Resources for Faculty

As we all know, writing effectively is a crucial component of student success, and will be a factor in students’ future professional lives. Yet many of the skills we expect them to have mastered by the time they reach our doors, they haven’t.

Below are some links to articles about strategies you can use in the classroom, as well as articles about the reasons why we are seeing some deficits.

Strategies

An Assignment Sheet provides students with all the details they need to consider when they are assigned a project. This sample pertains to a writing assignment, offering a structural guide that may be helpful to you regardless of your discipline. Keep in mind that prescriptive formulas can sometimes feel limiting for students. However, if you have students who struggle with writing, or if you have specific expectations, something like this may be helpful.

Rubrics are important because they provide concrete and specific goals for students. They are also important for instructors because they reflect course outcomes – and make the grading process easier, as well as more consistent. There needs to be some level of subjectivity when you’re grading, but having some parameters ensures that you are capturing all the necessary components of a student’s performance and measuring them fairly against their classmates.