After Thanksgiving Break, the semester takes on added urgency. Students complete—and instructors assess—final projects and exams, and everyone scrambles to wind down the term, gear up for the next, and make arrangements for the holiday break. With time scarce, it can be challenging to take stock and reflect on teaching and learning. But looking back now can provide valuable insights for looking ahead.

One month into the Fall Semester with a round of exams, essay cycles, lab reports, problem sets and other core assignments completed, students may be experiencing fatigue and dips in their engagement. Whether you teach in person, a blended course, or fully online, the discussion forum available through Canvas can be an effective space to (re)engage students in their learning and to support them as they transition into new units of study. This post offers five suggestions for how to use the online discussion forums effectively.

We’ve completed the first week of classes, and campus is vibrant once more. Amidst the bustle of finding classrooms, following safe indoor practices, securing course materials, and navigating the various Canvas sites for their courses, students are apt to feel excited and nervous.

In the Fall semester, the University of Minnesota will resume its on-campus activities, guided by ongoing recommendations from the CDC.

Students often receive specific guidelines on the number and type of materials they are expected to use in research writing or how they should offer attribution and citation. In many courses, these guidelines include explicit instruction on search strategies and information literacy, whether from instructors or librarians. Yet even when students know how to find good sources and can manage the details of citation practice, it can still be challenging to help students see how to synthesize information from multiple sources into a document that advances its own claim.

Just like a journey, every course begins with a plan and a destination in mind. However, experienced instructors (and navigators) know that circumstances, opportunities, and unforeseen challenges often produce small changes that can lead to significant consequences. One slight shift in a deadline for a writing assignment or one extended conversation and discussion can have repercussions down the road.

Previous tips and workshops have addressed the importance of formative feedback for student writers, those comments aimed toward generating revision when a student still has time to revise their work. In this tip, we will focus on two types of informal writing that can help students turn formative feedback into effective revision. Revision plans are beneficial for students who have less experience revising the kind of writing they have produced, while revision memos are more useful for more experienced writers.

Circumstances have made many of us quick experts on preparing and delivering online and hybrid courses, but the semester’s start gives us a chance to retool and refine our practices. It can help to take a step back from the tools, technologies, and platforms for delivering course content online to consider the foundational learning goals for your course. This tip will provide suggestions for reviewing course and learning goals and thinking of ways that writing practice can support and reinforce those expectations.

Educational research strongly underscores the interdependence of reading and writing and the social nature of literacy.

Peer response activities are a long-established and well-proven means to improve student writing. In a recent meta-analysis of studies of peer response, Huisman, Saab, van den Broek, and van Driel (2019) demonstrated that across 24 recent studies of the effectiveness of peer response, peer response activities resulted in strong improvements in writing and greater improvements than other strategies like self-assessment. Nevertheless, peer response activities are still the exception rather than the norm.