“Presumably, what any classroom seeks to nurture is intellectual conversation, leading to enhanced powers of discernment. Since writing enables both learning and conversation, manifesting and enlarging the capacity to discover connections, it should be a resource that all teachers in all disciplines can rely on to achieve their purposes.”

–Knoblach and Brannon

Three Pillars

WIP courses support the following three approaches to writing:

 Writing is a mode of learning. Writing increases student engagement, teaches critical thinking and problem solving skills, and deepens learning of subject matter.

 Writing teaches discipline-specific ways of thinking and communicating that are important in and beyond university courses. Teaching writing in the disciplines means helping students learn the processes and conventions that shape academic writing in the disciplines.

 Writing is a process. Teaching writing in math, science, or art means interpreting and guiding the writing process and responding to student work in productive and helpful ways that encourage revision.

Course Planning and Design Criteria

The following criteria drive WIP course planning and design. Read more here.

Writing-intensive courses

  • involve students in innovative writing assignments that promote course learning;
  • stage and sequence assignments to encourage writing as a process of creating and communicating knowledge;
  • maximize opportunities for guidance, feedback, and revision;
  • teach the writing conventions that are inseparable from modes of inquiry in a discipline.

Features of Successful Writing-Intensive Instruction

Feedback/interaction from instructors, WIP teaching assistants, and peers.

By reading and responding to each other’s work, students become better skilled at revising their own writing.

Opportunities to revise.

In addition to teaching the writing process, staged assignments permit this.

Writing assignments that are relevant to the course and to a student’s career plans.

Designing such assignments requires innovation, so as to create authentic writing projects that are fully integrated into the course.

How WIP Courses Develop Teaching: Possible Elements

This kind of re-orientation to teaching through writing is one of the ways in which writing-intensive programs claim to foster teaching development for faculty. Overall, writing in the disciplines faculty report that attending to writing effectively in a course leads them to teach more effectively.

Possible influences on teaching:

  • better planning;
  • clearer communication to students (including more fully articulated goals and schedules directions, models, and grading criteria);
  • greater engagement in course issues through thinking about, designing, and explaining writing assignments;
  • increased communication with students through reading their work;
  • a better sense of how students are doing;
  • more opportunities for management of the learning/writing process.

Creating a Writing-Intensive Environment: Class Size, Interaction, Process

Because they offer greater instructor involvement in the writing process, writing-intensive courses work best in regular-enrollment courses, which allows greater student-instructor interaction. The assignment of a WIP teaching assistant, along with more thoughtfully staged writing tasks, helps WIP faculty to offer additional opportunities for interaction with students and permits greater involvement in the student’s writing process, even in larger classes. Large classes may be structured effectively as writing-intensive (see Writing in Large Classes) and may permit the kind of interaction associated with much smaller classes by offering writing-intensive instruction in breakout/discussion sections led by WIP teaching assistants. Having instituted a writing-intensive course requirement for majors, the School of Music has been prominent in delivering writing-intensive courses in this way.

Writing Intensive Should Not Mean Time Intensive

For many faculty, teaching with writing sounds time and labor intensive. The assistance of a specially trained WIP teaching assistant should help considerably, yet faculty have expressed concerns about writing-intensive courses, for instance:

“How can I teach the content I want to cover if I have to teach writing, too?”

Our response:

You can’t. You probably will have to cover less content, but the content you do offer, which is inseparable from the writing that presents it, will be learned more deeply because students engage course issues in writing.

“I don’t assign more papers because I don’t have time to teach them.”

Our response:

Teaching writing and giving feedback on writing projects forces us to teach the very things we should be teaching: the processes, questions, patterns of evidence and argument, styles and formats that are specific to making knowledge in a discipline.

“All those papers to read and grade. I don’t want to spend time correcting students’ grammar and mechanical errors.”

Our response:

There’s no need to. Not all student writing needs to be responded to, and fewer and more strategic comments prove more useful. “Correcting” writing is always an inefficient use of faculty time.