WR Classes
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 […]
Facilitating Discussions
Each Flipped Learning Module (FLM) is a set of short videos and online activities that can be used (in whole or in part) to free up class time from content delivery for greater student interaction. At the end of the module, students are asked to fill out a brief survey, in which we adopt the […]
Student Presentations and Strategies for Audience Engagement
WR 111, WR 112, WR 120, and WR 151 all require oral presentations for students and value these opportunities for students to speak to their peers. However, instructors sometimes struggle to sustain engagement on the part of the rest of the class during presentations. The following list provides some strategies to motivate audience members to […]
Place-Based Possibilities: Experiential Learning Ideas for WR Courses
This guide helps instructors connect place-based experiences and experiential learning to different courses in the WR sequence. Guiding Questions for Adventures Outside of the Classroom How can students engage deeply and safely with a place/event and its community/ies? What clear ground rules can you create to protect students while giving them freedom to explore? How wide […]
WR 112 Discussion Leader Presentations
For this assignment, students in WR 112 work in teams to explore a short assigned course reading in greater depth and practice their oral presentation skills at the same time. Refer to the Faculty Guide to WR 112 if you are not sure how this assignment fits into the arc of the WR 112 semester. Objective […]
Assignment Sequence: WR 120
These assignments and assignment templates are meant to offer new Writing Program instructors an easily adaptable overview of the WR 120 assignment sequence. They refer to sources using the BEAM/BEAT framework, which we recommend but do not require you to introduce to your students in WR 120. Opportunities to specify your course material and alternative […]
Synthesis Paper in WR 112
In WR 112, students will write a formal, argument-driven synthesis essay bringing together three texts. Scaffold the assignment with a series of reading journals, summaries, claim-writing workshops, and other pre-writing assignments as you see fit, and walk students through a process of peer review for their essay. Students should be developing claims with a fair amount […]
Argument-Driven Paper in WR 111
At the end of WR 111, students need to write a formal, argument-driven academic essay on the longer work (novel or memoir) that has been assigned. (Consult the sidebar here for the current list of longer works used in WR 111.) For this assignment, students should be mainly focused on thematic analysis, rather than primarily […]
Rhetorical Analysis in WR 111
Though all sections of WR 111 ask students to write and revise a rhetorical analysis of a passage from a course text, instructors have their own preferred ways of introducing this assignment. You may decide whether you wish to refer to Aristotelian models or not; this page gives you two possible approaches to this assignment. […]