Resources for teaching Comm-B courses
There are many resources at UW-Madison to help support you in teaching Comm-B. If you have questions about any of the following resources, contact a member of the Writing Across the Curriculum team.
Supporting the Research Requirement: The UW-Madison Libraries
What the Libraries Offer
The Libraries have many services and resources to support your Comm-B course, including:
- In-person library instruction sessions (e.g., instruction in a library classroom, or a librarian visit to your classroom)
- Online library instruction sessions (e.g., Canvas modules, synchronous or asynchronous instruction, online research tutorials, support for research activities, or virtual assistance)
- Research Guides designed for your course (e.g., customized lists of databases, resources and research strategies for your course or assignment)
If you’re interested in any of these options, simply fill out this online form and we’ll be in touch: Request Library Instruction
And if you have questions or want to learn more about how the Libraries can support you and your students, contact Ros Faulkner, Instructional Services Librarian: ros.faulkner@wisc.edu.
Library Instruction Sessions for Comm-B
Scholarship looks different in each discipline: how it’s recorded, how it’s shared, how it’s evaluated, how it’s used. With this in mind, librarians have identified these four common learning outcomes for Comm-B library sessions:
- Identify and locate information sources
- Apply search strategies
- Understand scholarship as an ongoing conversation
- Evaluate sources
If you schedule a library instruction session for your course, the librarian will most likely address these learning outcomes in addition to any specific topics, resources or skills you request.
Research Guides
You can request that the Libraries create a Library Course Guide to support your students in quickly finding the most relevant resources for your course. These online guides pull together links to library databases, embedded tutorials, and other resources. If you’re interested in a Library Course Guide for your class, I encourage you to contact the Libraries as soon as possible.
Tutorials
The Libraries also have a number of online interactive, text, and video Library Research Tutorials that cover a wide range of topics, and these can be linked to or embedded in your Canvas course. For example, below you’ll see some screenshots of a video on evaluating sources, a video on scholarship as a conversation, an interactive tutorial on how to read scholarly articles, an interactive library resource recommender for Comm-B subjects, and an interactive tutorial illustrating how to map scholarly conversations.
Supporting Student Writers: The Writing Center
The UW-Madison Writing Center is a key resource for student writers in Comm-B courses. The Writing Center should never be viewed as a punitive space—in other words, encourage your students to see the Writing Center as a supportive space from which writers at all levels can benefit.
The Writing Center believes that every writer needs a reader. They support writers within and beyond the university across all levels, disciplines, and identities. Readers at the Writing Center are committed to using inclusive and accessible teaching practices. The Writing Center team believes:
- writing is a powerful tool for communicating existing ideas and discovering new ones;
- learning to write is a lifelong process;
- linguistic justice is a vital component of equitable writing center practice; and
- all writers can benefit from sharing work in progress with attentive readers who are dedicated to helping writers meet their goals.
They provide writers with support, resources, community, and accountability at any stage of the writing process through:
As an instructor or TA teaching a Comm-B course, consider telling your students about the benefits of visiting the Writing Center, or scheduling a visit from a member of the Writing Center Outreach Team for your class.
Supporting Comm-B Instructors & Student Writers: The Undergraduate Writing Fellows Program
The Writing Fellows are a group of carefully selected and extensively trained undergraduates who serve as peer writing tutors in courses with writing across the College of L&S. The Fellows make thoughtful and thorough comments on drafts of assigned papers (usually on two of the assigned papers in a course) and hold conferences with students, in an effort to help students make smart, significant revisions to their papers before the papers are turned in for a grade. Building on the special trust that peers can share, Fellows help students not only to write better papers but also to take themselves more seriously as writers and thinkers.
Selected through a competitive application process, Writing Fellows are chosen for their proven performance as writers and for their strong interest in helping others improve their writing. UW—Madison’s Writing Fellows represent a wide range of majors, including sociology, political science, English, philosophy, molecular biology, physics, and history.
Here’s a faculty comment about the benefits of working with Writing Fellows:
“[The Writing Fellows] were outstanding in their ability to motivate students to adhere to the assignment. In particular, they made sure the students stated and developed arguments in their papers and pushed them to address the readings and important themes from the course.”
-Professor Katherine Cramer Walsh, Political Science
Here’s a comment from a student who received help from a Fellow:
“I found that talking to someone about my paper helped me figure out exactly what I wanted to say and how I could do that…. This was the first experience I’ve had with a Writing Fellow and I thought it was extremely beneficial in improving my writing skills.”
-Junior, sociology major
The Fellows are equipped to tutor writing across the L&S curriculum. In the past, they have worked with students in astronomy, Afro- American studies, history, philosophy, political science chemistry, classics, English, women’s studies, sociology, zoology, mathematics, psychology, geography, and more.
You are eligible to apply to work with a Writing Fellow if you:
- will have between 12 and 40 students enrolled in the course
- are willing to adjust your syllabus to allow time for revision and to require that all enrolled students work with the assigned Fellow(s)
- are willing to meet regularly with the assigned Fellow(s) to discuss assignments
If you would like to learn more about the program or apply to work with a Fellow in a Comm-B course you are teaching, please contact Emily Hall, Director of the Writing Fellows Program (ebhall@wisc.edu).
Supporting Comm-B Instructors & TAs: The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Program
At UW-Madison, the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program supports all instructors teaching with writing—including those teaching or TAing for Comm-B courses. In addition to the maintaining the materials in this Pressbook, our team also offers one-to-one consultations with instructors and TAs to discuss teaching writing in their course(s).
Relevant Material in this Pressbook
To support you as you develop and teach your Comm-B course, please visit the following sections in this Pressbook (remember to use the drop down menu on the left – click “Contents” and “+” to expand the menu. Alternatively, use the arrows at the bottom right and left of the pages to move forward or back):
| Pressbook Section | How it supports teaching Comm-B |
| Low-Stakes, Informal Writing Activities & Assignments | Low-stakes writing activities can be especially helpful for creating a culture of writing in your course. They can be used in-class or as assignments to scaffold discussion and/or larger writing assignments. |
| High-Stakes, Formal Writing Assignments | High-stakes writing activities are a key part of any Comm-B course. Because they are high-stakes, they can be high-stress for students. It is important to design such assignments with care and intention. Check out this section for strategies for designing effective high-stakes writing assignments, as well as examples from courses at UW-Madison. |
| Responding to (and Evaluating) Student Writing | Because Comm-B courses involve a significant amount of writing, they also involve giving a significant amount of feedback to students on their work. This section discusses best practices for providing feedback to students as well as ways to design assessment tools such as rubrics. |
| Supporting Students in the Writing Process: Peer Review | Peer review in a Comm-B course allows students to engage with their peers and receive feedback on their writing. It can be a great way to help students view writing as a process, not just a product. |
| Supporting Students in the Writing Process: Student-Teacher Conferences | One-to-one student-teacher conferences can be an effective way to make the writing process interactive for students, and to build connections between an instructor or TA and student writers. |
| Supporting Students in the Writing Process: Language Diversity and Multilingual Writers | Supporting multilingual student writers is an important way to build equity into a Comm-B course. This section discusses linguistic diversity and ways to support students whose first language is not English. |
