One Hour by Arrangement for:

English 100, 100+101, 110, 120, 135, 140, and 165

ESL 400

English 100, 100+101, 110, 120, 135, 140, and 165

English 100, 100+101, 110, 120, 135, 140, and 165 classes have a one-hour-by-arrangement requirement. As part of the course outlines of English composition courses, the Hour by Arrangement (HBA) gives students the opportunity to enrich their learning beyond class time through a number of activities and materials available both inside and outside the Writing Center.

The college monitors which students make use of every lab at CSM as they work on the HBA requirement for their courses.The attendance and activities of each student is recorded on the SARS attendance system in all the campus labs, including the Writing Center.

All English faculty MUST ENFORCE THE REQUIREMENT FOR ATTENDANCE AT THE WRITING CENTER for every student, or we will lose funding for the center! For this reason, in your syllabus, you must stress the importance of coming to the center AT LEAST ONCE to have an essay conference with an instructor or use some of the resources available there to improve your students' writing skills. Because it is critical that faculty adhere to these state regulations in Title 5, the Dean of Language Arts will address this issue with any instructors who do not send their students to the Writing Center. Remember that syllabi are reviewed as part of the faculty evaluation procedure.

As the classroom teacher, you will determine which activities will satisfy the one hour by arrangement and fill out a yellow reporting form for each student, which lists those activities. You don't need to list many initially; you can add activities and due dates to the reporting forms throughout the semester. You also will determine how the one hour by arrangement will affect your students’ course grades. The form will be in your mailbox the first day of the semester. During the first week of class, please explain to your students how you want them to fulfill the hour-by-arrangement requirement and how it will affect their course grades. This HBA should translate into approximately sixteen hours of work for students each semester.

The reporting form serves as a communication between students, classroom teachers and the Writing Center. To work in the Writing Center, students must present their yellow reporting forms. With these reporting forms, your students can study or use the computers in the Quiet Room of the Writing Center (18-104) and can get writing help from the English instructors in the Writing Center whenever they need it.

Students will keep their own yellow reporting forms throughout the semester so that you can collect them periodically if you wish. At the end of the semester, you need to collect the yellow reporting forms to determine what one-hour-by-arrangement activities your students have done. When you are finished with them, please remember to deposit them in the designated box in the Language Arts Division office. Information on these forms may be used to help assess the SLOs for the Writing Center. All data are anonymous, and no student or instructor names are noted.

Feel free to assign any activities you want, but options include:

1. One-on-One Tutoring: Essay Conferences in the Writing Center (18-104)

One-on-one essay conferences can be assigned to any students who need individual help with their writing. Based on your students’ writing, you can indicate on the yellow reporting form in order of importance which areas of writing your students should work on with the Writing Center instructor, for example, thesis, topic sentence, audience awareness, organization, development, or any specific grammar issue. Students are limited to three essay conferences per essay. With each essay conference, students can get advice on how to begin an essay, strategize about how to organize it, go over a draft or practice proofreading strategies with a lab instructor. Our purpose is not to correct student papers to improve grades but to help students become better writers as well as independent editors of their own essays. When a student meets with a Writing Center instructor, the instructor will make notes about the conference and put a signature on the student’s yellow reporting form to indicate that a conference session has taken place.

2. Critical Thinking Skills Supplementary Exercises on the Web and in the Writing Center for English 165 and 110 Students

You may assign one or more supplementary exercises in critical thinking skills to your students. These exercises were designed for English 165 and 110 students only. The students can come to the Writing Center (18-104) to begin an online critical thinking skills supplementary exercise, or they can access the exercises from the Writing Center tutorial section on the web.
Once they are finished with the questions and the exit quiz, students come to the Writing Center to receive verification on their yellow forms. Because of the time required to check these exercises, we ask students to bring no more than two quizzes to be checked on each visit. (NOTE: Drawing Inferences from Literature requires that students complete the quiz in the Writing Center.) The critical thinking skills supplementary exercises include the following:

1. Logical Method: Induction/Deduction
2. Understanding Arguments: Logic
3. Understanding Arguments: Rhetoric
4. Drawing Inferences from Literature
5. Facts, Inferences & Judgments
6. Hidden Assumptions
7. Logical Fallacies

 

3.Online Library Tutorials

You may assign one or more online library tutorials to your students. The students can come to the Writing Center (18-104) to begin an online library tutorial, or they can access the tutorials at:

http://www.smccd.net/accounts/csmlibrary/engtutorials.html

Once the tutorial is completed, students come to the Writing Center to receive verification. The library tutorials include the following:

1. The Research Process
2. List of Works Cited & MLA Citation
3. Plagiarism & Copyright
4. Print Resources and Search Techniques
5. Internet Searching & Evaluation
6. Online Databases — Journals, Newspapers, Literary Resource Center

4. Video(s) & DVD(s) and Independent Work

If you want to assign any other work for students to complete, indicate the activity in the Video(s) and DVD(s) and Independent Work box on the yellow reporting form. You can assign a VHS or DVD from the Writing Center video library. The staff in the Writing Center will verify the completion of this activity on the yellow reporting form. Click here for a list of VHS or DVD movies that you may assign to your students. The Lannan Video Library includes many videos which focus on poetry, authors and playwrights.These videos are also available in the Writing Center.You may also give the Writing Center a VHS or DVD that you want your students to view, and the staff in the Writing Center will return it to you at the end of the semester.

You may assign a number of other activities which satisfy the one hour by arrangement but which don't involve the Writing Center at all. They can include students conferencing with you, attending cultural event(s), viewing video(s) off campus, and reading book-length work(s). In this case, you will sign the yellow reporting forms yourself. If the activity is completed in the Writing Center, the staff will sign the yellow reporting form.

5. Tutorials and Podcasts

If you would like your students to complete tutorials on sentence development or other writing skills, please list them in the Tutorial box on the backside of the yellow reporting form. A student can work on tutorial 1-9 by using the hard copies in the Writing Center; tutorials 11-21 are available online at http://www.collegeofsanmateo.edu/writing/writingcenter/wctutorials.html, or use the hard copies in the Writing Center. The student reads the explanations and completes the excercises before making an appointment to go over the work with an instructor. At the end of the conference, the student must complete a writing assignment (in the Writing Center) to show that he or she can incorporate the skill in an essay. A Writing Center instructor will check to make sure that the student has been successful and will date and initial the student's reporting form. There are also short podcasts on writing skills available on our website for your students to view.

To print a list of available tutorials and podcasts, click here.

For those or those students with residual ESL errors, we do have ESL tutorials (e.g., articles, verb forms, verb tenses) and other resources available in the Writing Center, as well as ESL workshops and ESL instructors available for writing conferences. Call 574-6436, or stop by the Writing Center for more information on ESL workshops or tutorials.

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ESL 400

ESL 400 has a one-hour-by-arrangement requirement. If you are teaching this class, you must fill out a pink One-Hour-by-Arrangement Reporting Form for each student, specifying which activities you want each student to complete. The pink reporting forms will be in your mailbox the first week of class.

The reporting form serves as a communication between students, classroom teachers and the Writing Center. To work in the Writing Center, students must present their pink reporting forms. With these reporting forms, your students can study or use the computers in the Quiet Room of the Writing Center (18-104) and can get writing help from ESL and English instructors in the Writing Center whenever they need it.

As the classroom teacher, you will determine which activities will satisfy the one hour by arrangement. You don't need to list many initially; you can add activities and due dates to the yellow reporting form throughout the semester. You also will determine how the one hour by arrangement will affect your students’ course grades. The pink reporting forms will be in your mailbox the first week of class. During the first week of class, please explain to your students how you want them to fulfill the hour-by-arrangement requirement and how it will affect their grades.

Possible activities for the hour by arrangement include the following: Web Ready, grammar exercises, questions to answer, or independent reading with vocabulary, or ESL tutorials available in hard copy at the Writing Center. For a list of these tutorials, click here. You also can ask students to have conferences with faculty in the center on their class essays. With each essay conference, students can get advice on how to begin an essay, strategize about how to organize it, go over a draft or practice proofreading strategies with a lab instructor. Our purpose is not to correct student papers to improve grades but to help students become better writers as well as independent editors of their own essays.

Whenever a student completes an assignment in the center, the instructor or instructional aide will sign the student’s pink reporting form.

Students will keep their own pink reporting forms throughout the semester so that you can collect them periodically if you wish. Throughout the semester, you can collect their pink reporting forms to determine what activities your students have done. At the end of the semester, you will use the reporting forms to determine what one-hour-by-arrangement activities your students have done. When you are finished with them, please remember to deposit them in the designated box in the Language Arts Division office (17-169). Information on these forms may be used to help assess the SLOs for the Writing Center. All data are anonymous, and no student or instructor names are noted.

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The Writing Center
Building 18-104
(650) 574-6436

The English 800 Lab
Building 18-102
(650) 574-6539