Teaching with Writing Blog

A previous TWW post focused on ways to align your course and syllabus with recent findings in The Meaningful Writing Project. This month’s tip continues this thread by suggesting ways to make your meaningful assignments clear and timely for your students.

In their recent book, The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching, and Writing in Higher Education (2016), researchers Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner share results from a multi-year study featuring surveys and one-on-one interviews with students and faculty at three universities.

 When students are preparing large projects and writing long documents, occasionally the goal of meeting page length requirements gets in the way of effective organization and revision. Students can quickly go from worrying about having enough material to concern for having too much writing, and once a student has written a lot, they may be hesitant to delete evidence of their hard work. This month’s Teaching with Writing Tip introduces reverse outlining as a strategy to help students to consider strategies for effective revision and reorganization of their documents.

Instructors and students alike recognize that getting an early start on an assignment and spending time on task can lead to both smoother writing processes and stronger written products. Nonetheless, students often seem to wait too long to get started, fail to effectively manage their time when assigned with an unfamiliar writing task, or appear to put forth minimal effort.  This Tip addresses some key factors that influence student motivation and discuss instructional strategies to both promote student self-efficacy and reduce the consequences of procrastination due to demotivation.

At its best, early feedback from an instructor can guide effective revision. However, this asynchronous strategy isn’t the only way to help students develop their thinking and improve their writing. Brief one-to-one conferences, in-person or electronically, can provide students with both valuable feedback on their writing and the opportunity to describe their plans for revision. Instructors of large classes might think, “Conferences?  I have 50 students (or 100, or 200)!?” However, even a five-minute structured dialogue can help students see the value of writing for their learning.

Instructors can have a vexed relationship with the quantity of writing students produce. In the same course, even the same assignment, students can produce vastly different quantities of words. Some longer documents will be well detailed, rich, and thoughtful, while others may contain tangents and filler. Some shorter documents will be clear, concise, and complete, while others may lack critical details, appear incomplete, or seem glib. How can faculty encourage writing that is well detailed and sophisticated, yet compact and concise?

Research in writing studies strongly suggests that when students reflect on specific moments of success and struggle with their writing, they are more apt to transfer learning gains. Student reflection can also guide future teaching. This end-of-the-semester tip offers three suggestions for taking stock with your students and planning ahead.

Last month’s TWW tip offered three suggestions for how to use explicit guidance with reading to support student writing. This month’s tip extends this discussion by considering the literature review, an assignment that requires students to perform a number of intricate and closely related reading and writing tasks.

The last two bog posts have stressed the benefits of making writing expectations and conventions explicit for students through syllabus statements and the use of metateaching strategies. This month’s tip begins a two-part series on how explicit guidance with reading tasks can also benefit student writing.