Program Training & Professional Development

The FYC program at UTEP is primarily staffed by graduate students in their MA and PhD Programs in the English Department, programs that all of their lecturers had completed during the time of our visit, thus the training overviewed and featured here reflects this population. 

The FYC Handbook was used within all composition classes within the UTEP program and likewise served as an instructor resource with options for assignment, lessons, etc. 

• Comp Camp was a pre-semester orientation facilitated one-to-two and half weeks before the semester began and was required of all students 
• In the first semester, rather than immediately teaching, graduate students tutored in the writing center, where they participated in (1) a 40-hour pre-semester training that included preparation to work one-to-one with students who were working in different digital modalities and (2) weekly or biweekly training meetings, including strategically planned professional development meetings around due dates of assignments in RWS such as storyboards and digital compositions  
• In the first semester, before they taught, graduate students without an existing MA in RWS completed a semester-long practicum course which prepared them to be instructors of record the following semeser (or once they had completed 18-hours of graduate-level coursework)--the practicum course asked all GTAs to complete one of the two video project options for the major assignment for English 1302
• Monthly Friday afternoon professional development workshops were arranged by the writing program's administrators with the support of guest facilitators (including GTAs) that addressed upcoming assignments and prepared instructors so that they anticipated common roadblocks students often faced and had a variety of tools and approaches to help guide students around them 
• There were opportunities for graduate students to serve in GWPA roles, including two withinin the writing program and two within the writing center (total of four positions)
• The program provided funding for GTAs to pursue external professional development opporunities, including funding for conference travel 
• Historically, assessment via the MinerWriter tool was also used as a method of training graduate students before they became instructors of record--GTAs spent a semester annonymously grading FYC assignments which, in turn, well-prepared them to implement those assignments the following semester in their own classrooms

The FYC Handbook is a nearly 300-page PDF that provides explanations of all assignments in RWS 1301 and 1302. This handbook is for instructors and students, and the relatively low cost students pay for it supports the FYC program. According the Beth Brunk-Chavez, Interim Dean of Extended University and former WPA, "[The old handbook was] a book that every student had to buy, but it wasn't necessarily useful. It had a lot of things in it that most, some teachers would use. Most would ignore. The students would say, 'I don't know why I had to spend' whatever it was—it was not very expensive— $15.00, $18.00 'on this book. I've never even opened it.' So, that was the other thing we did was to redo that book, completely, so it matched the curriculum. So that became a super helpful guide to the instructors...They already had assignments, they already had ideas, they already had scaffolding. They had things they could actually use with the students." 

The handbook has 6 chapters:

1. An Introduction to First Year Composition Studies
2. Revision, Style, and Grammar
3. Research, Libraries, and Technology
4. RWS 1301: Rhetoric and Writing Studies I
5. RWS 1302: Rhetoric and Writing Studies II
6. Sharing the Grade: Group Work in Undergraduate Writing

It also contains a glossary of commonly used writing terms and a brief bibliography.

At the time of our visit, there was hope that the book, which was an e-book, could become more interactive and more clearly embody the types of work students were being asked to produce in the course. (Note that we share the full e-book on the curriculum page and that all items in the teaching repository for UTEP come directly from that e-book.) 

At the time of our interview, accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools required that all instructors had completed 18 credit hours of graduate-level course work before teaching. This created a bit of a challenge for the program. A required first-semester composition pedagogy course (not spotlighted here) worked great for students who weren't teaching in their first semester but not as great for students who were starting off the semester in the classroom. The solution was creating a pre-semester orientation program that has since come to be called Comp Camp. 

The required composition course ran for a full semester and deeply engaged graduate students with the undergradaute writing curriculum, particularly the digital assignments (for example, over the course of the semester graduate students complete things like public service announcements and e-portfolios so that they have hands-on familiarity with the projects they are assigning and assessing in the writing program). Comp Camp, however, was designed as an accelerated version of the required composition pedagogy course (something informed by Beth Brunk-Chavez's own experience in gradaute school). 

At the time of our visit, Comp Camp was a two and a half week course that ran from around 9am to 3pm Monday-Friday where students received an advanced reading list, access to a Blackboard shell, and completed mini assignments (such as discussion posts and reading notes). This was supplemented over the course of the regular semester with monthly professional development workshops, synced with assignment deadlines for RWS and often run by experienced GTAs. 

Tutoring in the Writing Center

Graduate students spent their first semester working in the Writing Center. In addition to the hands-on practice that new practitioners take away from writing center work, Lou Herman, Director of the Writing Center, explained that all UTEP Writing Center staff receive pre-semester training--40 hours--some of which is focused on digital technologies, including focusing on things like creating digital argument, storyboarding, sound, music, and visuals. As one example of what this training looked like, Herman explained that the staff will watch a video together and complete a genre analysis, talking about the necessary elements that make the video a successful composition. Likewise, Herman facilitates professional development meetings over the course of the semester, including meetings synced with the RWS syllabus so that there's a professional development staff meeting to prepare staffers to productively critique RWS digital compositions. 

Faculty Observations 

In addition to Comp Camp, monthly interactive Professional Development workshops, a composition pedagogy course, and tutoring in the Writing Center, graduate students also periodically observed experienced faculty in the classroom. The primary purpose was for graduate students to learn how to teach composition; however, they also observed faculty teaching RWS digital assignments, giving them a preview and a low-stakes way to learn how to successfully assign, teach, and assess digital assignments in the course. 

Residual Assessment (Historical)

When UTEP faculty wrote a grant to procure the funds to redesign the curriculum to incorporate digital writing, they also wrote shared assessment into the curriculum, which was facilitated through a system called MinerWriter that students would upload all their major assignments into. Then, GTAs who were not instructors of record for the course would grade the students' work anonymously. In this way, grades were meant to be more objective, and GTAs also gained intimate knowledge of FYC assignments by assessing them. 

All of the FYC faculty we talked with were part of the program when MinerWriter was used, and many of them recounted how MinerWriter had helped them feel prepared to teach within the FYC program. It seems the spirit of Miner Writer also lives on in understandings of assessment as meaningful conversation to be had across the program.

Below, find direct links to professional development materials used for this particular institution. Note, you can also find all professional development materials for all institutions in the resource repository by clicking here.