How to teach Comm-B courses (For Instructors)

Being an instructor for a Comm-B course can be intimidating. If you have never taught writing before, it’s normal to feel a bit nervous about this new challenge. As Melzer & Bean (2021) remind us, though:

Because the best teacher commentary focuses primarily on students’ ideas and the strengths, weaknesses, or clarity of their arguments, no special terminology is needed. Teachers simply need to be honest readers… (12).

You don’t need to be an expert writer—or an expert teacher of writing—to be an instructor for a Comm-B course. Your experience as an academic writer and reader, along with your expertise in the ways of inquiring and arguing in your field, are the foundation you need to help your students with writing (Melzer & Bean 2021, 12).

Below is additional guidance to help you teach your Comm-B course.

Teach Writing (and Thinking) as a Process

As an instructor, you usually have significant control over the design of the writing assignments in your Comm-B course. Consider designing your assignments and lesson plans in a way that prioritizes writing process alongside product.

Students typically focus on writing product (e.g., the finished, 5-page paper) and forget about the importance of the writing process (everything from brainstorming to drafting to revision and polishing). Be intentional about teaching writing (and thinking) as a process.

Sequence and scaffold assignments. Students are more likely to value and engage with the writing process if writing assignments are sequenced (so that students practice a particular genre or genres in a series) or scaffolded (so that smaller, low-stakes assignments and activities build to larger, high-stakes assignments). See below for more on sequencing and scaffolding.

Build in opportunities for feedback and revision. Making the writing process interactive is a high-impact practice. Both peer and instructor feedback affords students the opportunity to engage with others in the writing process. Consider building peer review into a scaffolded sequence for a larger writing assignment. See below for more on peer review.

Talk about your own writing challenges and successes. It can be very validating for college students to understand that even experienced writers struggle with parts of the writing process. Share with your students how you approach writing and the places you usually get stuck—including how you troubleshoot and navigate challenges. For example, you may share that you use concept maps or mind maps to visually map out your thoughts in the brainstorming phase because it helps you organize your ideas. Or you may share how you rely on reverse outlines to revise the structure of your drafts. By modeling for students that sticky points need not be stopping points, you will help your students learn writing resiliency.

Use in-class low-stakes writing activities. Another great way to emphasize process alongside product is to have students regularly engage in in-class, low-stakes, not graded writing activities. For a table of some common activities, see our page on Examples of Standard Low-Stakes Writing Activities & Assignments. Low-stakes writing activities help students take writing and thinking risks without fear of impacting their grade. You might even consider using low-stakes writing activities to scaffold the larger writing assignments in the class. For example, you might have students do a freewrite or write-pair-share about their potential research topics; or you might have students draw concept maps in the brainstorming phase for a large writing project. Low-stakes writing can work well even in large lectures. You might also encourage your TAs, if you have any, to use low-stakes writing in section/lab.

Prioritize Growth-Oriented Feedback

Whether you (as the instructor) or your TA(s) are responsible for providing feedback on student writing in your Comm-B course, be intentional about prioritizing growth-oriented, high-level feedback.

You or your TAs may feel overwhelmed by the amount of writing that students do in a Comm-B course. Make sure whoever on your teaching team gives feedback resists the urge to mark every error or typo they notice. This is overwhelming for you as the person giving feedback, and for students receiving this feedback. Instead, consider the following practice.

Make global, before local, comments. In any piece of writing, global concerns are those related to the entire piece of writing (e.g., structural, argumentative, conceptual, and organizational concerns). By contrast, local concerns are those related to only a small portion of a piece of writing (e.g., sentence-level concerns such as syntax, grammar, and punctuation). In giving feedback to students on their writing, focusing on “global before local” fosters critical thinking as students grapple with ideas; helps students develop strong, clear arguments; gives students guidance for substantial edits in the drafting process; and validates students’ ideas as worthy of focus and attention. This doesn’t mean local concerns aren’t important—just that, especially early in the drafting process, global concerns should come first. Local concerns can become more important in the final, polishing stages, once global concerns have been addressed.

