Develop two ways to incorporate low stakes writing in your classroom. Be specific with how you would integrate writing with the concepts you want your students to master. Use the examples from your reading as a basis:
#1
I plan to start having the students in my ARH 132 class (intro to Western art, part II) read the Arts page of the New York Times on a weekly basis. I will then, once a week, have them write a bit about the art that was discussed. This assignment would be at the beginning of class. In this case, I'm not so interested in specific concepts to be mastered, but in getting them to read about art and to think about it beyond the classroom.
#2
I like the idea of breaking up the class--re energizing it midway--by having a short writing exercise and then breaking the students into small groups to discuss their answers. I can certainly see the benefit in this for both writing and learning. I'm not sure exactly what I would ask them, because I would like to maintain a certain spontaneity in using this type of exercise. Certainly I would use it to reinforce specific points that I thought were important with respect to that lecture.
For these types of assignments I will use a check, check plus, check minus grading system, which I already use for homework assignments.
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If you set such writing assignments up on Blackboard and have students do them out of class, all the recording of whether they have done the work is carried out by Bb. Another option, again for out of class work, is to have them blog these short assignments. You set up RSS feeds for each student at the beginning of term; then when you go to read their posts, they will all be in one central location, in your reader.
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