Strategies for Designing Low-Stakes Writing Activities

Why you should use informal writing activities

1. To build a more accessible and inclusive learning environment

Students enrolled in your undergraduate and graduate courses come from diverse academic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, and with diverse physical and neurocognitive abilities. In order to create a learning environment that is inclusive of and accessible to all your students, you must strive to present them with multiple means of engaging with course content.

(This “multiple means” principle is central to a predominant framework for inclusive teaching, Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Don’t worry if UDL sounds like a heavy lift for this semester – it is! You are not expected to implement UDL in every facet of your teaching practice right now; rather, it will be a career-long enterprise.)

Asking your students to engage in informal writing activities – in addition to class discussion, one-to-one conferences (i.e. “office hours”), formal (i.e. graded) assignments, and more – can help you to provide those multiple means of engagement.

For example, consider students who experience anxiety in the classroom, who feel ambivalent about the relevance of an intro-level class for their career plans, or for whom English is their second or third language, (can you think of other identities to consider?)… Being asked to jump into an oral discussion about a topic that is new and possibly confusing can present barriers to these students. Given the opportunity to collect their thoughts and make connections to their personal experiences in, say, a freewriting activity, though, these students might more easily engage with the topic at hand and face less of a barrier to real-time discussion about it.

2. To support and deepen student learning

If there’s one thing to take away from the many points of consensus among experts in writing studies, literacy studies, education psychology and other learning sciences, one might argue it’s this: that writing is a cognitive as well as a communicative activity. Put simply, writing and thinking are linked in powerful ways. The (re)formulation of ideas into language and language into ideas helps us to discover and explore complex concepts as well as to share what we have found.

Incorporating informal writing activities in your teaching throughout the semester can contribute significantly to your students’ comprehension, application, and retention of course concepts. It’s important to note, however, that such writing activities most effectively support student learning when their purpose is clearly articulated. Without a clear statement about why they are being asked to do the activity, students might view it as mere “busy-work” or become anxious that they’re not “doing it right.” Clarify that informal writing activities are meant (for example) to help guide their reading, to identify points of clarity or confusion, or to prepare them for a formal writing assignment.

Purposeful integration of informal writing into your Intro Lit sections can also help you to acknowledge and address common assumptions about learning that many students (and instructors!) carry into the classroom. For instance, keeping a weekly reading journal or providing feedback on a classmate’s draft assignment can help students recognize that academic knowledge is dialogic (not static or purely informational). Likewise, reflective and exploratory writing can help students move toward adopting a “growth” mindset (rather than a “fixed” mindset) about their critical thinking and close reading skills.

How you can use informal writing activities

There are many kinds of writing activities and ways you might incorporate them into your regular class meetings. Rather than attempt to create an exhaustive list for you to choose from, though, we want to encourage you to think in terms of purpose and lesson design when planning informal writing activities for your students. Consider these examples as a place to start:

You may have some go-to writing activities that you’re excited to use in your graduate or undergraduate courses. That’s great! If you haven’t already, consider what purpose that that activity might serve in an upcoming class meeting, and where it might fit within your lesson design for that meeting.

Mitigate cognitive overload by establishing consistency

There are certainly enough activities to choose from that you could use a different one every week, but this might have the opposite effect on student learning than you’re hoping for. Especially where activities ask students to engage in a new platform or submit/share their writing through a new procedure, too much variability can redirect students’ cognitive energy to learning the platform and procedure rather than learning the concepts or strategies you’ve connected to the activity.

Throughout the semester, try building a small repertoire of informal writing activities to draw from, noting the specific platforms and procedures you used for each one. This will allow you to use a variety of writing activities while still establishing some consistency and familiarity for your students.