For more information and promising practices for giving feedback on student writing, check out our section on Responding to (and Evaluating) Student Writing.

Make Student-TA Conferences Inclusive & Accessible

One of the wonderful, high-impact practices characteristic of Comm-B courses is the opportunity for students to engage directly with instructors about their writing and learning processes. Because we know that individualized attention and conversation supports all learners in their development, holding individual Student-TA meetings (“conferences”) aligns with the mission of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Still, there are several ways you can curate conferences to be more intentionally accessible and inclusive of all students. If your TA(s) will be holding one-to-one conferences with the students, make sure they are familiar with these practices.

Take an explicitly collaborative approach. It would be impossible to plan for every kind of disability, chronic health issue, or life situation that might impact students’ performance in your sections or labs. Rather than try to guess what a student might be experiencing, UDL encourages you to engage students in genuine conversation and work collaboratively to determine how best to support their learning.

Such a collaborative approach centers the students—their identity and their experience—throughout the conference. As the teacher in this context, it is your role to ask questions and to listen as much as it is to provide feedback, clarifications, and suggestions. It is only through asking questions and listening carefully to students’ responses that you can most effectively provide feedback! Some open-ended questions you might ask during individual conferences include:

• How would you like to work together [e.g., in person or on Zoom]? What works best for you?
• Before we get started, is there anything you’d like me to know [e.g., about how you’re doing, about your experience with this class]?
• Could you tell me about your writing process? What aspects feel fairly easy or more difficult for you?
• Have you talked with instructors about your writing before? What did you find helpful (or not so helpful) about those conversations?

Offer options and flexibility. Through your conversations with students, you may come to learn that some aspects of conferences that seem inconsequential to you are sometimes significantly consequential to students. You can respond—or better yet, anticipate—such instances by being overtly flexible about your conferences and offering options for how, when, and where consultations occur.

The table below lists several ways to build greater flexibility into one-to-one conferences with students.

Support executive functioning. Individual conferences are an excellent opportunity for you to talk with students about potential difficulties with executive functioning as well as course content and writing processes. Executive functions include a broad set of cognitive tasks that inform behavior, including goal-setting, planning, strategizing, and monitoring progress toward goals.

Consider reading through the UDL on Campus website’s page on executive functioning in online environments if you plan to hold some or all of your conferences virtually.

Here are UW-Madison, the McBurney Disability Resource Center is an excellent resource as you strive to support disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill students.

For additional information and promising practices for individual conferences, check out our section on Supporting Students in the Writing Process: Student-Teaching Conferences.

Build in and Prepare for Peer Review

Peer review can be an incredibly rewarding part of the writing process for students writers. But as you may know from your own experiences, when peer review is not properly structured, scaffolded, and executed, it can feel like busywork or be outright unpleasant.

As the instructor, consider incorporating peer review intentionally into a scaffolded sequence for a larger assignment. Avoid assuming that students know what peer review is—and even anticipate that some may have prior negative experiences with peer review. Take time in class (or have TAs take time in section or lab) to explain to students why peer review matters and what students can hope to get out of it.

For further information on facilitating a successful peer review, see our section on Supporting Students in the Writing Process: Peer Review.

Sequence and Scaffold Writing & Speaking Assignments

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 a single 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 (1) a working research question appropriate to your field or discipline, (2) an annotated bibliography, (3) a critical review of a source, and (4) a draft of the paper (with feedback from you or from a peer) all before completing (5) the final paper. As with sequencing, scaffolding tasks helps students learn the ways writing is practiced in your discipline.

Make sure to explain the purpose of assignment sequences and scaffolds to your students. Students will be better able (and perhaps more willing) to meet your expectations if they understand not only the requirements for individual papers but also the larger purposes of those assignments. Be transparent with students about your goals and learning objectives for your assignments and explain in writing and in person how each builds upon and relates to the previous assignment.

