39 Using writing to reflect on learning

Incorporating writing into courses helps enhance students’ written communication skills and contributes to their overall learning. It can benefit learning in all disciplines, even if your course does not focus on written communication and competencies. Having writing assignments as a regular part of the learning experience stimulates students to structure their thoughts, process complex ideas and theories in a course, and reflect on their learning progress. Writing assignments also provide students with a sense of ownership over new information. Here are evidence-based strategies and some considerations for promoting writing pedagogy in your course.

1. Nurture writing as a consistent part of students’ in-class learning. One-minute papers, entry and exit tickets, and the muddiest point activity described in previous sections can make writing a regular part of the classroom experience. We also recommend introducing your students to write-pair-share, a version of think-pair-share, where students start formulating their thoughts through writing before sharing them with their peers.
2. Engage your students in freewriting activities to strengthen their writing skills and allow them to articulate and structure their ideas. This can help direct students’ participation in a large group discussion. You can ask students to briefly brainstorm a question and write down as many responses as they can, write their initial thoughts to a prompt (check the YxN activity below), reflect on the most important thing they have learned in class, or annotate a specific passage from a reading or a textbook to agree or disagree with its central argument. Invite students to reflect on their writing process for a particular assignment and across the semester’s arc.
3. Make frequent writing assignments a part of students’ homework to help them summarize what they have learned, prepare for the next class, and develop their writing through practice. Some instructors create an ICON discussion forum where students post these summaries or propose question sets for the next class and explain why these questions are significant. Another possibility is to ask students to share their written responses on ICON to practice their critical thinking skills. Here are potential prompts:
   • Locate a “hotspot” in the text (a passage that seems important, striking, or puzzling) and write a brief comment on what makes it interesting or suggestive (Walk, 2008).
   • What are the advantages and disadvantages of accepting the author’s perspective or claim, and why?
   • How does this research article connect to other course materials?
   • What explicit and implicit assumptions are expressed in the text, and how do they inform its main idea?
4. Use writing activities to achieve deep and durable learning in your courses. Design writing assignments with specific questions and provide clear learning objectives. When designing a writing activity, communicate its purpose with your students (for example, using the transparent assignment design framework) and share the most effective strategies for approaching writing assignments. Here are some ideas:
   • A quiz or test to demonstrate learned knowledge.
   • A term paper to practice research abilities—analysis, synthesis, evaluation.
   • A short essay or literature review to evaluate an idea.
   • A one-minute paper or write-pair-share to guide a discussion or help students feel more comfortable speaking aloud.
   • Expository writing and freewriting to increase metacognitive awareness.
   • Series of drafts to hone communication skills.
   • A personal essay, reflection, or learning portfolio to help express feelings and opinions and reflect on what has been learned, how, and why.
5. Discuss secondary sources through the writing lens to introduce your students to main strategies for discipline-based writing, help them develop critical thinking skills, and increase their written communication awareness. Explicitly point out and describe the author’s writing methods and rhetorical strategies, noting how they state a central argument, provide an example, test a hypothesis, perform analysis, critique a statement, or cite resources. Enable students to approach the discipline’s discourse with critical reflection. For example, when assigning a reading, ask students to respond to not only content-related but also writing-related questions:
   • How does the author frame the central research question?
   • What are the main elements of this text, and how do they function?
   • What are the form and function of each source citation? (Walk, 2008)
6. For larger writing assignments (e.g., research papers, essays), engage your students in peer-review to help them develop their reading, writing, and teamwork skills. Explain that it is a crucial aspect of the writing process and will help them revise their writing before the final submission. Providing thoughtful feedback is a skill, so students will need coaching to learn how to formulate and communicate feedback. They will also need to learn how to respond to feedback on their projects through peer review. Consider sharing how you use peer review in your own scholarly work. After sharing the purpose of this activity, explain the positionality of a peer-reviewer who is not an evaluator but an observer and thought-partner. We encourage you to provide concrete rubrics for such activities and periodically check in with each pair or small group. A useful tool for ensuring equitable facilitation of the peer review process for large classes is an instructional technology tool Peerceptiv, while the ICON peer review feature can be used for smaller classes.

Consider diversifying prompts for peer review. You could ask students to address critical strengths and areas for improvement; write a summary of their peer’s argument, highlighting areas that are particularly clear or less clear; and write a curiosity response by marking their moments of curiosity, parts of the text that they would like to learn more about. Some instructors encourage students to highlight areas for which they want to receive feedback.

💡 Please reflect: