Teaching Resources
Browse online resources for integrating writing into courses across disciplines: assignments, rubrics, discipline-specific resources, and more.
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How can I use writing in my course?
Using Writing in Your Course Context
While all instructors want students’ writing to be clear, coherent, and insightful, what counts as good writing can mean very different things depending on the discipline and course context.
Syllabus Matters
The syllabus requirements page in the University Policy Library specifies two functions of a syllabus: information specific to the course, such as its title, goals, readings, assignments, and instructor; and information informing students of University policies that might have an impact on their participation in the course.
Beyond detailing the nuts and bolts of course policies and procedures, the syllabus is also an excellent place to provide students with useful information about the kinds of writing they will practice in your class, the relevance of writing to your discipline or field, the resources available to support them, and the acceptable or restricted uses of GenAI.
Mid-Semester Feedback Strategies
Student feedback is routinely gathered at the end of the semester, but getting it at a semester’s midpoint is even better. When we collect students’ perspectives partway through a semester, we still have time to address their impressions and implement their recommendations. These midpoint reactions and insights can help us make some adjustments, straighten out some confusion, and improve our instruction in ways that students recognize (on end-of-semester ratings and elsewhere) as valuable to their learning (McGowan, W., & Osguthorpe, R. 2011).
How can I build effective writing assignments?
Designing Effective Writing Assignments
One of the best ways for students to determine what they know, think, and believe about a given subject is to write about it. To support students in their writing, it is important to provide them with a meaningful writing task, one that has an authentic purpose, clear guidelines, and engages students in their learning. In this section, you can read about key principles of assignment design, review examples of effective writing assignments, consider ways GenAI can be integrated or deterred in writing assignments, and use a checklist to guide your own designs.
Writing Assignment Checklist
A helpful checklist to guide you through the stages of assignment design.
Scaffolding and Sequencing Writing Assignments
Effective writing assignments, aligned with core learning goals, can help students build on their prior knowledge, apply key concepts introduced in lectures, labs, readings, and discussions, and anticipate future learning.
Informal, In-Class Writing Activities
Incorporating informal writing activities into our classes can lead to enhanced thinking and learning, improved writing, and less time spent commenting on and grading finished projects. Because few of us have class time to spare, we’ll take a look at brief activities designed to (1) help students develop and distill their writable ideas and (2) provide targeted revision practice that they can apply to their works in progress.
Teaching Writing with Quantitative Data
Providing students the opportunity to write with and about data will allow them to use their computational and analytic skills to inform and persuade. On this page, we identify strategies for helping students develop effective habits for writing with data.
How can I help students improve and revise their writing?
Commenting on Student Writing
Commenting on student writing is among the most important tasks for any instructor who uses writing. Whether the writing is short or long, formal or informal, a work-in-process or finished product, students learn both course content and writing habits through the process of revising their own writing.
Supporting Multilingual Learners
Like writers who are native to English, multilingual writers continue to develop written fluency as they move forward in their majors and chosen fields. Unlike native writers, though, some multilingual writers may retain (by habit or choice) features of their native or preferred languages in their English writing.
Teaching with Effective Models of Writing
Models of effective writing can increase students’ awareness of the ways experts and practitioners organize and present knowledge in their fields and disciplines. This page offers guidelines for selecting, annotating, and using models of writing in your class.
Benefits of Peer Response
Peer response workshops—activities in which peers read and comment on each other's drafts or ideas—enable students to get quick, direct, and timely feedback on their works-in-progress. While feedback is beneficial to the writer, research has also shown that peer response benefits the peer reader as well; the act of carefully reading another student’s work fosters the capacity to detect, diagnose, and improve one’s own writing.
Peer Response Protocols and Procedures
Giving students protocols to follow during peer response workshop sessions can keep pairs or groups focused and on task. For workshop sessions that are intended to extend for more than a few minutes, consider providing guidelines (what to comment on) and procedures (how to do so). These protocols can be used, adapted, and combined to fit most writing contexts, whether you’re teaching a large- or small-enrollment course, and working in an onsite, online, or hybrid environment.
Using Reflective Writing to Deepen Student Learning
This resource page offers a number of suggestions for how to support students in their development as writers and thinkers through the act of reflection.
