IV. Low-Stakes, Informal Writing Activities & Assignments
A Step-by-Step Guide to Designing a Low-Stakes Writing Assignment
Below is a step-by-step guide to designing a low-stakes writing assignment, accompanied by the example of Professor Abby Letak’s Semester-Long Padlet Board assignment.
Interested in designing a low-stakes assignment for your course but not sure where to start or what to include? Contact the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) team to set up a one-to-one consultation.
Step 1: Determine your goals for the activity/assignment.
Following the principles of backward design, it’s important to determine what you want to achieve by implementing a particular low-stakes writing activity or assignment before actually diving into assignment design. This helps to ensure that the assignment serves a clear purpose that aligns with your overall class session or course-long goals.
Make sure to take into account your course context:
- What level is the class?
- Who are your students? (i.e., are they majors in the discipline or taking this to fulfill a general education requirement? Are they first years or seniors?)
- What skills have they already learned by the time they come to your course? (consider prerequisites)
- What skills do you want them to learn by the end of your course?
Answering the above questions will help you come up with a context-appropriate list of goals for the low-stakes assignment.
Example:
Professor Letak teaches an upper-level English elective course, English 505: Rhetoric of Wellness & Self-Care. The course has 30 students, most of whom are English majors or students who have taken English courses before. Because the course is an upper-level elective, it draws juniors and seniors.
Her goals for the assignment:
- To break down the dubious classroom/”real-life” divide and get students noticing things outside the classroom that pertain to the course topic
- To include multimodal elements
- To feel low-stakes to students (designed to complement other low- and high-stakes writing in the course)
- To provide the opportunity for students to see what their peers are noticing in their daily lives
Step 2: Explore the possibilities & look for inspiration.
When designing your own low-stakes activity or assignment, it can be immensely helpful to browse examples of what other instructors have implemented successfully.
If you haven’t already, consider browsing the examples of standard and context-tailored low-stakes assignments in this book:
- Examples of Standard Low-Stakes Writing Activities & Assignments
- Examples of Low-Stakes Writing in UW-Madison Courses
Also consider the various learning technologies at your disposal—tools such as TopHat and Canvas. How might you use one of these tools to facilitate your low-stakes activity or assignment? For example, TopHat might be helpful in large-enrollment courses; Canvas might be helpful if you want to provide students with feedback on their writing.
Example:
Given her goal of using multimodal elements, Professor Letak wanted to use some sort of learning technology or platform to facilitate her low-stakes assignment. To have students document what they were noticing in their daily lives that pertained to the course topic, she decided she wanted them taking photos.
The tricky thing was determining what platform might support large numbers of photos, and allow students to see their peers’ photos as well. Professor Letak had been to a few workshops that used Padlet* (a platform that melds discussion board capabilities with the visual elements of a Pinterest board), and decided to give it a try.
*Note: Padlet is not currently supported by UW-Madison. The free version allows a user to create and host up to 3 boards at a time (you can delete unused boards to free up space). There is a free corresponding mobile app.
Step 3: Draft the activity/assignment instructions.
Once you have an idea for an activity or assignment and have determined what platform (if any) to use, create a draft of the instructions you’d like to communicate to students. Make sure to include:
- The core task(s) of the assignment
- Necessary information about the technology being used (if applicable)
- How you’ll assess the assignment
- Whether/where/how students should submit the assignment (if applicable)
Example:
Here are the instructions for Professor Letak’s Semester-Long Padlet Board assignment, which she includes in her syllabus and on Canvas:
Semester-Long Padlet Board (Weekly Posts) – 10 pts (1 pt each post)
Padlet boards are a bit like a mix between Pinterest boards and Discussion boards. They host posts in a grid format, allowing you to post something yourself, comment on another person’s post, and/or “like” another person’s post. In this class, we will have a Padlet that will run the entire semester. Every week (due on Thursdays at the beginning of class, 9:30 am), you will post at least one photo, screenshot, image, or link to the class Padlet. When you post, make sure to include a brief description of what you’ve posted (in other words, don’t just post a photo or link with no description). Posts should fall into one of the following two categories:
- Something you encountered that relates to wellness and/or self-care
- Something you did that you consider related to wellness and/or self-care
When you post, make sure to browse what others in the class have posted that week. Posts are graded for completion. There are 12 weeks where Padlet posts are due: you only need to do 10 (in other words, you get to skip two weeks and still get full points).
