Welcome to the Teacher’s Pathway!
Let’s start with our #1 Piece of Advice: Be Selfish! Teach students to write the kind of prose you want to read.
In other words, what kind of papers do you want to grade? How much time do you want to commit at the end of the semester before you feel like the only way back to sanity sits atop a bar stool? Are you ready to build the scaffolding required to make grading student writing more akin to method than madness?
Our goal in this section is to help you select, plan, schedule, deliver, and grade discipline-specific writing assignments. Most of our recommendations are based on experience: we are a faculty of 15 or so, ranging in age from 30-something and older, all of whom have been teaching discipline-specific writing between 5-30 years. That’s a lot of experience to draw from! Because we are “lecturers” in the U.S. higher education system, we are not tenure-track, so don’t have to publish research to keep our jobs. Instead, our contracts stipulate that our work is to teach and design writing classes that meet the needs of the university and community.
If you are thinking about adding a writing assignment and want a prologue to what is entailed, please start with the post “Thinking through a writing assignment” — it’s the quick guide to designing assignments in which we walk you through some questions about what you’d like writing to accomplish so that you choose the best form/content combination for the learning outcomes you want to achieve. If you’d like a bit of practical theory to steer how to think about writing assignments overall, then head to the essay “What’s the Challenge? Using Form-Meaning-Use to diagnose and design writing assignments”. In addition to strategy, the Challenge Model is primarily a plea to take seriously the twin oracles of success: scheduling and scaffolding.
If you’re ready to jump into a particular assignment, then click on that link on the drop down menus above! Each module starts with an explanation of the text (genre), explores what you’ll need to do to get good results, and includes an Action Plan that you can adopt/adapt to your situation. All the materials are creative commons licensed, so use them in good conscience, and send us a note with how well it worked for you.