Shared by Lynn Reid
With links to assigned readings and a sample essay as well as directions for assignments and scaffolding, this is the sequence for a four-week narrative unit. The unit begins with consideration of Freire’s banking concepts and includes lessons on thesis statements, introductions, use of evidence, and quote integration.
Shared by Karin Evans
This unit was created for an all-online developmental writing course. The course does not have a textbook – all the instructional material is currently baked into Blackboard (that’s where the icons came from), and I roll it over and update it from one semester to another. I revised this unit extensively in Fall 2020 and it went really well this time. The document includes a schedule for a five-week unit, links to readings, and directions for students (including time on task recommendations) for each activity/task.
Mini anthology of poetry readings by African American women
Shared by Anne McGrail
This mini-anthology and the accompanying exit tickets provide weekly occasions for engaging and low-stakes student writing. Over the course of 11 weeks students watch 11 readings and compile 11 exit tickets. (I format it as a “book” in my LMS but that’s not shareable here.) I link out to the exit ticket from my LMS. I use the “notice/value/wonder/question-challenge-extend” protocol from the Washington Center as the basis for the question stems.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
This assignment has been working really well to get students to engage with instructional materials in meaningful, productive ways. Many are opting for multimodal delivery options, and the applications I’m getting across the board are exciting.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
In this revision remix, students transform their evidence-driven character analysis into a presentation. This assignment pushes student understandings of their chosen character and encourages revision of the character analysis paper. Because students have at this point all run at least one episode discussion session and worked with everyone in class in small-group work, the presentation portion of the assignment isn’t daunting. This is the final project in The Wire, season 4 series.
095 One Word Argument Guidelines
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
In this paper, students expand their analysis to concepts. This paper also introduces synthesis and documentation. Using scenes from season 4 of The Wire, students examine different presentations/understandings of one little word (like home, school, justice) and argue for a complex definition of the term.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
This is the second paper in our work with season 4 of The Wire. Here, students are asked to carefully examine just one character from the show. This paper, coming relatively early in the semester, will require regular revisiting and revision as we get further into the season and students’ chosen characters evolve.
Education Vignettes Guidelines
Education Vignettes Revision Workshop
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
With credit to Jacque Wilson-Jordan
For their first major writing assignment, students are asked to deliver snapshots of their educational experiences, like those bits we see in early episodes of The Wire (season 4) or in Sherman Alexie’s “Indian Education.” I’m also including here the revision workshop students complete after a peer evaluation workshop and peer evaluation letter.
Shared by Jacqueline Wilson-Jordan
With credit to Joan Livingston-Webber and Beverly Braniff who wrote and/or tried earlier versions of this assignment
This assignment, which requires field research and is fairly demanding, asks students to observe and analyze the conversation in a chosen discourse community. I thought the James Baldwin essay might be dated because of the term “Black English,” but you should have seen the faces and heard the voices when I asked them to discuss James Baldwin’s points about how coded language can protect those who use it, such as (even) from the police. Sparks were flying! The project was excited and produced good results.
Shared by Barb Bird
We do the portfolio assignment a bit differently from what others have done (that I’ve seen anyway). We really focus on the reflective, metacognitive essays, but we do require specific evidences for how they have accomplished the course objectives. It has really helped students accomplish the portfolio project well when I began emphasizing course objectives throughout the entire course.
Shared by Barb Bird
I have found that students really like having a lot of choices for essays. I used to just leave it open-ended (topic could be anything related in any way to our readings), but I found that that much openness actually froze students’ minds instead of helping them. So every year I work on crafting another really strong option for each essay (I still have several options in each of these essay assignments that need better crafting).
Annotations and Quote Responses
Shared by Barb Bird
These assignments are designed to encourage student engagement with assigned readings–first to understand the reading and to consider its component claims and then to respond thoughtfully to one of those claims.
Final Presentation and Reflection
Shared by Glenn Newman
In this take on a final reflection, specifically designed for an ALP course, students are asked to deliver a presentation on their progress as a preparatory activity for a final written reflection. I set up an ethos theme in my courses, less Aristotelian, more about what will we do when what we bring to the table is not enough.This helps us think about how we can move beyond the classroom and into our real-time lives, and it’s a driving theme in their final reflective piece.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
Using Humans of New York as a profile genre, students are challenged to produce their own Humans-style profile, using photos and individual stories to profile a local place of their choosing. This one requires some solid scaffolding, but it has yielded some exciting, inspired results from students who were genuinely interested in the work. I recommend this video for getting students to think about their approach and questions and this StoryCorps app as a useful tool for interviewing. Also, I created a writing-only alternative for students who don’t have access to a smartphone or digital camera that involves using traditionally-written profile portraits to describe the subject and the setting.