Make sure you are signed in to Padlet when posting (you can make a free account with your wisc.edu email address). If you are not signed in, you will not get credit for your post. Note that Padlet has a free app, so you can post directly from your smartphone. Join our class Padlet at: [LINK]
Some items to note about Professor Letak’s assignment:
- The assignment is low-stakes because each post is only worth 1 point, and each is graded for completion
- The instructions explain how to use the Padlet technology
- The instructions explain how the assignment will be graded (for completion)
- The assignment builds in flexibility by allowing students to skip two weeks without penalty
- The assignment builds in student choice by allowing students to choose between one of two options for posting
Step 4: Determine how to communicate instructions & expectations to students transparently.
Once you have drafted the instructions for an assignment or activity, determine how you’ll communicate them to students. You may do this in the syllabus, on Canvas, on a separate assignment sheet, on a lecture slide, and/or verbally.
It is generally best practice to not only give instructions verbally, but to pair verbal instructions with, say, written ones on a lecture slide or a separate assignment sheet. For example, if you want to do a write-pair-share activity during lecture, consider having a slide the provides instructions (including the prompting question(s)) while also explaining verbally what you want students to do.
Low-stakes assignments and activities can be particularly successful when instructors communicate the “why” to students. Why do this write-pair-share? Why after this point in lecture? For example, you might explain to students that you are doing a write-pair-share to help prepare them for a subsequent class discussion.
Example:
Professor Letak includes the instructions for her Padlet Board assignment on her syllabus as well as on the Canvas site for her course. On the first day of class, she also verbally explains the expectations for posts to the board as well as the rationale behind the assignment. She particularly highlights that the assignment is designed to help students start noticing things in their daily lives that pertain to course content.
Step 5: Implement the activity/assignment.
After the planning phase, it’s time to run the activity/assignment in your course!
Example:
Below is a screenshot of one row of Professor Letak’s students’ posts in the Semester-Long Padlet Board. Names have been redacted for anonymity.
Step 6: Consider student feedback and revise the activity/assignment as needed.
Especially after implementing a low-stakes writing activity or assignment for the first time, it can be helpful to invite student feedback. There are many ways to gather feedback—for example: through an informal midterm survey, individually during office hours, or through an anonymous low-stakes activity like a minute paper that gets handed in to the instructor.
Student feedback can be particularly helpful in helping you as an instructor gauge whether you are meeting the goals you set out to accomplish when designing the assignment or activity.
Example:
Professor Letak used an anonymous midterm survey during class time to invite student feedback on her course. Between the midterm survey and the end-of-semester anonymous evaluations, she received multiple comments about the Padlet, including:
“I also really really enjoy the padlet posts because they help us apply class concepts to our actual lives, which further allows for personal engagement.”
“I also found the padlet posts to be helpful because it primed me to be applying what we had learned to what I was observing in the real world.”
“[Professor Letak] also implemented ways to make observations about wellness outside of class using a Padlet board, which was a super engaging and interesting way to seek out what we learn in class in the real world.”
“I scrolled down to the bottom of the padlet, and something that caught my eye is how much the posts grew in depth. In the beginning, posts were more about how everyone was practicing wellness, but as the class progressed, more people posted about the things they were seeing and how they connected to class.”
Based on the written and verbal feedback from students, Professor Letak determined the following benefits of the Padlet assignment for students and for herself as the instructor:
| Benefits to students: | Benefits to the instructor: |
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