Elective 2 · Written Communication Instruction Certificate · C²TC
Writing Across the Curriculum Strategies
Low-stakes writing is not a supplement to teaching — it is a form of teaching. This elective gives you the conceptual framework for WAC and a menu of practical, evidence-based strategies you can implement immediately without restructuring your course.
Three Categories of WAC Activity
Writing Across the Curriculum encompasses three distinct kinds of writing, each serving different learning purposes. Understanding which category you are designing for determines how you should assign, respond to, and grade student writing.
Low-stakes writing that helps students process, consolidate, and engage with course content. The audience is the writer; correctness is secondary to engagement. WTL is typically ungraded or graded on completion. Its purpose is cognitive — to help students think by writing, not to demonstrate mastery to an evaluator.
Writing that builds community and conversation — in-class responses, discussion posts, peer commentary. WTE is oriented toward exchange rather than learning-in-isolation. It is social and dialogic; students are writing for each other, not just for themselves or the instructor.
Formal writing in disciplinary genres — the research paper, the lab report, the case analysis, the policy brief. WID is evaluated against disciplinary standards and is typically high-stakes. It is the culminating genre for Module 3 of this certificate; WTL and WTE are the scaffolding that prepares students to do it well.
Not all writing must be graded. WTL is most effective when students do not feel evaluated on correctness — the evaluative pressure suppresses exactly the exploratory, risk-taking thinking WTL is designed to produce. Grade WTL on completion, or not at all. The pedagogical return comes from the thinking, not the product. This is not a reduction in rigor — it is a redistribution of where rigor belongs.
WAC's low-stakes writing activities — exit tickets, minute papers, freewrites — are often framed as "too easy to fake with AI." The question is worth inverting: an exit ticket that asks "summarize tonight's reading in your own words" is fakeable because it does not require actual engagement with the class's specific intellectual moment. An exit ticket that asks "what was the most surprising claim in today's discussion, and what prior assumption does it challenge for you?" is much harder to complete without having been in the room. WAC activity design that specifies the particular, the situated, and the personal is inherently more resistant to AI substitution — not because it polices for AI, but because it requires genuine presence.
Design a Low-Stakes WAC Activity
Select one activity type from the menu above and design it in full for a specific course and moment in your curriculum. The design should be specific enough that you or a colleague could implement it directly — not a description of what you would do, but the actual materials.
The most effective WAC activities are tied to a specific moment in the course — a particular reading, discussion, or concept — rather than generic across the semester. Specificity is what makes them intellectually substantive.
Complete all five design elements.
Contribute to the Repository
Share your WAC activity design to build a cross-disciplinary library of low-stakes writing prompts. Discipline-specific prompts are particularly valuable — a post-lab reflection from chemistry, a pre-class reading response from political science, an exit ticket from a music history course.
WAC Implementation Reflection
This activity asks you to think through the implementation of your Activity 1 design — specifically, the obstacles that are most likely to prevent it from working as designed. The goal is not to talk yourself out of it but to anticipate and address those obstacles before they become reasons to abandon the activity mid-semester.
The most common WAC implementation failures are not pedagogical but logistical: the activity takes longer than planned, students do not take ungraded work seriously, the activity gets cut when class runs long. Naming these in advance is how you protect against them.
Contribute to the Repository
Implementation reflections are among the most valuable contributions to the repository — they help future participants anticipate obstacles before they encounter them.
Build a WAC Integration Plan
Use your work from Activities 1 and 2 to design a WAC integration plan for one of your courses — a semester-long plan for where and how you will incorporate low-stakes writing. This is a planning document for your own use, formatted for sharing with a department colleague or CWSP liaison.
Elective 2 Readings
- ·Stevenson, D. "Benefits of a Low-Stakes Write-to-Learn Assignment on Exam Performance." 2019. Empirical evidence that WTL assignments improve exam performance — the most accessible evidence-base for making the case to skeptical colleagues.
- ·Leon, Kenny. "Low-Stakes Writing as a High-Impact Educational Practice." CWSP resource. Survey of the research literature on low-stakes writing — covers WTL, WTE, and the conditions under which low-stakes writing most reliably improves learning outcomes.
- ·CWSP Resource: Low-Stakes Writing in an Active-Learning Classroom. Practical guidance for implementing low-stakes writing in active-learning contexts — addresses the logistics of timing, grouping, and response that most instructors face when adding WAC activities.
- ·CWSP Resource: Writing for Learning, Not Just Demonstrating. The theoretical framework for WAC — why writing to learn works, and how to design activities that leverage writing as a cognitive tool rather than a demonstration vehicle.
- ·CWSP Resource: Leveraging the Power of Low-Stakes Writing. Practical strategies for WAC across disciplines — organized by course type, class size, and learning goal.
Submit Elective 2
Submit once you have completed both activities and previewed your WAC integration plan. For questions about implementing WAC in your department, contact your CWSP liaison.