Teaching the Elements of Writing Assignments

If your lesson plan is drawn from the actual assignment students are working on at any point in the term (whether it’s a smaller “now” response paper or a smaller part of a “bigger” project due in six weeks), then nearly every homework assignment or in-class activity is writing the paper. The purpose of section will always be more clear if students recognize that every meeting is a chance to practice relevant skills or make progress on an assignment. And of course, that recognition is only possible if students understand what the goals of the assignment they're working on are, what skills are relevant to meeting those goals, and what kinds of steps reflect progress toward them. With that in mind, it’s helpful to start with the Assignment Decoder for Students. 

The assignment prompt decoders linked throughout this site are meant to give course heads, TFs & TAs, and students a way of assessing how clearly a prompt is communicating its elements. For course heads and instructors, this might lead to a revision of the prompt or clarifications in class or meetings of the teaching team. For students, it might lead to questions in section, emails to an instructor, or asking a fellow student for input. Whatever doing the decoder leads to—and whether or not the decoder is used at all—it’s crucial to keep in mind that prompts don’t speak for themselves, no matter how clear they are: they’re a framework for, and hopefully an invitation to discussion about what it will look and feel like to do an assignment well. But what about a really clear prompt—doesn’t it save class time if students can just read it on their own? It’s a fair question, and the fair response is that we can’t know whether students have understood the really clear prompt unless we have a discussion with them about it. At that point, of course, we’re back to discussing the prompt, and the upside is this: spending class time working through prompts is actually a reliably efficient way to make subsequent classes more effective. 

With all of that in mind, sharing and discussing prompts is most effective when it takes place at the start of the process of the assignment, at a point when questions can be asked and students can, for example, engage with lectures, readings, in-class discussion etc., in terms of how this uptake and processing of course material will become elements of evidence and analysis in their writing, or models of the genre they’ll be writing in.

If you and your students are on the same page about the goals and priorities of an assignment, then you’re freed up to engage in some backward design triage: How much time is there until the likely deadline? How many sections are there to work with? What are the essential elements that need teaching and practice? What’s a good place to start? When giving feedback, it’s almost as unhelpful to just write “A-” without comments as it is to fill the margins with comments or append a novella’s worth of reflection to the end of a student’s essay. In both cases, it’s unclear what the rubric for feedback is and how they reflect the priorities of this assignment. And the same goes for teaching this assignment: You should find the sequence of in-class activities and formative assessments that best balance what’s necessary for students to succeed with what’s possible given the time and bandwidth available to you and your students. The general advice and sample trajectories for assignments in this section are meant to make that balance feel both attainable and much more than “good enough”—it’s what great teachers aim for.