Designing Better Assignments: Faculty & Writing Consultants Collaborate in Workshop Series
In February Howe Writing Across the Curriculum partnered with Howe Writing Center consultants to present a workshop series on Assignment Design, focusing on clarity, audience, and accessibility. Led by faculty and student consultants, the sessions provided real-time feedback to help instructors create more effective and inclusive writing assignments.
Designing Better Assignments: Faculty & Writing Consultants Collaborate in Workshop Series
Howe Writing Across the Curriculum recently partnered with consultants in the Howe Writing Center to present a series of workshops on Assignment Design, featuring real-time feedback from our student consultants.
The first workshop, Designing and Scaffolding Writing Assignments, was led by Elizabeth Wardle and Emma Boddy, with support from HWC Consultants Ally, Katie, Charlotte, and Katie. The session focused on developing effective writing assignments by considering audience, genre, rhetorical context, and process.
Utilizing a structured framework by Anne Beaufort, faculty were asked to think about the challenges that students face as they try to meet the writing demands that their faculty ask of them. Not only do students have to understand the subject matter, but also the genre conventions of the “discourse communities” that they are attempting to engage with. As a consequence, faculty are encouraged to explicitly outline the genre conventions and clarify the audience in order to help students access their discourse community.
Consultants provided real-time feedback on assignments the faculty members brought in, advocating for clearer audience expectations and for helping students find their own voice while adhering to genre norms.
Their insights proved invaluable to the faculty in attendance. As Professor Todd Edwards noted, “You realize being a writer and helping someone with their writing, it's two different things. They [the consultants] give a different perspective than talking to a colleague in my department or using Chat GPT because they work in a very hands-on way with folks here from the Miami University writing community.
The second workshop in the series was led by Emma Boddy and Cam Cavaliere, with support from HWC Consultants Katie, Julia, Charlotte, and Katie.
The session focused on readability and accessibility, offering faculty members practical strategies for formatting assignments to improve clarity and tools for assessing accessibility. The goal was to help instructors create assignments that are not only clear in their expectations but also inclusive for all students.
One faculty participant perfectly summed up the emphasis of both workshops when they noted:
"When we write assignments, we should be writing them for how students will use them."
This workshop is part of Howe Center for Writing Excellence’s ongoing commitment to fostering effective teaching and writing practices at Miami University. Faculty interested in future workshops or one-on-one consultations can find more information through the Howe Writing Across The Curriculum website.