Shared by Karen Henderson
This assignment sequence we work on for about a month at the end of the semester. I use the This I Believe essays as models and ask students to write their own. I subsequently publish a hardbound book of student essays each year, which is my way of making the audience more authentic. Not every student chooses to be published, and it’s just an option not mandatory. The revision process comes from forcing them to think of the “one paper” as three separate papers, starting small, expanding, and then editing back. It does take quite a long time, but it allows me to model and scaffold learning, and the students do a lot of group work, so they see how their classmates’ papers come alive and become really nice writing. It’s a great way to end the semester, and I hope it changes their attitudes toward revision and group work.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
Inspired by Jeanne Henry, Nancie Atwell, and Meagan Newberry
This semester, I’m trying to make the joy reading component of class more focused on the joy. I’ve dialed the work back and dialed the intensity down and tried to strike a balance between my need/desire to hold students accountable and the reality that external motivators and consequences aren’t conducive to reading for pleasure.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
This is a sampling of the prompts I give in a weekly writing challenge called Rock Star Battles. Students are to apply the skills they’re learning in class to fun, challenging writing tasks that are designed to encourage a focus on audience and purpose. Students post their best-attempt pieces to a discussion board, and everyone gets work credit for completing the assignment. Two students (one of my choosing and one of the class’s) earn Rock Star Points (a coupon worth a three-point boost to any assignment’s grade). At the end of the semester, students choose their best two battle pieces to include in the portfolio.
Shared by Jeremy Branstad
I use this assignment to help students understand the concepts of main ideas and supporting details. The assignment is given during unit two, the placeography, and involves having students work together in groups to give a presentation to the class. They decide on a main idea for their presentation together as a group. They then go out and take pictures to support that main idea. Students use the worksheet (page 2 of the attachment) to do all the planning collaboratively during classtime.
Worksheet for Indian Education
Shared by Jacque Wilson-Jordan
This is a narrative collage. I’ve used the assignment for years, and the students love it. In addition to the assignment sheet, there is a worksheet based on an analysis of Sherman Alexie’s “Indian Education” (from *The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven*) and two award-winning student models of the collage.
Shared by Beth Gulley
This assignment was designed to teach students to use a mentor text (from Bob Brannan’s A Writer’s Workshop), to get them to write to an audience from someone else’s perspective, and to demonstrate their understanding of the issues presented in a text (in this case the 1980’s documentary Style Wars).
Shared by Gael Grossman
Adapted from Burkhardt, J.M., MacDonald, Mary C. (2010). Teaching information literacy: 50 standard-based exercises for college students. Chicago: ALA
This is an assignment I use to get my students thinking about plagiarism and other issues of academic honesty. It’s more a discussion based assignment; however, I have had students write their response to it as well.
Shared by Beth Gulley
This assignment was designed to subtly promote student engagement on campus and increase student awareness of campus resources in addition to teaching MLA documentation and writing from sources.
Shared by Gael Grossman
Book Reflections (silent reading) – You will be reading independently chosen books this semester. A book will need to be approved by me and generally be at least 200 pages in length. A book may be fiction or nonfiction. They may not be an assigned book, a textbook, or a requirement for another class. It should not be a book you’ve already read. For around every 25-30 pages read, you will write a 1 page typed response. This is not a summary of the pages but more a discussion of personal connections you had with the book so far. This can include your likes/dislikes, predictions of where the book will go next, and reflections (what it makes you think about outside the book).
We will discuss and practice this in class first.
Reading Strategies 101Filledin
Shared by Meagan Newberry
With inspiration from/credit to Harvey Daniels’s Literature Circles
Students formed groups based on the book of their choice (they turn in a top 3 out of a choice of about six—I got a grant to buy sets of book). They met for about 20-30 minutes once a week. They set their own ground rules, after we talked a bit about what makes a group work, etc. I also spent time on reading strategies (attached, but I use those separately with the whole class, or even in classes without book clubs).The “Book Club Reflections 216” attachment is one example of what I asked them all to do each time they met. I used the honor system and asked them to report if they read or not, and if so, how much. I found that students self-reported pretty accurately, and I simply choose not to police them because I want the crux of this to be reading both for pleasure and the challenge of discussing chosen reading. Most students participate actively and enjoy the process. Of course, a few are always unprepared, and we talk about how to prevent that. For those few, the “grade threat” sadly is what pushes them to try to be prepared. I really hope for intrinsic motivation with this, and for 80% of students, it works really well. I highly recommend a copy of “Literature Circles” or “Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles,” both by Harvey Daniels.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
With inspiration from/credit to Nancie Atwell’s The Reading Zone
This assignment asks students to write critical response letters to their instructor and their classmates about their joy reading books. The assignment sheet itself borrows heavily and extensively from Atwell’s. There’s very little original material here.