Below are some common assignment sequences, adapted from Brad Hughes and Rebecca Nowacek. These sequences provides examples of how instructors have scaffolded writing tasks across a semester or as a way to build toward a single assignment:

For more information, check out the section on sequencing and scaffolding writing assignments. That section includes information about why it is important to sequence and scaffold, how to sequence and scaffold, as well as examples of sequencing and scaffolding in UW-Madison courses.

Additionally, consider visiting the sections on High-Stakes, Formal Writing Assignments and Low-Stakes, Informal Writing Activities & Assignments for examples of assignments developed by UW-Madison instructors.

Support Students to Present their Work

The Comm-B course criteria requires:

[A]t least two opportunities for each students to be graded for presenting research findings, creative work, or other coursework, in modes other than writing common to the discipline as well as two or more opportunities to be graded for writing. Comm-B courses should also include activities that give students further opportunities to develop and receive feedback on their communication skills in writing and at least one other mode of communication in informal settings such as discussion or brainstorming.

Many Comm-B courses include an in-class presentation to showcase students’ research and to allow students to demonstrate communication skills through presenting their work; however, sharing work need not take the form of presentation. Comm-B instructors have used iterative in-class debates, scaffolded extemporaneous presentations, or structured in-class discussion to fulfill this Comm-B course criteria.

In addition, many instructors invite students to develop multimodal or multimedia assignments. As long as the assignment you develop is appropriate to the discipline in which you are teaching, the possibilities are endless. Visit the section on Supporting Students to Present their Work for more information and examples of assignments from UW-Madison instructors that showcase skills in addition to writing (including mock trial assignments, in-class debates, and models for assessing in-class participation).

A wonderful resource to help you learn to design engaging and equitable in-class discussion is UW-Madison’s Discussion Project. You might consider enrolling in the semester before you teach your Comm-B course.

Also consider visiting the section on Multimodal Writing Assignments, which includes example assignments from UW-Madison instructors.

For additional assistance in developing multimodal assignments,  UW-Madison’s Design Lab is a terrific resource that offers in-person consultations to help you develop digital and multimodal assignments. UW-Madison’s Instructional Design Collaborative (for instructors in the College of L&S) and the Center for Teaching Learning and Mentoring are also terrific resources for designing media-based assignments and assessments.

Consider Your Role & Responsibilities as Lead of a Teaching Team

As the instructor for a Comm-B course, you may be the lead of one or more TAs. While this means the work is divided among the team, it can be hard to ensure that everyone is on the same page throughout the semester. Because of the power relationship between TAs and instructors, it can often be difficult for TAs to ask for the support they need.

Consider setting up regular (e.g., weekly) team meetings throughout the semester to navigate any issues that arise and share what’s going well. This is also a great chance for TAs to hear from one another about how their sections/labs are going and how they are navigating challenges.

The UW-Madison L&S Teaching & Learning Administration has compiled a resource for instructors working with TAs. The resource is broken down into considerations for before the semester, during the semester, and at the end of the semester.

This resource from the University of Minnesota likewise includes a chronological list of considerations for instructors working with TAs.

Note: Both the resources from UW-Madison L&S and the University of Minnesota bring up “grade norming.” This refers to a variety of practices meant to help everyone on a teaching team be on the same page about what kind of paper gets an A, AB, B, and so on. This can be a significant concern for large teaching teams teaching Comm-B courses. As the instructor and lead of the team, consider using previous students’ papers (exemplars/models) to illustrate what you find effective in student writing for a particular assignment, and what you find ineffective. Contact the Writing Across the Curriculum team to set up a collaborative, guided session to help make sure your team is on the same page about feedback and evaluation.

References

Melzer, Dan and John C. Bean. Engaging Ideas : The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=6632622.