ESOL 100: College Reading and Writing Skills is the English language learner equivalent of WRIT 100, and is a common course among all diploma students. It focuses on communication skills and writing style conventions.
The focus of this course is on skill development, and learners hone their communication skills by reading content, engaging in critical thinking, summarizing and creating their own voice. What the learners read and write on is up to the faculty member, so a faculty member decided to incorporate sustainability into an assignment in which learners need to analyze and evaluate appeals to pathos, or emotionally-charged arguments.
1: Created the assignment objectives.
2: Aligned assignment with related HLO skills:
3: Used sustainability competencies and HLO skills as the performance criteria in the rubric
4: Incorporated a self-reflection component where learners reflect on their progress
Learners were engaged as many of them were international students from regions that experience droughts and other fresh water issues; they saw themselves in the assignment, and performed much higher than comparable learners in previous cohorts.
Focusing the rubric on real work-related skills also helped students be able to better articulate that they had developed not only sustainability knowledge and competencies, but also the other core skills that were assessed.
Follow the four steps modelled in the example above to add a sustainable mindset into one of your own assessments from a class that you teach. Please type your responses in the space provided. Be sure to save your responses as a PDF so you can use them in your practice.
If you need any extra support while completing this exercise, please see the following suggested resources: