Practical things to try

In our ‘Supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide’, we share multiple activities to do in and out of the classroom to promote student engagement with meaningful writing. We have selected three key activities here for you to attempt with your students, and we invite you to explore the guide to find many more to play with and adapt to your own context. The guide is free and open access, and you can download your own copy, and we hope you enjoy it because it’s illustrated by one of our design students and we think that brings it alive in very special ways.

The first activity that we are sharing with you is collage making, and collage can be a useful first step into academic writing. As a pre-writing activity it takes away the pressure to know the answer and write perfectly formed paragraphs. The production of a collage can reveal that answering a question means exploring ideas experimentally and playfully. The collage process makes visible how different themes or ideas are connected. It also allows students to see the bigger picture and make connections between the question, the learning outcomes, and the themes and topics covered in a class.

We have how to, so if you’re going to try collage making bring in magazines, scissors, glue, and paper. Put up a question and learning objectives. Ask students to reflect on the question and produce a collage that answers the question for them, and this can be individually, in pairs, or small groups. Remind students to review the relevant learning objectives making sure that they are also addressed in the collage. Invite students to share their collage explaining what it shows and why it answers the question. An alternative method is to get one group showing their collage to another and the other group says what they see in the picture and how they think it might answer the question. Once the dialogue has finished, ask students to write to their collage to see what essay ideas emerge, and then ask students at the end to reflect for themselves on how useful the collage process has been.

We do have some top tips. Top tips, make time for an activity like this so that students can really get lost in the flow of the task. And introduce collage making early on in a course so that students enjoy and accept them as a process. For example, in week one of our course we ask students to make a collage of who they are and they share them in pairs, moving around the room, sharing their collages. It’s a great getting to know you activity as well as a useful thinking tool.

A particularly wonderful example of using the collage making processes as the thinking processes, and as a pre-writing activity was at our university in the first year, the students are expected to write a reflective essay on their experiences so far. And this is really difficult, what’s an essay, what’s a reflective essay? Students are really puzzled, so we got them to make a collage of the first four weeks of the course. What surprised you, what was exactly as you expected, what have you learned, what do you think your next steps are? And they thought about that and made their collage. They shared those collages and then they wrote the most wonderful reflective essays feeling confident that they had something to say, and that they wanted to tell somebody else their experiences. This is what collage making can do when you help students use it experimentally and playfully.

Another activity that we do, it’s slightly different, and it’s using voices, and we call it “Record and Review”. And here, we get the students to debate the assessment task in pairs and record their discussion. So they discuss what they know and they don’t know about the assignment question. Afterwards, they play back the recording and discuss some more, taking the argument on, linking the different points they made to different weeks of the module and different notes they’ve made, different bits of recommended reading. This discussion carries on until the students think they’ve covered all the ground. Now they are ready to write, either in class or as homework.

A further activity that we’d like to share with you now is free writing, and free writing typically involves plunging into writing on a topic without any thought or planning. Sort of counterintuitive, but it’s also without any pressure to get it right. The idea is to set a time limit for this writing, and 10 minutes is good in class time, ask students to write on the topic or question without stopping for that amount of time. Free writing is really useful to capture those initial ideas and thoughts. Free writing freely on a topic helps students to surface their ideas and get a sense of where an argument may evolve, what they know, what they don’t know, and of course, free writing gets students actually writing. And if you do this regularly, you set up a writing habit. You also set up a read, write, read more, write more ethos rather than a one draft only approach.

Encouraging students to write in this exploratory way can be life changing, and many students have reported to us that it was the initial free writing activities that we did together that changed forever the way they thought about and approached writing. A top tip is to free write early in the module, and if you do have essay assignments, undertake a 10-minute free write on an assignment question, maybe in the very first week of the module. Ignore the gasps of horror and reassure the students that this is low stakes writing and that if they do it, they’ll make conscious what they already know before the module starts. Review the writing they produce in a lighthearted way, highlighting the ideas that emerge, and then discuss how this has set them up to make more sense of the module or the course as a whole. And moreover, it shows that they have not come in to your module course empty.

An elaboration on this free writing activity is to get the students to free write with two pieces of paper in front of them. So you put up a real assignment question and you ask them to write an answer to that question without stopping on one of the pieces of paper. And then on the other piece of paper, they write the reason they’ve stopped writing. So they will stop, so they might write, “I couldn’t think, I reread the question. I wanted to check my spelling, punctuation, and grammar.” At the end of your 10 minutes, you do an extended debrief. How did it feel to be asked to write like this? And you explore helpful and unhelpful feelings. Why did you stop? And what can you do about that? And mainly, it’s about giving yourself permission to write first and revise later. And we also ask the students to think how that free writing itself might have helped them approach writing their assignments differently and more successfully. We really encourage you to try this.