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 ...

I’ve always found that getting into the heads of your students is one of the best ways to learn what they bring with them into the classroom. In today’s stressful, standardized testing-based culture, ...

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 ...

When we give writing assignments in in-person courses, students have informal opportunities in class to ask clarifying questions about why they are completing the assignment, about our expectations, ...

When writing assignments aren’t carefully designed and integrated into a course, they can feel like they have just been added on, and students don’t have a clear sense of what they should learn from ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...