Teaching Resources for Writing Instructors

One of the challenges of current staffing practices for college writing courses in my institutions is the sometimes last-minute assignment of multiple course preparations, additional sections, or new preparations that instructors can receive due to fluctuation in enrollments or inaccurate curricular planning. On this page, we offer direction to some teaching and learning sources that provide models of syllabi and assignments as well as heuristics and guidelines that can help instructors with the planning process that goes into teaching college writing. We also include some open-access materials that can be assigned in courses as student reading or that support course development.

Syllabi and Assignment Models or Collections of First-Year Writing Materials

Council on Basic Writing Resource Sharing Website
University of Georgia’s Syllabus System (browsable by course)
Campus Compact Syllabus Archives (select ‘writing’) for courses using engaged learning
Florida State Teachers’ Guide to the College Composition Program (including sample syllabi)
Printable Handouts for students on Writing Topics, Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing, Ohio University

Writing and Research Assignment Banks

CORA: Community of Online Research Assignments: An Open Access Resource for Faculty and Librarians: A searchable bank of assignments for developing and assessing information literacy.
Effective Research Assignments, Oregon State University Libraries (audience, exploration and topic selection, reading and evaluation)
Creating Successful Research Skills Assignments, Penn State Libraries
Alternative Research Assignments, San Diego State University Libraries
Alternative Assignments to Term Papers, Lawrence University
Writing Assignment Ideas for Specific Purposes (to learn, to communicate, Hobart and William Smith colleges
College Composition Instructor Guide, Three Rivers Community College, for first-year writing (including syllabus checklist and learning module ideas)
Effective Writing Assignments, Lehman College
Sample Writing Assignments for first and second-semester writing courses (narrative, summary, rhetorical analysis, synthesis, literary analysis) from Stephen Austin University
Sample Writing Assignments (literacy narrative, ethnography, new media, visual analysis), Georgia State University
Resources for Writing Teachers, George Mason University

Tutorials and Guidance for Writing Class Planning and Management

Colorado State’s Teaching Activities Bank: Discussion, Peer review, working with sources
Teaching College Composition: A Practical Guide for New Instructors (excerpts through Google books)
Dartmouth’s Principles for Syllabus Design
Sample Chapter from NCTE’s book “Sequencing Writing Projects in Any Composition Class.” In Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition
Designing Writing Assignments, by Traci Gardner (open-access e-book)
First Time Up: An Insider’s Guide for New Composition Teachers, Brock Dethier (open-access e-book)
Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing, (open-access e-book)
The Teaching Professor Special Report, “Keys to Designing Effective Writing and Research Assignments,” principles and guidelines for developing writing assignments.

Open Source Sites

These are open-access educational materials that can be useful for instructors who are assigned courses with little time to advance order traditional textbooks.