High School Connections 2

Professor Della Fera presenting at the Connections seminar.

Last week, the Writing Initiative held its second two-day High School Connections seminar. One component of the Writing Initiative is to make connections with the area high schools and share with them what we are doing with the teaching of writing across disciplines.

We have held two Connections seminars this summer for a dozen high school teachers. We invited teachers in all disciplines and got registrations from teachers of English, social studies, business, Spanish.

Participating schools included Clifton HS, Passaic County Technical Institute, Wayne Valley HS, Manchester Regional HS, the Paterson Pre-Collegiate Teaching Academy and JFK High School in Paterson.

In these sessions, teachers shared best practices and lessons that they use in their classrooms.

Amongst the topics we discussed during the seminars, we asked participants to consider these:

• What are the top 5 things PCCC should know about what your school and students are doing in regards to writing?
• Does your school have: a writing center; writing across the curriculum program; portfolios; or writing magazine?
• What technology works and doesn't work in your classroom?
• What would you like to know about the expectations that PCCC has for entering students?
• What might a college (PCCC and others) offer to your school that would improve your ability to use writing in the disciplines?

Using technology to help teach writing is a popular topic but most of the high schools have limitations on their Net access, especially to things like blogs and podcasts. We asked participants to check their school's access to a list of sites linked on our website.

We hope to continue the conversation next year with some participants and their schools. Several of the teachers who attended also teach as adjuncts for PCCC in our dual enrollment program. The dual enrollment program offers area high school students to take PCCC courses and receive college credit in a number of subjects.

We continue to update our Connections online resources that were used during the seminars and added to by the participants.

During the 2010-2011 academic year, the Initiative will be making additional connections to the writing center and writing programs at the 4-year colleges that our students often transfer to after completing their Associate degree at PCCC.

Visit the Connections website