Travis Grandy is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Find him on Twitter @travisgrandy or at his website. I work with a lot of instructors who use ...

Assignments: Make Them Effective, Engaging, and Equitable. At their best, assignments are one of the most important learning experiences for students in a course. Students grapple with course content, ...

In February Howe Writing Across the Curriculum partnered with Howe Writing Center consultants to present a workshop series on Assignment Design, focusing on clarity, audience, and accessibility. Led ...

Many instructors approach assignment design with a "product" focus—that is to say, the choices they make about their assignments (frequency; genre; difficulty; grading scheme; etc.) are oriented ...

At a recent conference on teaching in higher education, I attended a session on ChatGPT. The session organizers, a team from the University of Central Florida, began by asking us to position ourselves ...

The Writing Center's consultants strive to help students understand and engage with writing assignments in productive ways. Unfortunately, we sometimes encounter assignment sheets that are difficult ...

Since the latest version of ChatGPT emerged late last year, educators have been puzzling over how to reconcile traditional writing instruction with tech that can churn out everything from essays to ...

The students’ assignment: Write an op-ed about lead poisoning in Lewiston-Auburn. Or write a caption for a photo, or text about a campus tree. Write about how strange quantum theory is, or write a ...

Effective course design begins with understanding the process of thinking and learning. These processes are commonly termed "metacognition." Metacognition includes a critical awareness of one’s ...