PODCAST · education
Teaching Writing in College
by Tom Skeen
Teaching Writing in College explores the connections between writing pedagogy and learning transfer. Episodes emphasize praxis--the relationship between the theoretical and practical--in an effort to understand how people learn to write and how educators might make the most of the time they have with their learners. The driving question is: How can instructors in higher education leverage theory, science, pedagogy, and craft most effectively to help their learners with writing?
Episodes
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45. Back to Class Reflection Series: Recap of the Teaching Skills I Used
What is teaching without reflection? In episode 45, I review some of the slides I used with students (and shared on the podcast in recent episodes). An important component of knowledge is being able to put a name to components of that knowledge; I went back and put a name to each teaching…
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44. Back to Class Reflection Series: Writing a Summary with AI
Now that we've covered the skill I was hoping to develop with my students (a basic knowledge of inductive reasoning) and several lesson plans that could help them develop that skill, in this episode I share the lesson plan I used to have them use AI as they write a summary of a piece of research...
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43. Back to Class Reflection Series: Copying a Model Summary in Class
In this next installment of the Back to Class Reflection Series, I walk through the lesson plan I used to show students what inductive reasoning might look like in writing. The lesson plan includes further modeling of inductive reasoning built on previous work with students. The main activity is…
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42. Back to Class Reflection Series: Getting Students Ready for Research
In this follow-up to episode 41, I share the second lesson plan I used (in which I prepare students to find a piece of research to report on). At the same time, having stumbled across Jay Caspian Kang's "The Despair of the Professor in the Age of AI" in the New Yorker (May 26, 2026), I've been...
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41. Back to Class Reflection Series: Taking Authentic Learning into the Classroom
Teaching Writing in College is available:YouTube Playlist (video): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUWbbrcygqkZvxqdPCqhuzu0yyx5trJUwApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/teaching-writing-in-college/id1667922309YouTube Music:...
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40. Back to Class Reflection Series: How I Chose Something to Teach
In upcoming episodes, I want to dive into how I taught inductive reasoning as a writing strategy. But for Episode 40, it's worth taking the time to reflect on how it became part of my repertoire in writing courses in the first place. In short, inductive reasoning can be used in the service of...
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39. Back to Class Reflection Series: Setting up Your Class to Reward Practice, not Product
Episode 39 of Teaching Writing in College reflects on the big picture when it comes to assessment. For the most part, we live in a system of education that emphasizes external motivation. Although we value things like the writing process, we often reward the end result, or the product with the...
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38. Back to Class Reflection Series: What Do Faculty Need?
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education focused on the frustration faculty have been experiencing for the last few years--since genAI became widely accessible a few years ago. For some, that frustration has become the impetus for early retirement. Although I understand and sometimes...
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37. Back to class reflection series: Yes! You Can Successfully Teach Writing in the Age of AI
As I reflect on my teaching from last year what I'd like to do this year, I'm launching a series that dissects several lesson plans I used on writing skill: inductive reasoning in cause and effect. The lesson plans led up to a passage students wrote with AI, and they incorporate a lot of teaching...
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36. The STAR Criteria and Thinking about Evidence Rhetorically
For episode 36, I share a helpful acronym from Richard Fulkerson called the STAR criteria. STAR can prompt learners (or all of us) to ask: is my support sufficient, typical, accurate, and relevant? STAR can also be helpful for writing transfer. While I've used the STAR criteria to help students...
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35. Transparency in Writing in the Age of AI
Questions about whether and how AI is used in writing and other communication seem to be an important part of the writer/audience relationship. In this episode, I walk through my effort to include transparency as a form of knowledge about writing. With transparency as a frame, this semester I…
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34. Infuse Some Sanity into Your Teaching in the Age of AI
In episode 34, I consider another way of looking at my success with AI in the classroom: through assessment. To my mind, AI has imposed a great deal of guesswork into assessment of student writing: "Did my student write this, or was it written by AI?" Since AI is here to stay as part of just…
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33. What I Did to Start a Conversation about AI with My Students in Spring 2026
In this episode, I share a short lesson plan I used to begin a conversation with students about AI on the first day of classes. I showed them an AI-generated ad that stirred some controversy, we had a brief discussion regarding students' judgments about the ethics of AI use, and then I also...
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32. Success with Teaching vis-a-vis AI
In this long overdue episode, I'm excited to share my own recent classroom success. After coaching and encouragement on my part, notetaking on my students' part, and then asking students to pull their laptops out periodically for several drafting sessions for their rhetorical analysis papers, the...
