Sequencing and Scaffolding Assignments in Your Course

As you think about your learning objectives and goals for your students’ writing in your course, consider developing a sequence of shorter assignments that build on one another (rather than one long assignment at the end) to help students develop and acquire the knowledge and the skills they need to meet those goals. Sequencing assignments allows you to move from simple tasks to more complex ones. A carefully developed sequence of writing prompts can teach students the process of learning to think and write in ways valued in your discipline.

Scaffold larger writing tasks into a series of smaller steps to foster student success. For example, a 15-page research paper could be scaffolded by having students develop a working research question appropriate to your field or discipline, an annotated bibliography, a critical review of a source, and a draft of the paper (with feedback from you or from a peer) all before completing the final paper. As with sequencing, scaffolding tasks helps students learn the ways writing is practiced in your discipline.