Travis Grandy is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Find him on Twitter @travisgrandy or at his website. I work with a lot of instructors who use ...

Professors sometimes bemoan their students' writing skills. But how good are professors at creating quality writing assignments? There's no recent, national study of how and what professors are asking ...

Sometimes it is difficult to know how to best approach writing about television, film or web media. Much of this process begins with understanding your assignment: this will have an impact on your ...

Effective course design begins with understanding the process of thinking and learning. These processes are commonly termed "metacognition." Metacognition includes a critical awareness of one’s ...

The students’ assignment: Write an op-ed about lead poisoning in Lewiston-Auburn. Or write a caption for a photo, or text about a campus tree. Write about how strange quantum theory is, or write a ...

Since the launch of the Common Core State Standards in 2010, I have placed a number of fairly standard writing assignments (DBQ’s, LEQ, and SAQ’s) before my students. But I didn’t stop there. I also ...

In the digital age of texting and online social networking, “writing” is no longer confined to the assignments students get in the classroom. Many teachers are still trying to define these new forms ...

AP and NWP teachers participating in the survey report giving students written assignments ranging from research papers to short responses, journaling, and creative writing. The type and frequency of ...

This is a story about some school district leaders who need some education — fast. In an effort to have students meet Common Core standards relating to critical thinking, a group of eighth grade ...

(This is the third post in a five-part series. You can see Part One here and Part Two here.) In Part Two, Matthew Johnson, Emily Phillips Galloway, Robert Jiménez, Holland White, Joy Hamm, and ...

In the pandemic, with classes online, teams working remotely, and conference rooms empty, managing group work (and writing with a group) is a challenge across industries. I’ve been taking on this ...