As the semester winds down, your students may be winding up. The syllabus and assignments you worked hard to craft and sequence in August take on new urgency in December. Office hours and Student Writing Support are now a lived reality. Amidst the end-of-term immediacy—the present tense, or tense present—it is worthwhile to ask your students to take some time to look back and to look ahead.

Many disciplines and professions require extensive collaboration for research and communication; indeed, for many fields, group writing and presentations are more common than individual work. Given their academic and real-world importance, team-based writing projects are excellent opportunities to practice and develop collaborative skills. However, as quite a few of us—and our students—can attest, “group work” can be a source of frustration due to unclear parameters, unequal distribution of work, and uncertainty about how one will be assessed.

At the start of the semester, students are brimming with questions. While many of these questions may initially concern course logistics and policies, they nonetheless send a powerful signal: engagement. As a good deal of educational research has shown, student engagement is high at the start of the term, and a key indicator of this engagement is talk.

A previous TWW post focused on ways to align your course and syllabus with recent findings in The Meaningful Writing Project. This month’s tip continues this thread by suggesting ways to make your meaningful assignments clear and timely for your students.

In their recent book, The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching, and Writing in Higher Education (2016), researchers Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner share results from a multi-year study featuring surveys and one-on-one interviews with students and faculty at three universities.

 When students are preparing large projects and writing long documents, occasionally the goal of meeting page length requirements gets in the way of effective organization and revision. Students can quickly go from worrying about having enough material to concern for having too much writing, and once a student has written a lot, they may be hesitant to delete evidence of their hard work. This month’s Teaching with Writing Tip introduces reverse outlining as a strategy to help students to consider strategies for effective revision and reorganization of their documents.

Instructors and students alike recognize that getting an early start on an assignment and spending time on task can lead to both smoother writing processes and stronger written products. Nonetheless, students often seem to wait too long to get started, fail to effectively manage their time when assigned with an unfamiliar writing task, or appear to put forth minimal effort.  This Tip addresses some key factors that influence student motivation and discuss instructional strategies to both promote student self-efficacy and reduce the consequences of procrastination due to demotivation.

Instructors can have a vexed relationship with the quantity of writing students produce. In the same course, even the same assignment, students can produce vastly different quantities of words. Some longer documents will be well detailed, rich, and thoughtful, while others may contain tangents and filler. Some shorter documents will be clear, concise, and complete, while others may lack critical details, appear incomplete, or seem glib. How can faculty encourage writing that is well detailed and sophisticated, yet compact and concise?

Last month’s TWW tip offered three suggestions for how to use explicit guidance with reading to support student writing. This month’s tip extends this discussion by considering the literature review, an assignment that requires students to perform a number of intricate and closely related reading and writing tasks.

In What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard 2004), Ken Bain describes the “promising syllabus” as a key text among excellent faculty across the disciplines.