Council of Writing Program Administrators

Billie Hara of TCU and I will be blogging on behalf of McGraw-Hill's Teaching Basic Writing Blog and want to invite all of you to stop by and participate--especially if you won't be able to make it to the conference in person. We will be reporting on workshops, sessions, presentations and other official gatherings at the C's with the idea of making the conference more accessible to all English faculty.

I'm serving on a summer committee which has been tasked to research if and how smaller freshmen writing class sizes serve to incease retention within both the freshman writing course(s) and later composition courses. The report that we'll be presenting in September is directed at the college deans and provosts, so we need to uncover data that supports what most writing teachers know--smaller classes equals a better chance at student success, and we need to consider the issue from an institutional / financial as well as classroom/pedagogical perspective.