Conferencing with Student Writers
This page offers suggestions for why instructors might consider using conferencing in their classes along with practical strategies for integrating conferencing into assignments and course designs.
How can I use writing to promote equity, access, and belonging in my courses?
Designing Inclusive Writing Assignments
When polled about what makes a writing assignment meaningful, students appreciate the opportunity to immerse themselves in activities to which they feel a personal connection and that seem to have a practical connection to their future selves. With this in mind, instructors benefit from considering the diverse identities of students in the classroom as they relate to the purposes of their writing tasks and the audiences to whom they will communicate. Making thoughtful choices about language use can help establish your class as one where all students can learn and succeed.
While there are many valuable sources for advice on equitable teaching practices, this page focuses on writing activities as meaningful sites for learning and assessment.
Addressing a Range of Writing Abilities in Your Courses
Students come to the University of Minnesota with many differences in personal and educational experience and with differences in educational goals, attitudes, and expectations. After they arrive, students will take courses at different times in their careers or in different orders depending on availability, experience, and context. Courses at all levels may include students from within a major and outside it, from their first year to fifth, and from highly motivated to nervous or resistant. Designing writing activities that can prove effective across these variations can be challenging for instructors, both to limit the frustration of activities that are challenging and to address those students who are ready for more complex tasks.
How can I grade writing with fairness and efficiency?
Effective Grading Strategies
Instructors can combine a number of strategies to overcome challenges and create systems for grading that can be efficient, fair, and beneficial for student learning.
Designing and Using Rubrics
An overview of grading rubric types and guidelines for their development and use.
Running a Grade-Norming Session
Grade norming can help ensure fairness and consistency in evaluating student work across multiple sections and with multiple instructors.
Working with Teaching Assistants
In classes with large enrollments and multiple sections, faculty members will often coordinate the work of teaching assistants as co-instructors; as lab, discussion, or recitation section leaders; or as reader/graders. Each of these roles requires careful coordination between teaching staff on expectations for writing and strategies for writing instruction.
Managing the Paper Load
For faculty members and teaching assistants, dealing with a seemingly endless volume of student work is one the most challenging facets of teaching with writing. Careful planning can allow you to both maximize your time and provide useful feedback.
Writing with Sources
Undergraduate students face a challenging terrain when writing with sources. Finding, evaluating, organizing, synthesizing, and documenting sources are complex, interconnected activities central to academic writing.
Preventing Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a challenging topic in the context of writing instruction. Academic integrity is a cornerstone of higher education, and violations of academic integrity policies are considered severe breaches of community standards.
Grammar Matters
Colleagues from across academic disciplines ask about strategies they can use to address problems related to grammar, usage, style, and mechanics in student writing. On this page, we begin by considering pragmatic goals before listing strategies that allow instructors from across the curriculum to address sentence-level issues within diverse course and disciplinary contexts.
What should I do about GenAI?
What are Generative AIs and why are they suddenly a thing?
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies have garnered significant media attention for their ability to produce high-quality text and images in response to written prompts. Since the public launch of several large language models in 2022, GenAI has raised considerable concerns about academic integrity and the future of writing as a learning tool. While some of the initial hype and panic may be abating, navigating the landscape of writing in the era of GenAI will require new ways of thinking about authorship, intellectual property, and how our writing technologies shape our writing lives.
Student Uptake of GenAI
According to the AI in Higher Education Global Survey 2026, most higher education faculty worldwide believe AI will bring “significant” or “transformative” change to the role of an instructor (p. 43), and the vast majority of students worry that their programs are outdated (p. 25) and are skeptical that faculty are prepared to guide their use of AI (p. 28). More fundamentally, GenAI tools have shaken one of our persistent beliefs about writing: that writing implies writers, human actors engaged in expression.
While the implications of this change are far-reaching, in this resource, we focus on the specific implications for undergraduate classrooms, exploring how undergraduate students think about and use AI tools.
How does GenAI impact student writing and learning?
