when crafting a syllabus for a Reading & Composition course is to select texts with which my 18-year-old students can readily connect, but which also challenge them to develop their own coherent interpretations. Last spring,…
by Julia Lewandoski, History Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 After several semesters as a GSI and Reader for history classes, it has become clear to me that a concise, clear, and specific thesis statement is essential to a successful student paper. Developing a strong thesis statement enables students to frame…
by Bristin Jones, Comparative Literature Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 In my first semester teaching Reading and Composition (R&C) in the Comparative Literature department, I realized that one of the most significant challenges undergraduates face in engaging with literary texts is producing thought-provoking thesis statements and arguments. After years of…
by Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, South and Southeast Asian Studies Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 The annotated bibliography is an important component of a research-based undergraduate course. But in most of my experience as a student and as a teacher, I found the exercise to complete it empty. Even after providing…
by Rosalind Diaz, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 Grading rubrics are an invaluable teaching tool. Ideally, they promote fairness and transparency in assessment, and help students set reasonable goals, develop metacognition, and practice self-assessment. But a rubric can also act as a gatekeeper of knowledge. Vague, abstruse, or circularly…
by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Rhetoric [A]sked to write an essay that deals with more than one primary text, [students’] tendency is ... to either illustrate the ways in which the texts make equivalent arguments, or to pit one text/author against the other… I realized that I needed to do more to teach students what it means to bring two texts “into conversation.”