Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom

Use your course's big ideas to accelerate students’ growth as writers and critical thinkers

The newly revised third edition of Engaging Ideas delivers a step-by-step guide for designing writing assignments and critical thinking activities that engage students with important subject-matter questions. This new edition of the celebrated book (now written by the co-author team of Bean and Melzer) uses leading and current research and theory to help you link active learning pedagogy to your courses' subject matter. You'll learn how to:

• Design formal and informal writing assignments that guide students toward thinking like experts in your discipline
• Use time-saving strategies for coaching the writing process and handling the paper load including alternatives to traditional grading such as portfolio assessment and contract grading
• Help students use self-assessment and peer response to improve their work
• Develop better ways than the traditional research paper to teach undergraduate reading and research
• Integrate social media, multimodal genres, and digital technology into the classroom to promote active learning

This book demonstrates how writing can easily be integrated with other critical thinking activities such as inquiry discussions, simulation games, classroom debates, and interactive lectures. The reward of this book is watching students come to class better prepared, more vested in the questions your course investigates, more apt to study purposefully, and more likely to submit high-quality work. Perfect for higher education faculty and curriculum designers across all disciplines, Engaging Ideas will also earn a place in the libraries of graduate students in higher education.

JOHN C. BEAN, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of English at Seattle University. He received his doctorate in Renaissance Literature from the University of Washington. He is Co-author of three composition textbooks ― Writing Arguments, The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing, and Reading Rhetorically.

DAN MELZER, PhD, is Professor in the University Writing Program and Director of First-Year Composition at the University of California. He received his doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition from Florida State University. He is a frequent speaker and lecturer at universities across the United States.