"I think that the writing coach led them to do a more conscientious job from the start." 
-WIP Faculty commentary Fall 1999

Depending upon the course, you may be called upon to help students interpret and get started on assignments, to provide models and other input (handouts, for instance) on disciplinary formats and conventions, to explain the goals of various parts of a staged assignments, to coach, respond to, and evaluate student writing in various stages of the process in conferences and in written feedback, to explain feedback strategies and the role of grammar and punctuation in a WIP course, and to assist with grading and recording credit for student writing. The WIP Faculty Guide covers all of these issues, and you should review it along with the syllabus for the course you are supporting to see the ways in which your course uses writing intensive elements. Below we focus on guidelines that are most important for WIP teaching assistants. 

1) Know course goals and fine points of the syllabus as they engage writing intensive elements. This means considering how the course you are supporting interprets "writing intensive," what you add to the menu of a particular course, your responsibilities in the stages of particular assignments, and the logistics and level of feedback provided. WIP TAs report that their workload is often uneven: they often have a great deal to do in a short time, or they feel under-utilized. Taking a long view of the course will help you manage your workload and help you become more aware of ways to become involved in students' writing process. 

2) Identify your role and duties for the course. Make sure your understanding of your role and responsibilities is in sync with faculty expectations and course needs (as well as WIP principles). Meet with your faculty member as early as possible to work out these issues. What kind of authority will you have? For what things? When will they need to be done? What will students be told about your role ? Will you need to come to class every day ? When and where will you be available to faculty and students? How will you learn faculty criteria for writing effectiveness and overall grading? Will students be invited or required to see you? What late work policies are spelled out? Who monitors them? How much grading will you be responsible for? What is the plan for resolving conflicts over grades and other issues? 

3) Make sure students know how they are to use your expertise. Faculty will more than likely specify this, but tell students what you are there to do for them if it needs clarifying. 

4) Be able to explain the rationale behind the writing intensive focus of the course in a way that makes writing integral to course learning rather than separates it into a "writing component." Anticipate student questions, for instance, about what "writing intensive" means and why the course is writing intensive. Like the idea of a "calculus intensive" course, which the Mathematics department offers, the idea of a "writing intensive" course can freeze some students unless we explain what it means, mainly that students get more opportunities for guidance and revision and more feedback: they get more intense instruction in the writing process, rather than having to crank out a n unreasonable amount of writing. 

Why our insistence on WIP theory: One of the reasons that your training as a WIP TA puts so much emphasis on writing in the disciplines theory and research is that students need solid explanations of the philosophy behind writing intensive courses (why, for instance, they are writing in a lecture class), and hey need to know how the work they are doing will benefit them. Having these benefits handy w ill help students to perceive writing differently, which is a step towards improving their writing skills. Psychological research says that "perceptions do mediate changes" (Thomas Hilger et al 78-79) in thought and behavior, a point that calls attention to the link between persuasion, pedagogy, and performance of any kind. How students think about writing and the writing process greatly influences their ability to do writing tasks competently. Students also need to know why their writing is being assigned and responded to as it is, since WIP strategies depart from traditional ways of thinking about and using writing in college classes. The guide for WIP students briefs them on these issues. 

5) Know goals, models, and grading criteria for specific writing assignments and be prepared to communicate these to students as you help them in early stages of the writing process, such as planning. Planning, including planning-in-writing as a means of developing an assignment, is an often overlooked part of the writing process. 

Teaching the writing process means helping students interpret and plan responses to assignments based on objectives. This may mean talking over a strategy, a thesis, or a list of main points, rather than responding to chunks of "writing" in first-draft form. It may also mean creating format guides that help students to generate and organize the content an assignment calls for. It may mean elaborating the criteria for A, B, C, D, or F more explicitly than is customary for some instructors. Along with specific thinking processes that Judith Langer states are part of "knowing" in a discipline, criteria for grading are often part of an instructor's tacit knowledge. A writing intensive course everyone involved to be more clear about goals, models, and standards, and it uses writing as a means of clarifying these issues. One of the most important things you will do is to help students identify goals for stages of the writing process and to help them plan their writing tasks on the process model. 

6) Along with teaching the importance of preparation and planning, emphasize that teaching the writing process means teaching the process of revision. Revision -- which intersects with planning and monitoring of progress toward different goals in different stages - takes many forms in a WIP course. Teaching revision may mean giving focused feedback on multiple drafts. (The idea of revising two or three drafts to improve their potential grade is a big step for many students who habitually turn in first drafts as final papers.) Teaching revision may mean helping a student make changes in his or her thinking, working thesis, or point list before drafting. It may mean abstracting a working thesis and topic sentences from a draft and drafting anew from them. It may entail changes at the global and at the sentence-level in a draft; however, teaching writing as a process of global revision is the focus of WIP instruction at its most fruitful. A broad concept of revision as the main process of effective writing -- and an emphasis on global as opposed to local revision -- is vital to writing intensive pedagogy. 

One more point: Since each WIP course uses revision differently, you'll need to know how revision and the logistics of revising will work in your class, for instance, how many times can a paper be revised? What are the time limits on revisions? How quickly must you provide feedback in order for faculty to add for their responses and still get the papers back to students quickly? Will you provide all of feedback for some assignments or only portions of them? Will students need to see you to pick up their papers? Will students be given point credit for revising and otherwise participating in the process? 

