Teaching

How I teach writing

My courses, laid out so other teachers can see how they work and borrow what's useful.

Revised November 11, 2026

Process: Directed drafting15 rounds of revision

Every course I teach makes those three moves.

Level 0 · From the rooms

CodeStarts at

Pick up a marker to draw

Do you use my board in your classes or talks? Save an image of an interesting session (Save image, on the tray) and email it to me, and I can put it on the projector. It goes up without names: not yours, and not any written on the board.

Presentations

The talks I give to students, faculty, and other organizations. Each reads as a page and turns into slides for the projector.

I started putting my presentation materials on this website to keep better track of them and make it easier as I move from classroom to classroom, campus to campus. I create and add new presentations as needed.

All presentations →

What people at my talks have sent me: From the rooms →

Assignments, by stage

Every course I teach includes a personal research project, a multimodal or digital project, and a more substantial research project built on active, boots-on-the-ground methods: APA or MLA citations, academic databases, and primary data like interviews and gathered evidence.

I'm always studying writing pedagogy and making new assignments or adjusting older ones. I keep the assignment sheets as up to date on this website as possible, and I track changes with the process cards at the end of each one.

Start with yourself

Autoethnography
The Personal Essay: A "Try"
Field Notes and workplace writing exercises

Move across modes

Comparing Notes
Digital Genre Analysis
Digital Writer Self-Portrait
Digital Presentation of a Professional Culture

Bring in outside voices

Some courses close with"Your Writing Journey" portfolio

How I've combined them

Search all 7 assignments →

Discussion boards

The prompts I post to my online courses' discussion boards, week by week, each with a few sample posts by made-up students. The samples stop after a few lines, so they show what a post does without handing my students an answer.

I keep adding prompts as I write them, so the board doubles as an archive. The rules for posting are pinned at the top, as a sheet with a PDF.

Open the board, 25 threads →

How my courses work

I teach first-year composition, professional writing, and business, in person and online, in 15-week semesters and 8-week sessions. The schools and course numbers change. The shape of the courses mostly doesn't. Students start by studying their own writing, carry what they find into other modes, and end by bringing in outside voices.

The arc

Personal
Students study themselves. Low stakes for being right, high stakes for self-awareness.
Multimodal
Students work across the five modes and see that form follows function.
Research
Outside voices and academic discourse come in.

Every course I teach makes those three moves. They differ in what counts as data at the start, how personal the multimodal project stays, and what counts as research at the end.

What holds it together 6 beliefs

Writing is recursive. Each project reuses what students made in the last one. Many pieces of writing start in one form and end up in another.
Students are researchers of their own practice. Their reading and writing habits are real data, transcribed and coded the way Sondra Perl studied her subjects.
Multimodality is composition. The five modes are core content, and major projects can be video, audio, web, or visual.
Revision is open-ended. As long as first drafts come in on time, students can revise as much as they like until the final portfolio.
Workshop comes from creative writing. Most Fridays are workshop days, and groups choose their method: the Iowa model, Peter Elbow's teacherless writing class, or Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process.
Literacy is personal. Disagreement is welcome when it's respectful, because these topics hit close to home.

Essays on teaching 4 essays

Process: Directed drafting

Claude drafted this section from my Master Teaching Document, which it compiled from my syllabi and assignment sheets, and has rebuilt the page as I've asked. It opens on a whiteboard, spread out like the homepage's desk, whose agenda is the page's doors: one goes up whenever I add a page, and the board grows to fit them. Everything else on the board erases. Its tray, sorted so a new button has a place, holds markers, a Type button for writing with a mouse, games, and Save image, which keeps every side of a board so people can send me theirs. Those play on the projector, a screen that comes down over the board before a talk and plays reels from around the site, in a shuffled order since I tried it on a real projector. The assignments were first laid out in pathways, one per course, but I don't keep one sequence per course, so they go by stage now, with the combinations I've used under them, described by length and format. I wrote the paragraphs on why my presentations live here and how I keep revising the assignments, and had Claude put everything under the board in one narrow column, give the discussion boards a section, show the newest presentations with art and dates of their own, and draw one face across the arc's three cards. Revised through 15 rounds. More on how I use AI.