Teaching with Writing Blog

A previous TWW post has focused on ways to highlight the discipline-specific roles and relevance of writing in your course syllabus. This post extends this practice of making explicit the intellectual moves and conventions in your field through the use of meta-teaching strategies.

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.

Few issues create more consternation among instructors than students’ perceived inability to proofread. For many instructors, typographic errors, misspelling, punctuation errors, and errors in tense, reference, and agreement may be signs of inattention to detail or deficiencies in basic skills. It almost seems that the more trivial the error, the more likely the error to solicit frustration, anger, and despair. Unfortunately, frustration with errors tends to multiply as errors multiply, even across drafts and students.

Many instructors use rubrics to help students understand the goals of assignments, to clarify their feedback on writing, and to save time in assessment. While rubrics can be very helpful in promoting student learning, they are by no means simple to construct and can even produce some unwelcome consequences. It can be challenging to codify (and quantify) the features of effective writing, leading to vague categories. At other times, instructors may feel hemmed in or confined by rubrics, forced to specify everything that could be a point of assessment.

Errors in documentation are a consistent source of frustration for instructors. Mistakes can range from punctuation errors in reference lists to significant omissions of attribution and documentation that might constitute academic misconduct. Instructors are often perplexed by students’ documentation errors, particularly since students have presumably been writing with sources their entire academic careers. This tip will address some of the potential causes of persistent citation error and offer some recommendations for improving students’ performance with citation.

We often use writing assignments near the end of courses as ways to assess student learning. However, early semester writing assignments can serve a number of important purposes. By asking students to write early in the semester, instructors can get a sense of students’ prior knowledge, learn more about students’ motivation, and potentially detect early misconceptions about subject matter that can impede student understanding of course materials.

Readers can often detect the sense of “flow” in a well-written document. Perhaps more importantly, readers are adept at detecting the absence of flow, often noting when writing without flow seems stilted, choppy, or underdeveloped. But what is flow, and how do we encourage students to create it? This month’s tip will focus on teaching students to understand flow and improve their revision processes by building cohesion.

Team-based writing projects are common, particularly in high enrollment courses, and can provide opportunities for students to become familiar with the writing practices of their fields. Scientists and professionals often work in collaborative environments and must negotiate the challenges of limited resources and limited time for major projects. Unfortunately, sometimes the products that emerge from some team writing assignments are disjointed, uneven, and unpolished. In this tip, we’ll discuss adapting the typical process of peer response workshops to the context of group writing.

Reading and writing are inseparable in many ways, but while instructors are often innovative in ways to include discipline-specific writing opportunities and instruction, reading is a much less common topic. Often instructors lament that students don’t read with sufficient comprehension, or in some cases, don’t read at all. This month’s tip will focus on teaching strategies and short writing activities that can help students to improve their reading habits and retention of information.