Writing About Teaching

Chapter forthcoming in Quick Hits: Creativity in the Classroom, eds. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Michael Morrone, and Deborah Whaley. Indiana University Press.

Cultivating a learning environment in which creativity is a core value enhances student engagement. Yet, in order to truly empower students to think and act creatively, we as instructors must carve out space daily for our students to cultivate creativity as a habit of mind.

Essay forthcoming in Teaching Poetry Now, eds. Caroline Gelmi & Lizzy LeRud, SUNY Press. Co-authored with Annelise Norman.

How do we read poems embedded in novels, and how do we convince students that this generic navigation is a labor worth undertaking? Unprompted, students are likely to (at best) skim or (at worst) skip a poem entirely when it interrupts the prose of their assigned novel. This reading malpractice is not without consequences!

Reference entry forthcoming in Constructing the Threshold: A Reference Work of Concepts between Teaching for Transfer and Teaching Writing, eds. Tom Skeen, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen. WAC Clearinghouse/University of Colorado Press.

Reference entry forthcoming in Constructing the Threshold: A Reference Work of Concepts between Teaching for Transfer and Teaching Writing, eds. Tom Skeen, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen. WAC Clearinghouse/University of Colorado Press, forthcoming. Co-authored with Annelise Norman.

Documenting Teaching Excellence: Promoting the University’s Vital Mission, eds. Karin deJonge-Kannan and Travis Thurston, Utah State University, 2025. Co-authored with Miranda Rodak.

This chapter, informed by our Branding Your Teaching Excellence faculty development framework, repositions the TPS as a dynamic, evolving space for cultivating your creative professional brand.

The Teaching Professor, 2025.

Incorporating digital tools into this process can help you realize your creative visions for teaching sooner and streamline your workflow while simultaneously developing dynamic documentation of your course design. Let digital tools do the visual and organizational heavy lifting so that you can spend less time trying to create a system for getting organized and more time creatively reimagining your course.

Teaching Community College and Historically Underserved Students: Innovative, Inclusive, and Compassionate Pedagogy, eds. Melissa Dennihy & Zivah Patel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. Co-authored with Annelise Norman.

In this essay, we propose a two-pronged, hybrid peer review strategy that both establishes and reifies the classroom as a compassionate learning environment.

2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication Companion

I showcase my approach to mentoring graduate student instructors serving as “co-teachers” in my large, digital projects-based composition course at IUB.

Fairy Tales in the College Classroom: Essays to Spark Lesson Plan Ideas Across the Curriculum, 2024.

Picture books, I argue, should be positioned as appropriate and legitimate objects of study for young adult readers and writers in both secondary and collegiate contexts. In this chapter, I discuss picture books’ pedagogical value on three fronts: multimodality, accessibility, and diversity.

Xchanges: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Technical Communication, Writing/Rhetoric, and Writing Across the Curriculum, 2024. Co-authored with Sarah Pedzinski.

We discuss how CTLs shaped our identities as teaching professionals and encourage readers, especially graduate students early in their teaching careers, to leverage the different kinds of resources CTLs have to offer.

The Teaching Professor, 2023. Co-authored with Sarah Pedzinski.

Peer-reviewing syllabi with colleagues can allow you to create meaningful reciprocal relationships and leverage advanced novice thinking to improve your own course.

Literacy & NCTE Blog, 2022.

In this back-to-school blog post, I share what I learned from K-12 teachers about how to make paragraph structures more visible to first-year writing students.