Teaching with The Ask

Whether you’re new to teaching the course or have years of experience, this guide offers suggestions for using the textbook effectively in your classroom.

Companion Resources

We recommend instructors explore the following companion resources, all of which are openly licensed and developed for use in MTSU’s first-year writing sequence:

The Muse: Misunderstandings and Their Remedies

Designed for ENGL 1010, this companion text helps students confront and challenge common misconceptions about writing, building a foundation for rhetorical thinking and genre awareness.

The GEM: The Gen Ed Magazine

The GEM showcases award-winning student writing from across True Blue Core English courses. It’s a valuable resource for modeling strong, diverse student work and for encouraging metacognitive reflection.

The Gen Ed English Faculty Guide

This guide provides lesson ideas, sample assignments, assessment tools, and other teaching materials to help instructors align their pedagogy with the True Blue Core outcomes.

Assignment and Pedagogy Resources

The Writing Spaces Assignment Archive offers specific assignments for the classroom, rooted in best practices.

Better Practices: Exploring the Teaching of Writing in Online and Hybrid Spaces provides specific, classroom guidance on a range of topics, from grading to peer review to online engagement.

Using Section Landing Pages

Each section of The Ask begins with a short introduction page that can be assigned to students as reading, used for in-class discussion, or adapted into a class activity. These landing pages help frame key concepts and signal how the section’s chapters work together to support student learning.

We recommend reading these landing pages together with students, especially early in the semester, to:

• Set the tone for inquiry-based learning;

• Highlight the book’s emphasis on process over product;

• Encourage metacognition by inviting students to reflect on their existing assumptions about writing and research.

Landing pages also serve as helpful prompts for journaling, Padlet activities, or small-group discussion. For example, the “Research Processes” section opens with the question “What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘Research’?”—a great entry point for surfacing and addressing student concerns and misconceptions.

• Consider assigning individual landing pages as “preview readings” before students dive into the full chapters.

• Use landing pages to help students anticipate the goals of the section and build schema for what they’re about to learn.

• Invite students to revisit the landing page at the end of the section to reflect on what has changed in their thinking.