Evidence of Teaching Excellence

Thank you for the opportunity to submit these additional materials, which I hope illustrate my commitment to thoughtful classroom practices, pedagogical innovation, and teaching excellence. Below you’ll find sample syllabi, writing prompts, lesson plans, and letters from colleagues and students. In addition, I’ll note that several years ago I was nominated by my writing program for an award that celebrates excellence and innovation in teaching first-year students. Then, just this semester, I was nominated by a former student for GWU’s Bender Teaching Award.

Additionally, here I’ve included an overview of my course evaluations from the past two years. My scores are consistently well above the averages for both my program and my college.

SAMPLE SYLLABI

WHAT IS COLLEGE FOR? WRITING ABOUT COMPLEX ISSUES AND CONTRADICTIONS IN HIGHER EDUCATION, SPRING 2021

This syllabus is for a 100-level, themed, first-year writing course.

WRITING FOR THE WORKPLACE, SUMMER 2021

This 200-level Writing in the Disciplines (WID) course asks students to work to understand and interrogate workplace discourse communities; consider, practice, and critically investigate what it means to conduct and communicate research professional settings; grapple with the concepts of agency, power, and ethics in workplace writing; critique and practice visual rhetoric of workplace documents; and write collaboratively.

PLEASE LIKE US: SELLING WITH SOCIAL MEDIA , FALL 2018

This syllabus is for a 100-level, themed, first-year writing course.

TELLING TRUE STORIES: TRUTH AND MEMORY IN CREATIVE NONFICTION, SPRING 2013

This syllabus is for a 100-level, themed, first-year writing course.

INTERNSHIP AND WORKPLACE WRITING, SUMMER 2016 (COURSE DESCRIPTION)

Students are concurrently enrolled in an internship while they take this 200-level summer course. We focus on key concepts like Communities of Practice, genre, and transfer while practicing discourse analysis.

 

SAMPLE ASSIGNMENTS

WHAT IS COLLEGE FOR? REMIX PROJECT

This Remix project and accompanying proposal asks students to reimagine the argument they made in their research paper for a new audience and a new medium of their choosing.

TRUTH AND MEMORY RESEARCH PROJECT PROMPT

This scaffolded research project was developed for a themed first-year writing course that centered around truth and memory in creative nonfiction. Students are asked to choose a discipline, genre, or other area to use as a lens through which they’ll answer our overarching course question: Where is “the line” regarding truth and/or memory in CNF?

SELLING WITH SOCIAL MEDIA BLOG PROJECT

This project and the one below comprised the major writing endeavors for a first-year writing course with the theme “Please Like Us: Selling with Social Media.” Students kept an industry-specific blog about social media throughout the semester and ultimately wrote a large-scale proposal for the company they deemed the weakest on social media.

SELLING WITH SOCIAL MEDIA PROPOSAL PROMPT

RHETORICAL GRAMMAR, MECHANICS, AND PUNCTUATION LESSON PLAN

This lesson plan maps out a class session on rhetorical grammar, and includes both “mini-lecture” notes and an in-class group activity.

WHAT IS ART FOR? LESSON PLAN ON RHETORICAL APPEALS AND ASSESSING AUDIENCES

I often employ this lesson early in the semester for my first-year writing students, as we begin to view all of our texts through the lens of their rhetorical situations.

 

CLASSROOM OBSERVATIONS AND STUDENT LETTERS

This letter was written by a colleague in GWU’s Speech and Hearing department after observing a 2021 class session.

One colleague from my writing program wrote this letter in 2017 and another wrote this one after observing me teach.

A student wrote this letter on my behalf after I was nominated for a teaching award at GWU.