Shared by Sarah Alexander Tsai
This group project, which can easily be scaled up or down, invites students to trace the way Wikipedia authors use and cite secondary sources. In following Wikipedia‘s “research paths,” students are likely to recognize both the strengths and limitations of collaboratively edited resources.
Shared by Sarah Alexander Tsai
By investigating the origins and meanings of their own names, students learn how to blend primary research (especially personal interviews) with focused personal narrative. Since this fairly low-stakes assignment also functions nicely as a community builder, I like to assign it early on. Recommended accompanying readings for this assignment are as follows:
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- Bonnie Wach’s “What’s in a Name?”
- Tom Rosenberg’s “Changing My Name after Sixty Years”
- Sandra Cisneros’ “My Name”
Shared by Barb Bird
With inspiration from/credit to Carie King, Ball State University (collaborator)
We require students to annotate all of the articles assigned as readings.
Sample Student Projects here and here
Shared by Ethna Lay
Writing instruction changes exponentially as the technologies for writing change. Sensitive to this need to address a rapidly flexing pedagogy, I have designed a digital, visual argument assignment for my first-year writing students. The project involves making an argument as a visual montage followed by a verbal, written reflection considering whether images can do what words do, and the converse query, can words do what images do.
Shared by Ethna Lay
With inspiration from/credit to Adam Gopnik’s introduction to the volume ofBest American Essays of 2008
The small object/LARGE SUBJECT essay is often an easy way for students to embark on cultural criticism. I’d tag it “new media,” as its relevance to this site hinges on the productive role of the affordances of technology like prezi for basic writers during the invention process.
Descriptive Writing Chart, Four Visitors Assignment Sheet, Four Visitors Peer Review Sheet, Going Somewhere Sample, and Questions for Going Somewhere
Shared by Jessica Weleski
I use this Four Visitors assignment at the beginning of the semester to help my students learn narrative structure and to allow them to have some fun with writing. As we lead up to the writing of the story, we talk about narrative structure and pacing, descriptive writing, and punctuation of dialogue (in preparation for punctuating research quotes). Since the story isn’t about the students’ own lives, I find that sometimes the peer review is a little less threatening. Each of the students in a peer review group can help envision ideas to make the characters of the story even more zany when they appear in the final draft.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
This is the primary handout from a workshop I designed for a department in-service. Accompanying the handout were a variety of interdisciplinary texts and miscellaneous manipulatives. I’m sharing it here in hopes that even without the accompanying materials, this could be a useful starting point for creating assignments and assignment sequences that enact best practices.
Shared by Sarah Tsai
This essay assignment invites students to identify, research, and unpack the pedagogical and administrative buzzwords that play a role in their school’s official documents (and marketing!).
Preparatory activity also posted here.
Shared by Susan Naomi Bernstein
With inspiration from/credit to “Recursive Processes in Self-Affirmation: Intervening to Close the Minority Achievement Gap,” an article published in Science 17 (April 2009) by Geoffrey L. Cohen, Julio Garcia, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Nancy Apfel, and Patricia Brzustoski. Their research investigated the connections between writing, values affirmation, and school success. Also see “Writing Beyond Stereotypes” on Bedford Bits: Ideas for Teaching Composition 5.9.11 by Susan Naomi Bernstein.
I have invited students to write in response to various versions of this prompt throughout the term as a touchstone for affirming their strengths and values as writers. Students may find this writing prompt especially valuable as preparation for any high stakes writing venture, including but not limited to: beginning a new semester; building resilience at midterm; undertaking revision and reflection for final portfolios; preparing for high stakes tests and assignments.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
This is a collection of fun multimodal writing projects for students’ joy reading novels.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
This packet leads students through the process of the kind of active reading that might be required for a summary or response paper.
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
This is one of the novel projects I assign to accompany joy reading of high-interest novels. In it, students are asked to make inferences about characters in their novels, and they’re also asked to make writing choices informed by analysis of a specific genre (the PostSecret card).
Shared by Elizabeth Baldridge
This packet is the guidelines for fun blog writing as well as the options for topics that I’ve been playing with lately.
CBW Resource Share 