Dragon's Den: A Reality TV Simulation for Research Writing (Guest Blogger)

Dragon's Den: A Reality TV Simulation for Research Writing (Guest Blogger) Both my Advanced Composition and First-Year Writing students need to produce better proposals to guide their research over the course of the semester.  First drafts of their proposals generally lack clarity and focus, indicative of new writers stumbling clumsily around a topic rather than pirouetting on the ball of a contentious research question. To address these issues, I designed a scaffolding activity using the television show Dragon's Den as a framework for pitching research ideas. To integrate immediate peer review feedback into the pitch sessions, I used live audience polling as a simple peer-review mechanism for determining which students could proceed to the next stage of the research process, library research.