Designing Writing Assignments

Effective student writing begins with well-designed classroom assignments. In Designing Writing Assignments, veteran educator Traci Gardner offers practical ways for teachers to develop assignments that will allow students to express their creativity and grow as writers and thinkers while still addressing the many demands of resource-stretched classrooms.

Writing assignments are road maps-or they should be. They guide the writer on a journey. They lay out a process, envision a destination. They are designed. As Jim Burke explains it: "What we are really doing when we create a year's worth of writing assignments, of experiences, is designing a story. Each day's class a sentence, each week a paragraph, each unit a chapter in the story of the year students spend in our classes. And as with any good story, there needs to be tension and transformation by the time one arrives at the end, or what I have called 'the user's journey.'" These maps are crucially important for engaging students with academic writing, which is often unfamiliar territory. Drawing on his extensive review of academic writing assignments across the country, Jim identifies six major categories of writing assignments that help students become better writers, readers, and thinkers: - Writing to learn - Short answer - Writing on demand - Process paper (which goes through multiple drafts) - Research paper/report - Alternate forms (multimedia presentations, etc.). For each assignment type, Jim invites us into his own practice. He shows how he composes the assignment, how he creates gateway activities to help prepare students, how he troubleshoots common problems, how he gives response, how he clarifies the criteria on which students will be judged. He also shows how these assignments are related-how the earlier assignments build to later more complex ones So please join a master teacher at work. Take this journey with him.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: 1.7, Southern Illinois University Carbondale (Southern Illinois University at Carbondale - English Department), course: English Composition Pedagogy and Practice, language: English, abstract: A teacher has to create a work-friendly environment that engages students to participate in and become a part of the classroom activities. Since I have had some teaching experience, I know that this is the most daunting task the teacher is confronted with. Furthermore, this is a task the teacher has to fulfill every day anew. No lesson is the same, and today your class can be totally different than the day before. Students’ attitude and participation in the classroom can fall from astonishing to frustrating within moments. To be aware of the classroom vibe is most crucial to teaching success. Standing in front of the classroom, the teacher has to be able to adapt to the students’ condition, to engage with them and to arouse their interest; in short, the teacher has to be aware of his or her audience. As a teacher, you need to be able to open a communicative channel that allows you to convey your message adequately and at the same time reach your students. Both speaker and recipient have to feel comfortable with the channel and must be interested to keep this channel open. When this communicative approach becomes one-sided, the teaching will fail; either the teacher will not be able to perform in a comfortable way, or the students might not be willing to receive. This can be avoided if both sides cooperate with each other by “make[ing] your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged“ (Grice 24). Grice talks about five maxims of conversation that need to be respected to provide a fertile ground for conversation.

From product documentation to menu labels to marketing emails, writing for the web can feel challenging-even insurmountable. But it doesn't have to be that way! Whether you're new to writing or looking to hone your skills, Scott Kubie's guide will empower you to get organized and get going. Learn to scope and articulate writing assignments, build a repeatable workflow, and develop methods for productive editing, collaboration, version control, and delivery. Don't struggle with writing-get the writing done.

This is an essential book for everyone who wants to write clearly about any subject and use writing as a means of learning.

In the face of the continuing discourse of crisis in US education, The Meaningful Writing Project offers readers an affirming story of writing in higher education that shares students’ experiences in their own voices. In presenting the results of a three-year study consisting of surveys and interviews of university seniors and their faculty across three diverse institutions, authors Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner consider students’ perceptions of their meaningful writing experiences, the qualities of those experiences, and instructors’ perspectives on assignment design and delivery. This study confirms that meaningful assignments offer students opportunities to engage with instructors, peers, and texts and are relevant to past experiences and passions as well as to future aspirations and identities. Meaningful writing occurs across majors, in both required and elective courses, and beyond students’ years at college. Additionally, the study makes clear that faculty across the curriculum devote significant care and attention to creating writing assignments that support student learning, as they understand writing performance to be a developmental process connected to overall cognitive and social development, student engagement with learning, and success in a wide variety of disciplines and professions. The Meaningful Writing Project provides writing center directors, WPAs, other composition scholars, and all faculty interested in teaching and learning with writing an unprecedented look into the writing projects students find meaningful.

Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century is a comprehensive introduction to writing instruction in an increasingly digital world. It provides both a theoretical background and detailed practical guidance to writing instructors faced with novel and ever-changing digital learning technologies, new approaches to access needs and usability design, increasing student diversity, and the multiliteracies of reading, alphabetic writing, and multimodal composition. A companion volume, Administering Writing Programs in the Twenty-First Century, considers the role of administrators in addressing these issues. Covering all aspects of teaching online, various composition genres, and the technologies available to teachers, Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century addresses composing processes and approaches; designing and scaffolding assignments; providing response, feedback, and evaluation; communicating effectively; and supporting students. These strategic and practical ideas are prefaced by a history of the relation between composition and rhetoric and a guide to diversity, inclusion, and access. The volume ends with a chapter on envisioning the future of composition.

Learn to design interest-provoking writing and critical thinking activities and incorporate them into your courses in a way that encourages inquiry, exploration, discussion, and debate, with Engaging Ideas, a practical nuts-and-bolts guide for teachers from any discipline. Integrating critical thinking with writing-across-the-curriculum approaches, the book shows how teachers from any discipline can incorporate these activities into their courses. This edition features new material dealing with genre and discourse community theory, quantitative/scientific literacy, blended and online learning, and other current issues.