Designing Your WI Course

The best teaching and learning can happen when faculty are intentional in their course design and transparent in their expectations. In the UWP, we encourage a backward design model in which we first ask, “Where are we going? Where do we want students to end up?” and then build the course backwards through scaffolded assignments and activities that can help students get to that end result. It is also helpful when we design with transparency in mind. Let’s look at the University Writing Outcomes (UWOs) and explore some questions that we might consider in designing our course.  

The University Writing Outcomes (UWOs) can be divided into two sets of writing experiences: 1) those that demonstrates students can do particular discipline-appropriate practices with their writing, and 2) those that demonstrate students’ understandings of their practices. Application and understanding. To explore these outcomes in greater detail along with multiple examples, enroll in our self-paced Canvas workshop WAC: Exploring the University Writing Outcomes.

Application Outcomes (1, 2, and 4)

At the heart of the UWOs is the expectation that students are asking complex questions that are important to the discipline they are studying and are producing writing that meets disciplinary genre expectations for either academic or public writing. To that end, you might ask: 

• What sort of writing does my discipline value? Is that writing only focused on other academic readers, or do we value writing that is read by the broader public?  

• What sort of academic writing practices are essential for our majors?  

• How do we construct arguments in my discipline? How can demonstrate that practice to students so they can emulate that model?  

• What counts as effective examples (or cases or models) in my discipline? How do writers use them to advance their claims? 

• What sort of source materials (primary and/or secondary) should students be using in their writing? How do my writing projects ask them to use those materials effectively?  

• What sort of public writing might students be expected to do when they graduate? Do I want them to practice any of those genres or skills in my course? For example, in Public Health, graduates will often be expected to “translate” research and complex health data into resources for the general public, so some teachers at ECU have asked students to produce research-based reports by midterm that they then revise into brochures, billboards, and social media posts during the second half of the term to get experiences modifying their language while being true to the research.  

Understanding Outcomes (3 and 5)

We also know from experience that for writers to be able to write effectively in new and emerging contexts, they need to understand the choices they are making as writers (metacognition). Knowing why they do something and what impact that thing will have on readers is a key to being able to make informed choices not just when they are assigned a task but in the future when they take on writing tasks that are less clearly defined for them by a teacher. Outcomes 3 and 5 focus on helping students discuss their drafting and revision choices and explain why they made them. To that end, you might ask: 

• How can I scaffold drafting and revision with this project? Does the project have sections that can be worked on and revised individually before bringing them all together? If so, how might I structure due dates and use in-class or online peer review to support that incremental development?  

• Where do I engage students in peer review and where can instructor/TA review be more helpful to encourage that revision practice? How can I target peer review so that students can concentrate on a key outcome for a piece of writing rather than on the whole essay or project? For example, in an academic introduction, the writer might be expected to demonstrate exigency for the project; could a peer review focused just on the introduction section target that exigency by having peers ask if the project demonstrates its value early on and what that value is to the field or to the world?  

• How can I help students capture and reflect on their choices? When you give teacher feedback on drafts, you could ask students to email you with their responses, noting what revisions they plan to make based on your feedback. Or students could keep a process log that they submit with their final draft where they reflect along the way on drafting decisions and where they struggled. Some teachers ask student to create a Project Memo to include with their final drafts where they write about their drafting process, the feedback they received from students, the writing center, and the instructor, and how they revised based on that feedback. They might also include idea for what they would do with more time or what questions they still have about the project, which gives you as a teacher a way to focus your feedback.  

Key to designing an effective WI course is thinking through the various steps you want to model for students so that they can learn effective practices for drafting and revising writing rather than waiting until the last minute to get things done. Anyone who is presented with a complex task can put it off until they think they better understanding; students are no different. Effective writers know that you just have to get started. As WI teachers, one of the gifts we can give students is modeling this sort of structure and process so they have better tools for tackling current and future writing projects.