Teaching with Writing Blog

Students are often eager for feedback on their writing. While faculty comments on assignments are crucial, with limited time, faculty can’t always give as much support as students might like, particularly before assignment deadlines. Students can also find it nerve-wracking to approach faculty for help.

The window between fall and spring semesters is an ideal time to reflect on our work and brainstorm new teaching strategies. After finalizing fall grades and taking time to rest and recharge, we have just a few short weeks to prepare for spring. In this month’s blog post, we recommend strategies for productive reflection and revision that will make your midwinter less bleak.

At the beginning of the semester, instructors often notice that when they introduce major assignments, students note the due date in their planners and add the appropriate length and format for their documents. Students understand that instructors and graders appreciate well-formatted, correctly scoped documents and value the concrete expectations that such guidelines provide. The differences between a two-page white paper and a 23-page research report are dramatic, after all.

Welcome back to standard time. As most of us were sleeping at 2am on Sunday morning, our computers and smartphones magically jumped back an hour. This magical leap was due to the use of a Standard Network Protocol that digitally connected devices follow to coordinate time. The machines were synchronized through a protocol—“an established set of rules that determine how data is transmitted between different devices in the same network.”

Networked information technology has made this the best and the worst of times for literature review assignments. Positively, information science experts continue to refine our understanding of literature reviews, highlighting how systematic and rigorous review essays can provide crucial clarity in an age of widespread misinformation. Less positively, those promoting AI tools claim generative artificial intelligence technologies can produce ‘literature reviews’ from nothing more than a well-designed query.

If your writing has been subjected to academic peer review, you’ve likely experienced the scourge that is “Reviewer 2”: a reviewer who is uncharitable and nitpicky, cluttering one’s paper with irrelevant, unhelpful, or sanctimonious nastygrams concerned more with asserting their own expertise than helping strengthen your writing.

Semester to semester, many of us copy-paste ever-growing lists of policies and resource recommendations for our syllabi. When we’re down to the wire the Friday before classes start, it can be tempting to recycle old materials after a quick skim, rather than closely rereading and analyzing our choices. But of course, syllabi set the stage in important ways for the work your students will do in your course. Crafting a syllabus is an excellent time to assess the scaffolding and support you provide to students in your course.

In March, our Teaching with Writing Blog addressed the complexities of documenting how Generative AI might be used in students’ writing processes. It provided suggestions for creating an Acknowledging AI assignment for courses where AI use is allowed.

As we move towards the end of the semester, many faculty are feeling overwhelmed by the mounting stack of student writing awaiting their feedback. With this in mind, today, we’re offering tips for streamlining the process of giving feedback while actually boosting its effectiveness for students.