Elective 2 · Written Communication Instruction Certificate · C²TC
Writing Across the Curriculum Strategies
Low-stakes writing is a way of teaching course content. This elective lays out the framework behind Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and gives you a menu of short writing activities to add to a course you already teach, without redesigning it. Plan on 3 to 4 hours: about 2 on the activities and the builder, the rest reading.
What this elective asks you to do
- Design one low-stakes writing activity for a named moment in your course. (Activity 1)
- Classify the activity as writing to learn, writing to engage, or writing in the disciplines. (Activity 1, prompt 2)
- Anticipate the logistical and teaching obstacles the activity will meet. (Activity 2)
- Plan three to five WAC activities across a course, with a grading approach for each. (WAC integration plan)
- Name the evidence you will use to judge whether the activities support learning. (Activity 2, prompt 3, and the plan)
Three Categories of WAC Activity
WAC distinguishes three kinds of writing, each with its own purpose. Decide which one you are designing for first. That choice shapes how you assign the writing, how you respond to it, and whether you grade it.
Low-stakes writing that helps students work through and retain course content. The writer is the audience, and engagement counts for more than correctness. WTL is usually ungraded or graded on completion. Students use it to think on the page.
Writing that builds conversation among students: in-class responses, discussion posts, peer commentary. WTE is written for exchange. Students write to each other as well as to themselves and the instructor.
Formal writing in disciplinary genres: the research paper, the lab report, the case analysis, the policy brief. You evaluate WID against your field's standards, and it usually carries high stakes. Module 3 of this certificate covers it in depth. WTL and WTE prepare students to do it well.
Some writing needs no grade. Elbow argues that when students expect to be judged on correctness, they stop taking the risks exploratory writing depends on. Grade WTL on completion, or leave it ungraded. Students gain from the thinking they do while writing. Your rigor moves to the prompt you write and to the formal assignments that follow.
Faculty often worry that exit tickets, minute papers, and freewrites are too easy to fake with AI. Look at what the prompt asks for. An exit ticket that says "summarize tonight's reading in your own words" is easy to fake, because it asks for nothing that happened in your class. 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 hard to answer without having been in the room. Prompts that ask for the particular, the local, and the personal hold up against AI substitution. They do so by requiring students to be present.
Design a Low-Stakes WAC Activity
Choose one activity type from the menu and design it in full for a specific course and a specific point in the semester. Write the actual materials, complete enough that you or a colleague would be ready to use them in class.
Tie the activity to one moment in the course: a particular reading, discussion, or concept. A prompt written for that moment asks students to think about something specific. A prompt reused all semester tends to get generic answers.
Complete all five design elements.
What a complete response does
- Places the activity at a named moment in a named course.
- Gives the exact prompt students will see.
- States the time, setting, and grading approach.
- Ties the activity to a learning goal of the course.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the elective.
Contribute to the Repository
Share your design to help build a library of low-stakes writing prompts across disciplines. Prompts written for a field are the most useful to other faculty: 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
Think through how your Activity 1 design will play out in class, with attention to what is most likely to get in its way. Plan for those obstacles now, before they give you a reason to drop the activity mid-semester.
Most WAC activities that fail do so for logistical reasons. The activity takes longer than planned. Students do not take ungraded work seriously. The activity gets cut when class runs long. Name these problems in advance and plan around them.
What a complete response does
- Names two or three logistical obstacles and a response to each.
- Names one way the activity itself might fail its purpose.
- Names evidence of learning beyond student engagement.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the elective.
Contribute to the Repository
Implementation reflections help later participants plan for obstacles before they meet them in class.
Build a WAC Integration Plan
Draw on Activities 1 and 2 to write a semester-long plan for where and how you will add low-stakes writing to one of your courses. The plan is for your own use, and its format makes it easy to share with a department colleague or your CWSP liaison.
What a complete response does
- Lists three to five activities with timing, type, and grading approach for each.
- States how the activities count toward the course grade, and why.
- Names the changes you will look for in student work.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the elective.
Elective 2 Readings
- ·Stevenson, Colleen M. "Benefits of a Low-Stakes Write-to-Learn Assignment on Exam Performance." Teaching of Psychology 47.1 (2020): 45–49. In a child development course, students who completed five short write-to-learn assignments outperformed a comparison section on two of three exams.
- ·Leon, Adele. "Low-Stakes Writing as a High-Impact Education Practice in MBA Classes." A pilot study of low-stakes writing in two MBA courses, with interview data from faculty outside writing studies and survey data from students.
- ·Freitas, Kripa. "Low-Stakes Writing in an Active-Learning Classroom Needs Focus and Feedback to Be Effective." Journal of Economic Education 54.3 (2023): 243–255. An economics study whose title states its finding: low-stakes writing helped learning when prompts were focused and students received feedback.
- ·Elbow, Peter. "Writing for Learning, Not Just for Demonstrating Learning." Elbow's short statement of the distinction between low-stakes and high-stakes writing, written for faculty across disciplines.
- ·Cunningham, Eamon. "Teaching Invention: Leveraging the Power of Low-Stakes Writing." Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education 6.1 (2019). A teacher's account of using low-stakes writing to help students generate and develop ideas.
Where you will use this work
Four questions about this elective
Your answers here go to CWSP without your name or email, apart from your elective responses. CWSP reads them to revise the elective. They are optional, and they send when you submit.
Submit Elective 2
Submit after you complete both activities and preview your WAC integration plan. For questions about WAC in your department, contact your CWSP liaison.