All of us—students, faculty, and staff alike—need multiple and varied resources to support us and our work. This Resources page describes some of those avenues of support for written, oral, and visual communication.
The best writing support resource at UVU is the Fugal Writing Center. It serves the entire UVU community.
The Writing Center provides writing pedagogy support. You can schedule an appointment with an undergrad writing tutor who will talk with you and provide immediate feedback on your assignments and rubrics. They can even anticipate where your students might struggle with or have questions about your writing assignments.
You can apply to work with Writing Fellows, a group of tutors who work specifically with your classes and your students.
Writing Center tutors can visit your class to introduce students to the Writing Center or to run a workshop on a focus you choose, tailored to your specific needs.
You can also use the Writing Center handouts to support your own teaching or to provide students with extra writing resources.
The Writing Center supports UVU students in their development as writers across their education. Meeting with peer tutors in the Writing Center provides students with an assessment-free space where conversations and learning occur. Students can utilize the Writing Center at any point in their writing, from beginning to end.
As their professor, you can encourage students to make Writing Center appointments throughout completion of assignments. You can also emphasize to students that they are expected to actively engage in their Writing Center sessions so they can learn and improve as much as possible.
Remember, though, that improving as a writer is a slow process. The more often students attend the Writing Center, the more they will improve. Your support of the Writing Center as a valuable resource can help students decide to try it out.
In coordination with the Faculty Director of the Writing Center and the Writing Enriched committee, OTL offers three, two-hour workshops to guide faculty toward more fully integrating writing into their existing courses. Each workshop is paired with an activity for you to do on your own, wherein you integrate some of the workshop concepts into your own course materials. Upon submission of these activities in Canvas, you will be paid a stipend and receive official Writing Enriched Certification.
Writing Pedagogy Workshop 1: Developing Effective Writing Assignments
This workshop focuses on ways to develop writing assignments that emphasize your purpose for the writing task and its desired outcomes, write assignment descriptions that clearly communicate your expectations to students, and develop a rubric that guides students toward effective completion of the writing task.
Writing Pedagogy Workshop 2: Teaching In-class Processes and Practices
This workshop covers ways of effectively teaching writing in the classroom. It covers different strategies you could teach through multiple stages of the writing process, making decisions about what instruction to prioritize, modeling, and effectively utilizing campus tutoring resources.
Writing Pedagogy Workshop 3: Responding to and Grading Student Writing
This workshop covers the differences between responding and grading as well as strategies for efficiently completing each task. It will cover ways of responding to students in the middle of their process without over commenting, the kinds of responses that would lead to more effective revision from students, and how to speed up grading by focusing only on rubric requirements.
You can register for Writing Pedagogy Workshops, and all other OTL workshops here
OTL provides support for redesigning courses. If you need to thoroughly rework a course to meet WE requirements, you can work with OTL’s team of instructional designers, faculty developers, and course specialists. You don’t have to do all of the work alone.
Technology can make the teaching of writing a bit easier, if we know how to use them. The OTL Lab is a resource available for you to explore and experiment with a variety of technologies that could be very useful in your WE courses, or your courses in general.
OTL’s Pathways are part of their Teaching Excellence Program. Within this program you can focus on developing particular aspects of your teaching by attending workshops and completing activities. Within some of these pathways you can earn certifications that can be an important piece of your RTP materials and be applied toward becoming a Higher Education Academy fellow.
The Writing Pedagogy Workshops are part of Pathway 7: Advanced Teaching Practice.
The following websites provide a variety of writing instruction resources that can assist you as you consider the approach you want to use in your own classes. On these sites you will find more detailed explanations of Writing in the Disciplines (the general approach WE has taken), guidance for assignment development or revision, types of low- and high-stakes writing assignments, and in-class writing activities. It is strongly recommended that you explore these sites as you work on your WE courses (both the application process and implementation).
WAC Clearinghouse Teaching Resources
Resources for Teachers from Montclair State University’s Center for Writing Excellence Digital Dashboard. This site is an aggregation of resources that address issues from "Conducting a Peer Review" to "Teaching with Technology" to "Writing in the Disciplines and Across the Curriculum."
Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University. This site is a broad teaching resource with information on designing and teaching courses, using technology, assessing teaching and learning, and more.
Teaching Resources from the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing. Each of the areas of focus--"Assigning and Managing Collaborative Writing Projects," "Cultivating Reflection and Metacognition," "Teaching Project-based Assignments," and much more--have Overview, Considerations, Strategies for the Classroom, and sources for further reading.
Writing Across the Curriculum from George Mason University. This "Teaching with Writing" page on George Mason University's Writing Across the Curriculum program's website provides a few documents and ideas for bringing writing into the disciplinary classroom.
Resources for Instructors from the Writing Across the Curriculum program at University of Wisconsin-Madison. While some of the information from this site is specific to their writing program, there are also many general resources and guidance that range from "Explaining to students why they should write in your course" to "Teaching revision" to "Preparing for Student-Teacher Conferences."
Resources on Teaching and Learning from The Teaching Center at Washington University in St. Louis. This site provides a broad range of teaching resources in addition to the "Writing Assignments and Feedback" page that would be especially useful for your WE course development.
Writing Advice from Writing at the University of Toronto. This resource is written for students as the audience, so it provides excellent information you can use in your own classes, whether they guide what you teach or are provided as extra resources for students who might need more guidance in a specific area.
Formal Writing Assignments and Informal Writing Assignments from The Writing Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The "Formal Writing Assignments" page is a resource you can use as you develop/revise your high-stakes writing assignments while the "Informal Writing Assignments" provide a few examples of low-stakes writing activities you could use in your classes.
