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.

Faculty members and instructors have learned that moving from face-to-face classes to online and hybrid instruction requires careful consideration of how we communicate information and expectations to our students. Meeting students’ needs and building community requires that we present materials in ways that are clear, concrete, and easy to navigate. 

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.

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.

At the end of the semester, especially one as trying as this, it may take all we have to just get through the next two weeks. Students are remotely navigating their labyrinths of final projects and exams, and instructors and TAs are working through their backlog of grading. It’s probably not a good time to implement a new strategy for teaching with writing. And yet, while “Old Time is still a-flying,” it is useful to think about gathering work from this semester to support your teaching in the spring.

As we enter the final weeks of the semester and approach the Thanksgiving Break, after which all classes at the University of Minnesota will be fully remote, the need to maintain supportive communication and instructional presence is vital. For many students, end-of-the-term, often high-stakes writing assignments may generate questions and concerns that are intensified in a remote learning environment and differences in time zones.

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

Despite so much uncertainty, here’s what we do know about this next semester: the university will begin and end classes remotely, and technology will factor heavily into how courses are organized and taught. For those courses that may eventually feature onsite instruction, measures to enforce social distancing will likely alter the familiar dynamic of physical learning spaces. Now more than ever, community and engagement—essential elements for successful teaching and learning across the disciplines—will be nurtured by attending carefully to our language and our modes of communication.