Writing assignments serve many purposes. They can demonstrate what students have learned or give students practice with specific formats or concepts, among many other goals.  As you make decisions about how the assignments in any given course will function, consider as well how your assignment choices will affect you.  Course design starts with your course goals, and it also needs to account for sustainable workloads for you and your students.  

Your assignment choices need to balance constraints: how many classes you are teaching, how many students are in those classes, and the timing of feedback cycles. Programmatically, your course goals may exist within a specific course sequence, meaning that subsequent courses depend on students’ practicing particular things, or accreditation or professional standards may require particular content or tasks.  All these factors affect your choice of assignments. 

Once you’ve sorted out those contextual factors, return to the fundamentals: identify how your assignments direct students to practice skills that you expect them to learn and how they mark divisions in the semester. Considering what you want students to take away from your class, both in terms of hard and soft skills, helps you make choices about what you want to assign and how often.  

Findings from the National Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE) suggest that the nature of writing assignments (rather than their length) is correlated with student learning. Interactive, meaning-making, and clear assignments make a difference. Assignments that invite students to analyze, argue or otherwise create meaning in their work—in a process that involves feedback and interaction with others—promotes learning. Asking students to reflect on their work allows students to consider how and why the assignment helped them grow as writers and people. Hollis Glasser from CUNY ultimately concludes that because meaning is socially constructed, one way to make assignments meaningful is to “let the students create them and then reflect on the experience.” 

Communicating your assignments to your students supports your course and pedagogical goals. When assignments are explicit about their purpose and evaluation criteria, students understand why the assignment matters. For more information, check out our page on assignment communication.

Your assignment design can also set you up for easy responding and commenting. Starting assignments with your course goals in mind can help you focus your feedback to students.  

Helpful responses to assignments are formative (helping learners improve), timely (offered when it’s possible to learn and change), and descriptive (goal-referenced and directed). Most of this boils down to the fact that responses should be actionable. Actionable responses help students see what they did, what the goals are, and what to do next.  

Communicating the assignment’s purpose and providing students with clear rubrics and examples can help to create opportunities for feedback later in the assignment. By clarifying your expectations for students, you create clearer expectations and therefore can make your feedback more targeted. 

AI tools have changed the landscape of teaching and assignments.  

You may be interested in designing assignments that encourage students not to use genAI, or you may be interested in assignments that invite students to interact with or analyze genAI’s impact on their process.  Either way, your assignment’s goals are paramount. Clarifying your learning outcomes can help you create a learning environment that emphasizes students’ self-sufficiency and metacognition, which incentivizes students to work within your course guidelines. Scaffolding assignments lead to opportunities to talk with students about their work and let that work evolve. AI can produce text but cannot engage in metacognitive conversation around the text or reflect on the effort of the work, so assigning reflections can help your students assess their progress. Incorporating non-text formats into both your sources and your assignments can also prevent some AI use. Incorporating peer review or collaborative annotation on sites like  Perusall allows students to work together toward their final goals. 

In the end, the most sustainable tip is to keep your focus positive. Policing errors and wrongdoing doesn’t emphasize student growth, and you have experience teaching students about the ethics of your classroom. If you keep your focus on assignments that work toward educating or creating meaning, you can guide students through assignments without turning to cheating or AI. 

WID has more information about this topic on our Teaching and Writing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence page.