Teaching First-Year English
Compiled here are internal and external resources to help instructors navigate the policies, procedures, and expectations for teaching first-year English as laid out by the Department of English and Texas State University.
For any further questions, please contact Nancy Wilson.
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A.I. Committee's Newsletters and Recommended Reads
A.I. Committee Newsletters
February 2025: /.assets/department-of-english/department-of-english-calico/faculty-resources/teaching-fye/1 FEB 2025 1
A.I.-Related Reads Worthy of Your Time
"The Urgency of Interpretability" by Dario Amodei
- Under the "Dangers of Ignorance" section, Amodei wrote, “Modern generative AI systems are opaque in a way that fundamentally differs from traditional software. If an ordinary software program does something—for example, a character in a video game says a line of dialogue, or my food delivery app allows me to tip my driver—it does those things because a human specifically programmed them in. Generative AI is not like that at all. When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choices it does—why it chooses certain words over others, or why it occasionally makes a mistake despite usually being accurate.”
Vee, A., Laquintano, T., & Schnitzler, C., editors. TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies.The WAC Clearinghouse, 2023. https://doi.org/10.37514/TWR-J.2023.1.1.02
- A collection of experiments in pedagogy with generative text technology, including but not limited to AI. The fully open access and peer-reviewed collection features 34 undergraduate-level assignments to support students' AI literacy, rhetorical and ethical engagements, creative exploration, and professional writing text generation technology, along with an Introduction to guide instructors' understanding and their selection of what to emphasize in their courses. TextGenEd enables teachers to integrate text generation technologies into their courses and respond to this crucial moment.
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Classroom Management Committee
Best Practices for Increasing Student Engagement in FYE
Lesson Plans to Encourage Student Engagement
Note: These lesson plans are stored in the CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT folder in our Teaching FYE Sharepoint.
“Freewriting for CMC” by Eric Wallenstein
“Lesson Plan: ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’” by Sandi Sidi (Welch)
"Lesson Plan: ‘The Terrible Phone-Based Childhood’” by Sandi Sidi (Welch)
“Mission to Mars Icebreaker” by Blake Vanderlind
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Course Planning Resources (Syllabuses, Calendar Shells, Textbooks)
FYE Overviews
Approved FYE Textbooks
The Texas State Department of English requires all FYE faculty to choose textbooks (a handbook and a reader) from a list of vetted texts.
FYE Syllabus
You must use a university syllabus template for English 1310 and English 1320. Be sure to include the correct section number.
P-Sections: If you are teaching a P-section of English 1310, you may wish to include in your syllabus this explanation of the grade required for becoming TSI-compliant:
FYE Course Calendar
- Link to university calendar
- Link to final exams schedule
- Calendar Shells (also available on Teaching FYE Sharepoint)
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Policies and Procedures
Below are several important University and departmental policies and procedures that pertain to teaching First-Year English.
- Official First-Year English Syllabus
- Attendance Policy
- Academic Dishonesty
- University Academic Calendar
- Final Exam Schedule
- Campus Carry
- Title IX
- HB 2504 Site
- CV-Template for TAs***
***Each semester, all faculty are required to upload their syllabi and current CV to the "HB 2504" site (see link above).
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Reading Committee's Newsletters and Recommended Reads
Reading Task Force's Newsletter Issue One (Spring 2025)
Reading Committee's Recommended Reads
Sinykin, Dan. “Pay Attention! The Invention of Close Reading.” The Nation, 12 May 2025.
We especially like this definition – “Close reading is a genre that turns quotations into evidence for well-crafted arguments made beautifully” – as well as the following paragraph:
But if we embrace a broader definition of close reading, if we take a closer look at how it works and what is required of it when it succeeds, we can teach it better. We can specify the steps of close reading, even if no close reading succeeds by performing the steps alone but requires beauty and grace. We can note that one should delimit the context for the text and one’s reading of it. One should quote a detail worth noticing and construct an argument to persuade one’s reader how to understand that detail, why it matters, and how it changes what we know about the text. Each of these steps entails skills that we can teach and that can sometimes blossom—with, yes, practice and imitation—into beautiful performances. We can, in other words, democratize close reading.
Carlson, Scott. “On Marginalia, Memory, and Making Meaning.” The Edge, 21 May 2025.
This week I stumbled across an essay in the Substack feed The Culturist, which offered advice on “how to remember everything you read.”
“Studies in educational psychology show that annotating a text dramatically improves your retention of its contents,” the essay noted. “In some cases, readers who engage actively with what they read by marking a book remember up to seven times more than those who don’t.” Part of the magic here is in mentally reprocessing and playing with the ideas the author presents, engaging in the “elaborative encoding” that helps the brain transfer knowledge into long-term memory. The Culturist features a picture of a page spread from Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, with Francis Ford Coppola’s marginal scribbles and arrows pointing to underlined passages.
“The margins of a text provide the real-world, physical space where you stop consuming ideas and start working with them,” the essay says. “In other words, the margins are where reading becomes thinking.”
McMurtrie, Beth. “The Reading Struggle Meets AI.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 May 2025.
“[AI] misleads students by giving them a false sense of having absorbed something. That makes it harder for instructors to convince them that reading is important.”“This idea that students find reading ineffective and stressful comes up again and again in conversations with faculty members. It likely ties into the foundational challenges students have with reading comprehension. If you trip over words, don’t understand how the parts of a chapter or academic article fit together, or are unclear what your professors want you to glean from a reading, then the act of reading can lead to confusion rather than clarity. It stands to reason that a summary generated by a chatbot would at least give you an orientation toward what your professor wants you to know.” -
Student Referral Resources (Academic)
With small class sizes, students often turn to their First-Year English instructors for guidance. One of the ways you can be most helpful is to refer students to available University resources.
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Student Referral Resources (Mental Health Concerns)
With the rise of mental health awareness and concerns on universities, it's important to know your resources and what actions you can take. This link provides websites, assessments, and other tools for you. Find Resources for Student Mental Health Concerns.
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Teaching Resources (SharePoint)
https://txst.sharepoint.com/sites/TeachingFYE
In SharePoint, you can find a myriad of lesson plans, prompts, sample essays, and other teaching resources for your FYE courses. If you develop successful original lesson plans or resources, please send them to nw05@txstate.edu.