Teaching with Writing Blog

August in Minnesota is a fine time to visit lakes, try unusual foods at the State Fair, and (re)design course syllabi. This post doesn’t offer local travel or culinary advice, but it does suggest three ways your syllabus can support student writers in your classes this semester.

Research in the teaching of writing has demonstrated that early feedback offered when a student has an opportunity to revise has beneficial consequences for learning.  This formative feedback affords the opportunity for students to learn in the context of their own writing, to experiment with strategies for improvement, and to engage in self-directed learning as they revise. However, what about the end of the semester? Can faculty offer meaningful feedback at the end of the term? Of course!

If your course design involves a large end-of-semester paper or project, now is the perfect time of year to examine students’ work in progress. Research on feedback in writing clearly demonstrates that students learn most when provided with the opportunity to revise based on formative feedback.  While some instructors might recoil at the idea of draft commentary as just more work, offering feedback before a final assessment can simplify the process of grading and ultimately save time. Here are some strategies to keep in mind when responding to students’ work in progress.

Sentence-level errors present a particular challenge for instructors who use writing in their courses. On the one hand, some sentence-level errors are easy to ignore when the meaning of a sentence is unimpeded. If the student understands the commutative property, the Council of Trent, or Ohm’s law, does it matter if they misplace a comma? On the other, the expectation of a particular variety of error-free prose is common enough in school and work settings that a failure to comment can shortchange our students and leave them unprepared for real-world demands.

While teachers of writing often refer to prewriting activities as a part of the writing process, just what counts as productive prewriting activity is cloudy.  Does daydreaming or silent reflection count, or are these just procrastination? What about note-taking, outlining, and concept mapping—are they prewriting or just writing? Are reading and research “prewriting” activities, or does this view neglect that research is often recursive? Is all of this stuff necessary, or should students launch into drafting and trust their revision processes?

While students are often quite proficient in summarizing texts, some students struggle to make the subsequent move to establish relationships between texts or build their own claims with textual evidence. In his book Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, Joseph Harris recommends the metaphor of forwarding as a way to help students to begin those conversations.

Early December is crunch time on campus. The Center for Writing hums with appointments, students pack office hours, and instructors work earnestly to return midterms and papers before the Final Exam period begins. Amidst the hurly-burly, some student writers will struggle to start and manage their final writing assignments, and some instructors may feel too pressed to spend time in class addressing writing issues. This post offers three tips for how instructors can use time strategically in class to support student writing in the final weeks.

Research documenting the relationship between writing, student engagement and deep learning identifies three areas of effective instructional practice:

You’ve developed meaningful writing assignments, and now it’s time to grade them. This tip offers six suggestions for grading student writing with links to additional resources. But, first, let’s acknowledge that grading writing is hard work, challenging for faculty and students alike.