Instagram Combined Shape quotation Created with Sketch. 69

Teaching a WAYS 102 Course

What is WAYS 102: College Writing Seminar?

College Writing Seminar helps students develop skills as critical readers, compelling writers, and thoughtful participants in the academic community. This course is designed to help students write effectively in other university courses; develop critical thinking and writing fluency; and find, critically evaluate, and incorporate source materials. Each seminar will have a particular framing question/issue that provides a focused context within which students will approach texts and assignments. Students will read, discuss, and write about a variety of texts, identifying underlying assumptions, evidence, and points of view, drawing inferences, and reaching independent conclusions. They will begin to work with resources -- evaluating, incorporating, and acknowledging them -- with increasing sophistication.

Ways 102 Design Guidelines

If you want to contribute to one of the most innovative parts of the new General Education curriculum, here is what you need to do:

Submitting a proposal to the Potsdam Pathways Curriculum Committee to teach a WAYS course for the first time is the culmination of a process beginning a year prior to first offering the class. That year involves professional development in skills pedagogy, consultation with skills experts, the appropriate WAYS Coordinator, and fellow WAYS faculty, as well as support in course preparation and approval.

After consulting the WAYS Getting Started materials and speaking to your department chair, please submit the WAYS Course: Intent to Design form to initiate the process, or reach out to the appropriate WAYS Coordinator. At the completion of the course development process the WAYS Coordinator will instruct you to formally apply for WAYS designation by submitting the WAYS course: Intent to Teach form and supporting documents to the PPCC.

WAYS Course: Intent to Design Form

For fall sections, the deadline is the preceding October 15th and for spring offerings the deadline is the preceding March 15th. 

In the semester before you teach WAYS 102, there will be 3 professional development workshops. These workshops are designed to provide you with the training, support, and time that you need to prepare your course.  Early in the semester, we will hold a full day workshop run by an off-campus expert in teaching college writing.  (This year that workshop is on September 13, 10am-3pm.) It will be a chance for you to refine your ideas, think about course structure, learn about best practices, and collaborate with other WAYS 102 faculty.  Several weeks into the semester, an on-campus expert will hold a half-day workshop to help you shape and develop your syllabus.  Near the end of the semester we will hold a 2-hour workshop so that you can share your syllabus with other new WAYS 102 instructors (and faculty who have already taught WAYS 102) and receive final feedback before submitting your course to the WAYS 102 Coordinator and the Potsdam Pathways Curriculum Committee for approval. 

Note: There is a small amount of professional development funds for faculty who successfully complete the training.

In the semester that you teach your WAYS 102 course, we will hold bi-weekly meetings with other WAYS 102 faculty (new and experienced).  These meetings will offer the opportunity to share experiences, techniques, and developing pedagogies with other instructors. Pilot faculty found these meetings (approx. 6-7 over the course of the semester) to be very helpful.

After you develop and teach your course once, we ask that you share your experiences with other WAYS 102 faculty so that the program can continue to grow and thrive.  To help facilitate that, we ask that instructors attend the bi-weekly meetings every time they teach a WAYS 102 course and to take part in the training process every time their course is reviewed (there is a three-year review cycle)