We routinely outsource tasks to technology, from dishwashers to Google Maps, without much concern. But educators know that encouraging deep understanding and long-term learning sometimes requires doing things “the hard way” before utilizing shortcuts: students use manipulatives to practice math before picking up calculators to ensure they fully understand fundamentals. Along similar lines, it’s important to consider how GenAI use impacts students’ writing processes and cognition, and to tailor GenAI policies and assignment design to encourage only those uses of GenAI that support learning.
Critical AI Literacy (CAIL): Encouraging Thoughtful Engagement With GenAI Tools and Texts
This brief resource introduces core axioms for critical AI literacy and argues for greater attention to the broader cultural impact of these technologies, moving beyond technical competence and familiarity into the wider context of ethical GenAI use in learning environments.
Connecting Your GenAI Policy to Your Discipline's Writing Expectations
How can we help students understand the range of policies they might encounter as they travel across departments, programs, and classes? Why do some programs encourage students to explore GenAI applications while others steadfastly discourage their use? Does all this variation imply such decisions are arbitrary individual preferences rather than grounded and principled choices?
Opening Conversations With Students About GenAI
Regardless of your syllabus policy, it’s important to talk with students about the role of generative AI (GenAI) in your course. Teaching support professionals across UMN created the excellent resource “From Policy to Practice: Talking with Students About Generative AI,” which includes suggestions for discussing GenAI use with students.
We recommend talking regularly with students about GenAI use. At the start of the semester, you might ground your conversations with an anonymous survey about students’ practices and perspectives around GenAI use. (Wake Forest’s Center for Advancement of Teaching offers an excellent set of AI use scenarios to serve as a starting point for discussion.) Students often believe their peers use GenAI tools more widely than they actually do.
Helping Students Disclose Approved GenAI Use
Initial concerns about Generative AI stemmed from the fear that students might submit AI-generated content instead of their own work on assignments and activities. Early responses to AI thus focused on requiring students to cite any AI-generated text or image, with guidance released for every major style guide.
While the risk of copy-pasted AI content remains, most faculty and students agree that such conduct harms learning and is therefore prohibited. Instead, more nuanced uses of AI have emerged. Traditional academic citation (focused on attribution of previously published information and specific quoted language) is in some ways ill-suited to collaborative uses of AI that increasingly predominate (e.g., prompting AI to edit a writer’s original text or using AI tools for conversational brainstorming). In many ways, these uses of genAI more closely resemble how we might use reference materials, word processors, citation generators, databases, or even conversations with colleagues than how we use sources. While citation remains the most effective strategy for directly attributing prior published texts, generative AI contributions require more robust attribution mechanisms—a point noted by academic publishers across many fields.
Incorporating GenAI in Assignments and Activities
Students and instructors continue to explore the possibilities and limits of using generative AI in classroom assignments. Beyond ways GenAI can support students’ content knowledge (for example, through GenAI tutors or AI-generated self-examination), GenAI tools can also be applied in both writing-to-learn contexts and major writing assignments. This resource will outline some principles for incorporating GenAI into elements of students’ writing process and identify both potential benefits and risks of various forms of GenAI intervention.
Discouraging (Not Preventing) Unauthorized GenAI Use
Many faculty and instructors want to restrict GenAI use in some way in their courses—whether by limiting the ways AI is used, limiting AI use to particular assignments, or largely prohibiting the use of any Generative AI tools in any capacity in a particular course. Limiting AI use is challenging given powerful social forces pushing AI use and how rapidly AI technologies have integrated into our writing platforms (including Google and Microsoft). Nonetheless, there is great value in engaging in writing as a way to engage with content and develop ideas, so it’s worth taking the time to build structures that encourage students to carefully limit their AI tool use and build their own capacity as thinkers and writers.
Identifying and Responding to Unpermitted GenAI Use
Students may misuse GenAI in several ways that result in academic integrity violations, including using GenAI in ways prohibited by course policies or assignment directions, failing to attribute their GenAI use adequately, or using GenAI in ways that lead to other academic integrity violations, such as misrepresenting sources or fabricating citations.
Some solutions that might seem initially appealing, like AI detectors and hidden-text traps, pose practical and ethical hurdles that lead us to recommend against their use. So what should you do as an instructor if you’re reading a paper and suspect GenAI misuse?