Writing an Innovation Abstracts
Share high-quality, thoughtful, and inspirational insights with your colleagues about the excellent teaching and learning programs, projects, and strategies taking place in your classrooms or on your campus.
We are currently seeking Innovation Abstracts submissions! Do you have a best practice or exciting lesson plan you would like to share with other community college educators? Please consider submitting to our call for Innovation Abstracts! We are especially interested in articles exploring inclusive classroom practices, mental health and wellness for students and faculty, and HyFlex teaching and learning.
Useful Information for Authors
What Is Innovation Abstracts?
NISOD’s flagship teaching and learning publication, Innovation Abstracts, is written by and for community and technical college educators. Issues are distributed electronically to NISOD member colleges bi-weekly during the academic year. The specific purpose of Innovation Abstracts is the dissemination of information useful for improving instruction at community and technical colleges.
In any year, a full academic year’s collection of Abstracts features a wide array of teaching and learning topics. Although individual issues are written from the perspective of a specific discipline or program, authors often include some flavor of the versatility of the strategies they describe.
What Content Should Be Included in Innovation Abstracts?
- Descriptions of successful and practical classroom teaching and learning programs, projects, or strategies that improve student learning; or
- Research that leads to successful and practical classroom teaching and learning programs, projects, or strategies that improve student learning
Composing Your Innovation Abstracts:
- Create a concise introduction that informs readers about your paper’s topic and purpose.
- This section should include sufficient context for your strategy, program, or practice to help readers understand why the topic is important, including why and how you came up with your idea, strategy, program, or project. Body paragraphs should build upon one other and fully explain the process of implementing your idea, strategy, program, or project in the classroom.
- Think about how each sentence within your paragraphs is functioning and whether your paragraphs have sufficient information to make the intended points.
- A topic sentence states the main idea of a paragraph. Beginning a paragraph with a topic sentence ensures that readers recognize early on in the paragraph what larger idea the paragraph is going to discuss.
- Body sentences develop the topic of the paragraph. These sentences are descriptive and enumerate points for readers to give them a sense of your paper’s bigger picture.
- Linking sentences relate back to your paper’s main purpose by showing how the idea of that paragraph matches the overall goal of your paper.
- Concluding sentences bring a section to its end before you move on to a new section.
- Use transition sentences to guide readers smoothly from the topic of the preceding paragraph into the topic of the new paragraph.
- Consider the conclusion from the reader’s perspective.
- At the end of a paper, summarize your key points to remind readers about what you’ve discussed. In addition, readers want to know how they and/or their students will benefit from what you described in your paper. Remind readers about the implications or importance of your topic.
Who Reads Innovation Abstracts?
Readers include faculty members, administrators, and staff at community and technical colleges from around the world. Our circulation list also includes subscribers who represent university, corporate, and government entities.
Author Guidelines
- Innovation Abstracts are high quality, error free, and have a clear and logical flow between sentences and paragraphs.
- Innovation Abstracts are generally between 1200 and 1500 words and follow AP Style or MLA formatting.
- Innovation Abstracts are original thought pieces and do not have to include citations in the text or a reference or bibliographic section.
- Innovation Abstracts are written for faculty, counselors, and academic administrators.
- Innovation Abstracts should be clear, jargon-free, and include definitions of any special terms.
- Innovation Abstracts explain strategies, programs, and projects that have the potential for easy and inexpensive application across a wide variety of disciplines.
Other Notes
- Innovation Abstracts published by NISOD cannot be submitted to other places of publication; however, they can be developed into new pieces and submitted elsewhere.
- NISOD does not accept Innovation Abstracts pieces that have been published elsewhere; however, we accept previously published pieces that have been significantly redeveloped or updated.
- Innovation Abstracts are not refereed.