Why incorporate low-stakes writing into your teaching?
Incorporating low-stakes writing activities in your teaching throughout the semester can contribute significantly to your students’ comprehension, application, and retention of course concepts. It can also foster inclusion, accessibility, and student wellbeing.
1. Low-stakes writing can support and deepen student learning by:
Helping students view writing and thinking as linked. 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.
Showing students that writing is a process. Students often think about writing as a product, not process. They assume they should be able to write an effective paper in one sitting, or the night before a deadline. By incorporating low-stakes activities and assignments into a course, instructors can show students that writing isn’t just about the final product—as discussed above, it’s powerfully linked to thinking. Low-stakes activities and assignments can provide students with space to brainstorm, explore, revise, and reflect. Reflective and exploratory writing can help students move toward adopting a “growth” mindset (rather than a “fixed” mindset) about their critical thinking and analytical skills.
2. Low-stakes writing can build a more accessible and inclusive learning environment by:
Offering multiple means of engaging with course material. 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.
The concept of “multiple means of engagement” comes from a predominant framework for inclusive teaching, Universal Design for Learning (UDL). By asking your students to engage in low-stakes writing activities (in addition to class discussion, lecture, tests/quizzes, and more “high-stakes” assignments), you can help provide them with multiple meanings of engaging with your course content.
Providing a cognitive “warm-up” for other activities and assignments. Low-stakes writing can be valuable in its own right, or as part of a scaffolded sequence of activities and assignments.
For example, low-stakes writing can be used to build up to small- or large-group discussion. Being asked to jump into discussion about a topic that is new and possibly confusing can present barriers for students (especially students who experience anxiety in the classroom and students for whom English is their second or third language, for example). By giving students the opportunity to collect their thoughts and make connections to their own experiences in, say, a freewriting activity before discussion, instructors can help students feel more confident engaging with the topic at hand.
3. Low-stakes writing can support student wellbeing by:
Allowing students to play around and make mistakes. In the high-stakes college environment, students rarely have opportunities to make mistakes without consequences. When an assignment is worth a significant portion of their grade, students may shy away from taking creative or intellectual risks. Indeed, studies show that students’ obsession with grades negatively affects their wellbeing (Romanowski, 2004). By having little to no impact on overall course grades, low-stakes writing gives students space to experiment and explore intellectually without fear for their GPA.
It is important, though, that students not perceive low-stakes writing activities and assignments as just “busywork.” If an assignment or activity does not count toward a large portion of their grade, they may wonder why they’re doing it in the first place. Instructors should strive to be transparent about the purpose of low-stakes writing. For example, you might clarify that an activity is meant to help guide their reading, to identify points of clarity or confusion, or to prepare them for a high-stakes writing assignment.
Fostering connections with peers and instructors. Low-stakes writing activities can also facilitate interaction in a student’s writing process, either with other students or with you as their instructor. For example, you might consider asking students to brainstorm ideas for an upcoming research paper and then share that brainstorm with a partner, with specific questions that need to be answered. Or you might ask students to end each online class with one question that they still have about the course content, which you might then answer at the beginning of the following class or via email.
4. Low-stakes writing can help students process difficult topics & hot moments in the classroom by:
Giving students space to process & reflect on their feelings and reactions. After reading about a difficult topic or after a “hot moment” in class, students can benefit from low-stakes writing as a way to think through how they’re feeling or reacting. For example, if there is a tense moment in the classroom, you might have everyone pause and write on their thoughts/feelings about the current conversation. This can also give you as the instructor time to process the situation and gather yourself before proceeding. Or when assigning a reading that covers difficult or sensitive topics, you might also assign a brief individual reflection to give students space to process before class and to get a sense of how students are responding to the material.
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