Rate My Professor Thomas Mitchell

Thomas Mitchell serves as Associate Teaching Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, where he has been on the faculty since 2013. He holds a PhD in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In his role, Mitchell advises the minor in professional writing and teaches courses in professional and technical writing, argument, and language analysis. His pedagogical approach centers on genre-based instruction, utilizing Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyze and scaffold students' writing of disciplinary genres. This work involves interdisciplinary collaborations with faculty in information systems, organizational behavior, history, and other fields to enhance undergraduate analytical and argumentative writing skills.

Mitchell's research contributions include numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals. Notable works encompass 'Analysis and Argument in First-Year Writing and Beyond: A Functional Perspective' (2024, co-authored with Silvia Pessoa and Pía Gómez-Laich), 'Argument not optional: The language of alternatives and recommendations in the case analysis genre' (2023), 'Degrees of Reasoning: Student Uptake of a Language-Focused Approach to Scaffolding Patterns of Logical Reasoning in the Case Analysis Genre' (2021), 'Scaffolding the Case Analysis in an Organizational Behavior Course: Making Analytical Language Explicit' (2021), and 'Using the Onion Model to Scaffold the Case Analysis Genre in Information Systems' (2021). His paper 'Scaffolding case analysis writing: A collaboration between information systems and writing faculty' (2019) received the Best Paper award from the Journal of Information Systems Education. Mitchell has participated in the SLATE-Q project, funded by the Qatar National Research Fund, to develop tools for academic literacy development in Information Systems. More recently, he and colleagues Pia Gómez-Laich and Silvia Pessoa were awarded a QRDI Academic Research Grant for 'Scaffolding analytical and argumentative writing in higher education: Developing tools and assessing outcomes.' Additionally, Mitchell has been appointed president-elect of the TESOL International Association, presented research at conferences including the Qatar TESOL Conference and Texas A&M Qatar, and organized the Badir event for the Qatar Teaching and Learning Forum. His efforts have advanced writing pedagogy in higher education through design-based research and mixed-methods studies.