The Writing Circle—Making Professional Skills Accessible to Students
摘要
To solve industry problems in the 21st Century, Engineering and Information Technology (IT) graduates need to be creative problem solvers, technically competent and effective communicators. In their professional lives, they must assess complex situations, devise possible options, pitch and defend their solutions, and write technical reports and software development documentation. It is incredibly challenging for educators to build the necessary communication skill sets whilst developing students’ technical capabilities, particularly in coursework programs with an increasing number of students, many of whom are still developing their English language proficiency. To address this need, an intervention program called the Writing Circle 1.0 was designed and successfully trialled in 2019. The program centred around reciprocal peer review and feedback to encourage students to practise and advance their communication skills. Student feedback was positive, with students reporting benefits to their writing and improved connections with peers (Mendoza, A., Chang, S., Elliott, K. & Venables, A. in The Writing Circle: A peer-based collaborative approach to improving engineering students’ scholarly writing skills. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE 2019), Brisbane, Australia, 2019). In response to the pandemic, Writing Circle 2.0 was created as four interactive, self-paced online modules that guide students in effective writing and provide opportunities to test and apply their skills. This chapter relates the two iterations of the Writing Circle, the lessons learned in implementing each, and concludes with plans for future iterations.