First-Year Writing: Pedagogies, Methods, & Design

On these pages, faculty will find an assortment of resources designed to support their teaching of first-year writing.

Writing Program faculty promote a culture of innovation in writing across campus through the courses they design, the research they undertake, and their sustained engagement with students.

Active Learning in the First-Year Writing Classroom

Active Learning teaches students how to learn in collaboration with their peers, creating a community that facilitates learning.

Syllabus and Assignment Design

Backward design is a useful method for any professor in that it ensures that all assignments, readings, and activities will connect students with the outcomes that the professor deems essential to the course.

Teaching Writing as Process

Some students arrive in college with strategies for managing all these steps of the writing process; others have habits that have served them in high school but that limit them in college.

Integrating Reading and Writing

Using writing to enhance our students' reading experiences is perhaps the most common write-to-learn exercise.

Diagnosing and Responding to Student Writing

A good diagnostician of writing is, first and foremost, a sensitive and attentive reader, capable of reading a text in multiple and complex ways.

Conducting Writing Workshops

The writing workshop is the heart of the successful writing classroom. In these workshops, instructors use student papers (in part or in whole) as the basis of discussion and instruction.