Metacognition
Reflective Writing Activities
All WR courses should offer students regular and varied opportunities for reflection, including personal, metacognitive, and social/systemic reflections that instructors assign as in-class activities and/or for homework throughout the term. Each semester, WR students will choose three of these reflections for inclusion in their cumulative portfolios. Below you will find ideas and examples that can […]
Effective Collaboration with Writing Centers
How can we as faculty make the best use of the Writing Center for our students? This guide offers some suggestions for how to introduce the Writing Center at the beginning of the semester, how to discuss tutoring with individual students before they make an appointment, and how to encourage students to respond critically to […]
Providing Feedback
One of our expectations in the CAS Writing Program is that faculty will provide students with “timely and substantive” feedback on their writing, both on drafts and on final versions of papers/projects. In general, all faculty will meet with students individually at least twice in the semester to discuss their writing in formal writing conferences, scheduled […]
WR 111 Grammar Presentations
In this activity, WR 111 students work in teams to review a grammatical topic, share it to the class, and practice their oral presentation skills at the same time. Instructors should make sure they have read the Faculty Guide to WR 111. Objective To work together to review and learn more about a grammatical topic; […]
Composing a Multimodal Reflection
Prior to this activity, students need to have some form of written reflections, perhaps looking back at prior writing instruction, looking ahead and setting personal goals for themselves for this course, or otherwise considering their strengths and needs as writers. For this activity, they practice the act of remediation by translating their reflections into the […]
Cumulative Portfolios in the Writing Program
As of Fall 2023, all WR students will create a portfolio in their first WR course and continue to add to it throughout subsequent WR courses. This cumulative portfolio assignment will create a shared experience for WR students, offering them a space to reflect on their growth and their developing identities as college writers and […]
WR 111 Mid-Semester Self-Evaluation
For this activity, students in WR 111 reflect on the assignments and experiences of the first half of the course. Instructors should plan on reading students’ written reflections and also on sharing them when requested. WR 112 instructors may adapt the questions to WR 112 skills and topics. Objective to think back over the last […]
Video Presentation and Reflections
For this assignment, students work in small groups to create and edit short video presentations (flexible in genre) to recast their research for a new audience. Students then reflect on their presentations. Guide to Oral/Signed Communication in Writing Classrooms Objective To remediate the findings of a research project into a different genre; to work […]
Inner Critic
In the first half of this reflective activity, students give voice to negative self-beliefs in the form of an uncensored personal letter from their imagined “Inner Critic” to themselves, listing their shortcomings, expressing anxieties, and identifying the perceived consequences of failure. Some instructors assign the first letter at the start of the semester, while others […]
Planning Peer-to-Peer Work: Groups, Peer Review, & Workshops
Writing classes are interactive, with students talking, writing, and collaborating with each other, in various permutations of pairs, small groups, and larger groups, nearly constantly. But how do you decide what kind of peer-to-peer work to integrate into a given class? This page offers some tips for instructors. You may also be interested in the […]