Guidelines for Effective Pedagogy and Supporting Students:

excerpts from the CCCC and CWPA Joint Statement in Response to the COVID19 Pandemic

Writing classes teach writing: Principally, writing classes foreground writing itself as a complex, distributed activity premised upon sociality and community formation, processes and materials, flexibility, and ethical communication. Writing classes may involve participants in purposeful interpersonal interactions (discussions and conversations), writing-related activities (peer review, studying features in model texts), and interpreting texts (making meaning individually or together with others); however, the activity of writing itself continues to be central to what a writing class sponsors

Encourage discussions of habits, experiences, attitudes, and dispositions regarding writing at intervals throughout the course of study.
Invite reflection through which writers identify and articulate a relationship between class-related activities, their development of a particular composition, and their development as writers, generally.
Invite students to discuss and reflect on writing excerpts and models as a form of inquiry and discovery.

Writers need readers: In online classes, students signal their participation through writing, and one common concern about online classes is that students may feel disengaged from the instructor and their classmates. Writing classes can cultivate engagement by ensuring that students have readers for their writing who then respond in a variety of ways.

Provide ample opportunities for students to read and respond to one another in a variety of informal and formal writing contexts at several stages of the writing process. Model how students can respond in meaningful ways.
Migrate effective practices of peer feedback on drafts into the online platform, devoting adequate time to the complex processes involved in giving and receiving feedback. Provide students with guidance on strategies for using annotation tools to read and respond to drafts. Link these practices with strategies for using feedback to improve student writing.
Provide regular feedback on student work in a timely manner. When possible, feedback could be delivered in audio or video formats as well as in writing if it meets the needs of the students and instructor.

Writing is a process: As a long-established first principle for writing instruction, process emphasizes the ways complex composing tasks play out in relation to time. A process-based approach to writing signals occasions for writers to write iteratively (repeating steps or redrafting), incrementally (breaking large tasks into smaller pieces), and socially (giving and receiving feedback and making decisions about which feedback to heed). The privileging of process provides appropriate and sufficient time for writing and invites writers to interact with others while showing and sharing their in-progress work.

1. Signal to writers estimates for time on task, both for longer projects (e.g., multi-week writing tasks) and for specific reading and writing activities (e.g., reading and annotating an article or developing a provisional draft).
2. Encourage writers to show their work, to pause to document moments when they made a choice; acknowledge the intersections of process with new (or changing) environments, platforms, and materials.
3. Establish occasions for reflection whereupon writers engage questions of self-awareness, messiness, decision and indecision, and the realization of self-set goals and/or course goals. Reflection serves broad goals of habit formation and attentiveness to development as recursive.

Writing classes are communities: The small, discussion- and workshop-based pedagogies characteristic of writing classes can and ought to be adapted for remote learning environments. We draw here from NCTE’s Guiding Principles for Understanding and Teaching Writing: “Writers grow in a culture/community of feedback” and the CCCC’s position statement on OWI: “Students’ motivation as learners often is improved by a sense of interpersonal connectedness to others within a course.” Any shift to new classroom formats should retain the small class sizes necessary to foster the frequent student–student and student–teacher interactions that are integral to writing instruction.

Because of the high levels of interaction between student and instructor, writing classrooms—especially first-year composition classrooms—are often the primary sites in which students develop a sense of belonging to extended academic communities. Therefore, every effort must be made to sustain and even increase the opportunities students have to interact with each other and their instructors, whether these classes are held in socially distanced classrooms or online.

Provide students with multiple ways to interact with each other for a variety of distinct, interrelated purposes: to build and sustain a classroom community; to co-construct knowledge; to exchange and test ideas; to give and receive feedback on each other’s work; and to hone their communication skills in digital, public spaces
Provide students with more than one way to interact with the instructor and to access and discuss feedback: email, phone, discussion boards, announcements, conferencing tools, etc. Use language that provides a clear timeframe within which the instructor is available or when students can expect responses to questions.
Provide students with more than one way to view or access critical content (web pages, uploaded documents, short videos with transcripts, etc.) and regularly solicit student feedback to ensure content and materials are accessible and usable.

Flexibility: Writers, teachers, and students all use flexibility in their roles. We draw here from the definition of flexibility found in the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing: “the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demand.” In periods of crisis, flexibility is even more important in order to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. We encourage habits of mind on the part of both students and instructors (and program decision-makers) that will make it possible for everyone learning in a virtual classroom to do their best work.

Provide students with multiple ways to interact with the instructor and to access and discuss feedback as instructors’ comfort level allows. This can range from email, phone calls, video conferencing tools (as wide a range as feasible within personal or institutional constraints), whole-class discussion boards, individual LMS conversation spaces (asynchronous or synchronous), etc.
Provide students with multiple ways to view or access critical content (web pages, uploaded documents, short videos), and include tutorials or explanations in order to help them learn which ways they are most proficient so they can request assistance in the areas they struggle. Instructors should ensure class activities can be accessed by students at a later time. In asynchronous online classes, also consider that students may be in a time zone different from the instructor; instructors should be aware of the need to adjust deadlines or course material availability in response to this.
Prioritize self-assessment models for students—that is, assessment strategies that allow students to make room for risk, disruptions, and the affordances of discoveries—such as cover letters, author’s notes, online journals in an LMS or Google Docs, reflective writing, or self-assessment discussion threads.

Fairness/ethical practices: Throughout the shift to responsive learning that must adjust to a range of circumstances, instructors and department leaders should consider the fairness and ethics of their decisions. Recognizing that fairness is not the same as equity and also recognizing there are no consequence-free decisions that can be made during this time, we encourage literacy educators and writing program administrators to use some of the following principles to help them navigate and work through the implications of particular decisions with colleagues:

Consider the range of material circumstances within which students will be accessing their learning and build in curriculum or assessment options that will account for varying situations. For example, policies that allow for dropping an assignment or task from evaluated work, a “late pass” that all students can use a specified number of times in the semester, or student choice in assignments and assignment topics that allows students to work from their strengths and with the materials at hand.
Consider extending due dates or expanding the eligibility for incompletes given the increased instability of and disruption to their schooling that students who are taking multiple courses remotely and managing many deadlines may be experiencing.
Provide multiple paths to meeting course-learning outcomes and flexible deadlines so that students who may have trouble accessing remote classes or the university’s servers are able to achieve course goals.