Introduction

Welcome to the online ISUComm Instructor Guide!

You can find the information you’re looking for by browsing through the menu items and links on the pages or by searching the site using the search field. We are working on improving the navigation and menu structures in future iterations of the site, so if you have feedback on the site, please share it by sending it to Deanna Stumbo at stumbo@iastate.edu.

If you are new to ISUComm Foundation Courses, please review all of the material on the site. Then bookmark it so you can easily reference it any time a question arises.

English 150 and 250 serve as a transition between students’ high school experience and the intellectual life of the university. The learning experiences in your ISUComm Foundation Courses are designed to help students develop the written, oral, visual, and electronic (WOVE) communication knowledge and practices that will be critical to their careers and lives after graduation.

We are a program—a community of practice—with common objectives, assignments, evaluative procedures, and teaching strategies. These commonalities do more than provide a convenient model from which to administer our program. They define our program. Because every student at Iowa State must meet the university-wide English communication requirement, ours is a program with which nearly every student at Iowa State will come in contact. As such, the need for reasonable consistency in student workload, in standards, and in course objectives is impossible to understate. The two ISUComm Guides—the Foundation Courses Student Guide and this Foundation Courses Instructor Guide—are designed to ensure an appropriate level of consistency across all sections of English 150 and 250. Both are critical to your students’ success in English 150 and 250, and to yours as an instructor in our program.

Why is it critical that you read these Guides and familiarize yourself with the policies they outline? Here are three main reasons:

1. They articulate ISUComm’s underlying tenets and how these will be carried out in our many sections of English 150 and 250.
2. Together, they provide the statement of programmatic coherence in our ISUComm Foundation Courses program.
3. They allow you and your students to have common expectations for these two courses.

We have designed the Instructor Guide in a way that we hope makes it more user-friendly. We have also included new information to help you in your teaching. Some of this information discusses

• The role of transfer and reflection in the composition process
• The value of ISUComm ePortfolios and how we implement ISUComm ePortfolios in our ISUComm Foundation Courses
• The importance of returning student assignments in a prompt manner

If you have questions about any of the policies or procedures in the following pages, or about other aspects of English 150 or 250, please contact us. We wish you a successful year in ISUComm Foundation Courses!