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31. AI Policy, My Teaching Improvement Report, and More
After my first week of teaching this semester, it's time for a report. I promised to share my AI policy, which will be first up in this episode. I'll also share my classroom "coaching" report. Earlier this summer, I discussed the possibility of adapting the way in which my favorite workout…
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30. Handwriting, Practice, Participation, and Cornell Notes
Electronic technologies have been embedded in classrooms for decades, but the emergence of genAI has prompted some professors to resort back to handwritten assessments, such as bluebooks and notes. The concern, of course, is cognitive offloading--that an overreliance on genAI for learning tasks...
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29. Inviting Students to Reflect on genAI (Summer Reflection Series, Episode 6)
As a follow up to episode 28, I made a plan to introduce reflection about genAI on my first day of classes. I start by reviewing a post I encountered on social media that got me thinking in more detail about asking students to reflect on genAI. From there, I present the new lesson plan and then...
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28. What do Students Need to Know about genAI? (Summer Reflection Series, Episode 5)
As my start date for fall semester draws nearer, I've started thinking in more detail about the kinds of knowledge students need to help them with writing. The distinction Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle made in 2007 concerning the need to *learn about* writing--as opposed to *learning to...
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27. genAI Prompts Me to Make Adjustments in the Classroom (Summer Reflection Series, Episode 4)
In this continuation of reflection on my teaching, I present (briefly) the basic routine I use for developing lesson plans: review, launch, deliver, apply, and close (RLDAC). From there, I share two full lesson plans that I described in episode 26: one that I have traditionally used to introduce...
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26. Adjusting a Lesson Plan to Accommodate Student Learning vis-a-vis genAI (Summer Reflection Series, Episode 3)
As a follow-up to episode 25, I outline changes to one of my existing lesson plans to keep student learning focused on the rhetorical strategy of presence. This episode includes a brief rehearsal about how context is central to writing, a brief anecdote of successful teaching with the rhetorical...
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25. AI Has a Context Problem (Summer Reflection Series, Episode 2)
Parsing the differences between writing from genAI and writing from people can be frustrating or intimidating. But it can also be fruitful for thinking about how humans and machines handle (or don't handle) context. In this episode, I use the rhetorical concept of "presence" from Chaim Perelman…
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24. Summer Reflection Series, Episode 1: Students Can Be Accomplished Novices, and So Can Teachers
In this first episode of my summer reflection series, I explore the need for both learners and teachers to position themselves as "accomplished novices"--people who are not complete novices, but also who are not absolute experts. In the space between those two extremes, one can develop a fruitful...
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23. Want to Help Students with Citations? Follow the "Penny Principle!" (part II)
Teaching Writing in College is now available on Spotify! (Please see below.)Episode 23 is a continuation of a discussion in Episode 21 about what I call the "Penny Principle"--a name I have given to a method for learning (and teaching) source citations that I derived from Nickerson and Adams'…
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22. GenAI Could Turn Education into an Illusion, but Do We Have to Let It?
In this long overdue episode, I offer thoughts in response to a recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education called "In the Age of AI, Is Education Just an Illusion?" In the article, author Dan Sarofian-Butin compares the current state of teaching in higher education to the concept of...
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21. Want to Help Your Students with Citations? Follow the Penny Principle (Part I)
Earlier this week, I came across a discussion on Facebook that questioned assumptions about citing sources--especially in an academic way. Importantly, a lot of students who take our classes might not cite sources in an academic setting once they leave college, so why all the (sometimes intense)...
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20. Metacognition is a Learned Skill
For a while now, I've thought of metacognition as something that can and should be taught as a skill. (I was reminded of this by a podcast episode from The Happiness Lab.) In this episode, I share a reflective exercise based on some of the 8 subcomponents of metacognition that were developed by...
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19. A 30-minute Activity about Student Writing in their Other Classes
In this episode, I depart briefly from my series on ROCSS (to which I will return in the next episode) to share a fun experience I had with students today. We used David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon's "detect / elect / connect" framework to find opportunities to use skills from our writing class…
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18. Writing Is Made of Genres, and Genres Are Made of ROCSS (Part IV)
In the fourth episode of this multi-part series, I provide a classroom exercise I recently used to demonstrate how additional knowledge about writing can support students' use of ROCSS. In particular, I introduced students to causal arguments (from stasis theory) as a way to generate content for...
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17. Writing is Made of Genres, and Genres are Made of ROCSS (Part III)
In the third episode in this series, I share a paragraph from Carolyn Miller's influential article titled "Genre as Social Action." It's a passage that has stuck with me for some time and informs my use of various genres--long and short, large and small--in my writing classes. I also go through...
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16. Writing is Made of Genres, and Genres are Made of ROCSS (Part II)
In this second episode on a series about ROCSS, I use a page from the Merriam-Webster Children's Dictionary on my son's bookshelf to talk through the components of the acronym: Recurring Occasion, Content, Structure, and Style. ROCSS offers a powerful and memorable way to describe genres in the...
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15. Writing is Made of Genres, and Genres are Made of ROCSS (Part I)
In scholarship on teaching for transfer from writing studies, a strong emphasis has been placed on knowledge about genre. Arguably, it can be seen as a threshold concept that helps students (or any of us) gain access to knowledge about writing. In this episode, I offer some reasons why genre…
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14. Turn Your Entire Class Period into an Exercise in Learning Transfer in Ten Minutes
Class time is precious, and it goes without saying that it needs to be dedicated to your curriculum. Although those minutes pass quickly, you can give students an extra benefit by dedicating about 10 minutes of class time to learning transfer. This episode offers some brief discussion and...
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13. Varied Practice with Students over Time: Familiar to Unfamiliar
This episode follows up on a discussion about the importance of practice--one of the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer's "enabling practices" that can help learners develop expertise and transfer knowledge. In this episode, I provide various examples of a skill I teach often. I call it "familiar...
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12. Short-circuiting AI with Practice
In a recent episode, I covered how using AI can sometimes take the focus away from a learning task and thus short-circuit learning. In this episode, I follow up with the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer and its second "enabling practice": practice itself. Ample varied practice with a given…
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11. AI and What Are We Teaching?
In this second of two episodes about artificial intelligence and teaching writing, I continue exploring an important concept in cognitive psychology about learning--that the mind must focus on what we want it to learn. The same is true of teaching--if we want students to learn something, we have…
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10. AI and Learning about Writing (Part I)
In this first of two episodes about artificial intelligence and teaching writing, I explore an important concept in cognitive psychology about learning. This episode provides some brief implications that could manifest as we consider encouraging students to use AI as a tool for learning or...
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7. Lesson plan: PARC
In this episode, I share a lesson plan that helps students to use all three "dimensions" I see in the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer: Conceptual knowledge, practice, and metacognitive reflection. The lesson plan is about using PARC--proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast from The...
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6. The Elon Statement on Writing Transfer: Enabling Practice #1
In this episode, I review "Enabling Practice #1" in the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer. Enabling Practice 1 emphasizes conceptual knowledge about writing, as well as practice with that conceptual knowledge. This episode covers conceptual knowledge and how it can help learners gain expertise…
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5. The Elon Statement on Writing Transfer in the classroom
This episode covers one of the field's most important guiding documents: the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer. Tom provides a brief overview, along with brief thoughts about the Statement's main points. Additional episodes will break down parts of the Elon Statement, and Tom will likely refer…
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4. A Transfer Inventory
In this episode on praxis, Tom shares a classroom activity that he calls a "Transfer Inventory": Students rehearse what they have learned in a writing course and then where they might apply it in their other classes. Watch Teaching Writing in College on YouTube: https://youtu.be/C8erj-r8BTk
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3. "Desirable Difficulties" and ChatGPT
Tom discusses "desirable difficulties," their benefits for students, and how ChatGPT responded to an assignment with desirable difficulties factored in. Desirable difficulties, as scholar Robert Bjork calls them, are forms of interference that teachers build into their teaching as a way to…
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2. My reaction to ChatGPT: Change grading to emphasize participation
Tom offers one path forward in the face of new developments in artificial intelligence: they can prompt us to hone our teaching practices, which could benefit all our students.
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1. Welcome to the Teaching Writing in College podcast!
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Teaching Writing in College explores the connections between writing pedagogy and learning transfer. Episodes emphasize praxis--the relationship between the theoretical and practical--in an effort to understand how people learn to write and how educators might make the most of the time they have with their learners. The driving question is: How can instructors in higher education leverage theory, science, pedagogy, and craft most effectively to help their learners with writing?
HOSTED BY
Tom Skeen
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How many episodes does Teaching Writing in College have?
Teaching Writing in College currently has 45 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Teaching Writing in College about?
Teaching Writing in College explores the connections between writing pedagogy and learning transfer. Episodes emphasize praxis--the relationship between the theoretical and practical--in an effort to understand how people learn to write and how educators might make the most of the time they have...
How often does Teaching Writing in College release new episodes?
Teaching Writing in College has 45 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Who hosts Teaching Writing in College?
Teaching Writing in College is created and hosted by Tom Skeen.
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