Common Places: Integrated Reading and Writing

Together, Common Places content, the author-created teaching resources, and Connect Integrated Reading and Writing (a state-of-the-art learning technology product) represent a cohesive instructional framework to accelerate college readiness. With a seamlessly integrated foundation in reading and writing strategies, unique purpose-oriented projects for upper and lower level IRW courses, a fresh approach to grammar that emphasizes sentence combining and grammar in context, a step-by-step modeling approach guiding students to emulate the reading/writing cycle, and multiple features to promote metacognitive thinking, Common Places offers a flexible and adaptive approach suitable for any curriculum design or course sequence.

Lisa Hoeffner earned a PhD in English with a specialization in rhetoric from the University of Houston. She has taught a wide range of courses over the past twenty-five years, including English composition and rhetoric, reading, critical thinking, American and British literature, world literature, humanities, and business writing. Since 1998, Dr. Hoeffner has served in two positions-professor of English and professor of reading-at McLennan Community College in Waco, Texas.

In addition to her teaching role, Dr. Hoeffner is focusing on curricular redesign in developmental education. She serves as grant director for a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board grant awarded for work on improvement and innovation in developmental education. With the advent of integrated reading and writing in Texas, she has provided leadership for colleges and universities across the state that are creating integrated reading and writing (INRW) programs. She has designed and led training workshops and webinars to prepare faculty to teach INRW and to help institutions create INRW programs. She has also provided leadership to public school districts implementing INRW programs as college preparatory classes.

Dr. Hoeffner has a passion for teaching and for innovative technologies. She designed and taught her first online freshman composition class in 1999 and has since developed and taught online courses for developmental students. She is thrilled that she is able to bring both passions to bear in her development of Common Places and the Connect IRW: Common Places Master Course.

Dr. Hoeffner is a recipient of several awards, including the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) Excellence Award. She has written and published scholarly articles and poetry, and she has presented her work in developmental education nationally. A native Texan, Dr. Hoeffner enjoys exploring the flora and fauna of regional ecosystems, cooking, and dreaming about living off the grid.

Kent Hoeffner earned a BA from Texas A&M University in College Station, and MDiv from Golden State Seminary in Mill Valley, California, and a PhD from Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Before working in higher education, Dr. Hoeffner was employed in the mental health field, working primarily with adolescents with social and emotional difficulties. During that time, he also taught adult basic education and GED prepartation classes.

Dr. Hoeffner has served at McLennan Community College since 2001, first as the division director for liberal arts and currently as a professor of philosophy. In addition to teaching introductory courses in philosophy, he has also taught and developed courses in critical thinking and logic. In 2007, he developed McLennan's first online philosophy course, and since then he has continued to develope and teach various online courses.

Recently, Dr. Hoeffner renewed his long-standing involvement in academic advising by joining a group of faculty in a grant-funded intensive advising program focused on improving the success of developmental students. He regularly mentors students who need help in the areas of successful academic behaviors, self-advocacy, and the development of college-level reading and writing skills.

His background in foreign languages and logic contributed to his talents for creating the sentence-combining and grammar units in Common Places, and his expertise in teaching critical thinking and in student mentoring has helped to shape the text. When he is not teaching, advising, or writing, Dr. Hoeffner following the Dallas Cowboys, reading and traveling.