7) For a principled approach to feedback, whether it focuses on revisions or not, remember that the golden rule of responding to student writing in WIP courses is, first, to consider the type of activity or assignment that you are dealing with (its goals) and, related to this, to consider where the work that you are seeing is in the writing process. For instance, you will respond differently, if at all, to a writing to learn activity than you would to an assignments that ask students to present learning more formally. You will respond differently to a first draft than you would to a final one. In general, you will think first, planning your response, and mark later and less than you expect to, and you will not unilaterally "correct "student work. These are thematic feedback strategies addressed in ENGL 6910. The feedback guidelines we provide for faculty summarize the WIP approach and emphasize the need to explain feedback strategies to students. Tell them why, for instance, you focus on a thesis or organizing principles in a draft and why sentence-level issues are not the focus of your advice. Along with increased confidence that they have the resources to handle writing tasks, which we believe results from greater facility with the writing process, students perceive feedback and chances to revise as most important benefits that a writing intensive course brings to their writing skills. 

8) Adopt a process approach to grading and grading feedback. In guidelines for WIP faculty, we ask them to allow you to be involved in students' writing process rather than only serving as graders of finished work. Your credibility will be enhanced if you have input into the work you evaluate, and students will have a chance to benefit from advice while it can still do them some good on a particular assignment. Again, some WIP TAs do a great deal of grading; others do none, while still others make grading suggestions for faculty. Whatever the level of TA involvement in grading, we ask faculty to make grading standards as they relate to writing available to TAs and clear to students. Doing this makes the task of providing feedback easier. As a WIP TA you may find that you have to elaborate and communicate these standards to students. 

9) Knowing that you will teach the writing process, identify your main teaching opportunities in the class. Determine your main points of contact with students, and make the most of them. Maybe students will be required to see you to pick up papers: if so, you can focus on written comments and an efficient conference style. Maybe written comments will be your only opportunity to give feedback to students. Maybe you will respond via email. Maybe you will have workshopping opportunities with a few students or time to talk to the whole class. Maybe you will communicate to the whole class through informative handouts or listserv postings. Maybe you'll use a combination of all of these teaching opportunities. Most often, contact with students for WIP TAs takes the form of written feedback on drafts and mini-conferences, though some WIP courses are taking advantage of the tremendous advantages that email offers for being involved in students' writing process.. Whatever form your contact with students takes, focus on doing it with distinction and making your communication count. While based on shared WIP principles, strategies for doing this are highly individual and claim an important part of our attention in ENGL 6910. 

10) When scouting for teaching opportunities, learn to teach peer feedback. Using peer feedback requires an up front investment in time and training, since students need to be trained in how to look at each other's work. Once they are, however, they can make your job easier (by helping to provide more opportunities and resources for feedback), while at the same time participating more energetically in their own learning, and building metacognitive skills. Faculty usually have to build peer review in to a course (about three opportunities are needed to "train" students), but in place of office hours or in addition to them, WIP TAs may offer peer feedback sessions. A peer-review session can take place in a WIP class or outside it, and it's a useful activity for a WIP TA to introduce and lead. As with any activity you want to add to a course, or any changes you think are beneficial, make sure to coordinate with faculty on this first. 

11) Take initiative to help faculty create a constructive writing intensive environment. You'll probably find plenty of opportunities to do this by seeing students and giving feedback, but if you don't think that students are fully aware of or taking advantage of WIP elements, talk over a few ideas for addressing this with your faculty member. 

12) Remember that being responsive to a class and its needs may mean that you and faculty may make adjustments in the way that assignments are staged and responded to. The faculty member you are supporting knows that good teaching is responsive to the climate of the class. WIP faculty know to exercise flexibility when it seems best to revise some class elements. The feedback you provide to them on how students are doing can help them assess class progress. 

13) If essay exams are part of the course, help facilitate a process approach to essay exams and other exams that require writing. According to the Bedford, writing intensive instruction in the disciplines improves student performance on essay exams (5). (You might tell students this. Why do you think it does?) 

14) Know steps to take to help minimize and resolve misunderstandings and conflicts. This means knowing the late work policy, the policy for missed conferences, the rules for submitting revisions or making up work, and recognizing the heightened emotional climate that goes with responding to and evaluating an individual's writing. Students are often emotionally attached to their writing as an uncomfortable revelation of who they are and an open admission of their deficiencies. They may view feedback as subjective criticism of them, rather than expert feedback from a reader unless we teach them how and why we respond as we do. 

15) Post and be diligent about keeping office hours and appointments with students. Students might not show, but the one time you are not available will be the one time they come by for help. Misperceptions about your commitment may unfairly arise, and once they do, they are just as likely to be compounded, affecting your credibility, as they are to be cleared up. 

16) Respond to student email promptly and thoughtfully. Email is a key pedagogical tool and an important means of professional communication. Let students know how email will be used in class communication, for instance, whether it will be part of the feedback strategy. Most important, let students know your schedule for responding to email and what role you want email to play in your contact with them. 

17) Try to respond more promptly to student work than students expect you to. Unfortunately, students are often used to a long lag time between doing an assignment and getting it back, much less getting advice on how to do it better. Take special care to coordinate with faculty when you must return work that you have read -- to the them first -- before it is returned to students. 

18) Look for ways to apply writing intensive theory and research in the course(s) you support. Look for ways you can provide outstanding support for WIP faculty. 

19) Look for opportunities to learn from the faculty member you are supporting. You’ll get a better grip on these issues over time as it becomes more clear just how much you learn by teaching in the WIP. Agreed, an appointment as a WIP TA probably demands a higher level of sophistication about writing and a sharper sense of academic professionalism than is expected of many in-coming TAs. However, the standards the WIP expects and the principles it develops, as you’ll see, match benchmarks of effective teaching and writing productivity. 

20) Keep your eye on WIP benefits of focused, regular attention to writing and learning with colleagues from other fields. Task groups at a recent UGA teaching retreat reported that such contact with others about common interests was one thing faculty would like more of. Supportive, collegial training in how to become a more effective teacher and a more productive scholar are important benefits of participating in the WI program at UGA. Look for ways to connect WIP ideas to your own work. 

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