Travis Grandy is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Find him on Twitter @travisgrandy or at his website. I work with a lot of instructors who use ...

Effective course design begins with understanding the process of thinking and learning. These processes are commonly termed "metacognition." Metacognition includes a critical awareness of one’s ...

Howe Writing Across the Curriculum recently partnered with consultants in the Howe Writing Center to present a series of workshops on Assignment Design, featuring real-time feedback from our student ...

Substantive writing assignments offer students unique opportunities to get to know the content of your course more deeply, to refine their thinking, and to get to know how to write like a biologist, ...

At a recent conference on teaching in higher education, I attended a session on ChatGPT. The session organizers, a team from the University of Central Florida, began by asking us to position ourselves ...

Many instructors approach assignment design with a "product" focus—that is to say, the choices they make about their assignments (frequency; genre; difficulty; grading scheme; etc.) are oriented ...

The Writing Center's consultants strive to help students understand and engage with writing assignments in productive ways. Unfortunately, we sometimes encounter assignment sheets that are difficult ...

This brief case study was written by Jennifer Roebuck Bulanda, Ronald E. Bulanda, J. Scott Brown, Aaron Abbott, & Rena Perez. Educators often incorporate extensive writing into their coursework to ...

It is good teaching practice to be clear and transparent about the purpose, task, and criteria for assignments and learning activities. This includes communicating with students about what is and is ...

Does thinking about spending hours grading student writing fill you with dread? It doesn’t have to! Writing is an essential activity for developing higher order thinking ability such as critical ...

Assignments: Make Them Effective, Engaging, and Equitable. At their best, assignments are one of the most important learning experiences for students in a course. Students grapple with course content, ...