From the Campus Writing Board
The Campus Writing Board is concerned that, as departments undertake the project of defining, or re-defining, their markers of research productivity, the increased instructional responsibility that comes with teaching Writing Intensive (WI) courses may get de-incentivized or assigned to teaching faculty hired with a higher teaching load. Because the labor that goes into the development and implementation of WI courses can often be largely invisible, we offer the following description of how WI courses function at MU and the work that WI instructors undertake when developing and teaching these courses.
As part of MU’s General Education and graduation requirements, students must successfully complete (C- or better) 2 WI courses. In other words, WI instruction serves a crucial need on this campus; without enough WI courses, students would not be able to meet this campus-wide requirement. Students in WI courses also learn additional transferable skills beyond the content that connect to the NACE Competencies of effective communication. As a part of this High Impact Practice, instructors face unique challenges due to the increased intellectual capacity and time required for WI courses, namely:
Additional Time Spent Providing Effective Feedback on Student Writing.
- WI Courses include a minimum of 20 pages of writing, of which at least 8 pages should have gone through substantive revision. Effective WI pedagogy requires this revision to be supported by iterative cycles of detailed and specific feedback, which takes substantial investment by the course instructor(s).
- Writing Intensive assignments highlight the complexity of course content, interpretation, and evaluation. These assignments require students to engage in various levels of critical thinking and are thus more difficult and time-consuming to grade.
Additional Workload for Supporting WI Teaching Assistants
- WI Instructors are the main responders of student writing, which includes overseeing the teaching assistants who may be assigned to the class. As the stipend for graduate students increases, the ability to hire graduate students decreases, therefore placing additional grading expectations on the WI instructor.
- More specifically, in large enrollment WI courses, which require a team of TAs to provide feedback on student writing, instructors invest additional time mentoring TAs in leading weekly meetings, discussing teaching strategies, calibrating grades across TAs and training them on the grading expectations.
Additional Administrative and Professional Development Workload
- Faculty are required to attend an intensive training offered by the Campus Writing Program within the first year of teaching a WI course.
- For a course to be designated Writing Intensive, the instructor must submit a course proposal before each semester the course is taught. The proposal is then reviewed by peers who serve on the Campus Writing Board.
To capture the additional time, effort, and expertise faculty invest in teaching WI courses, the Campus Writing Board suggests faculty highlight their WI teaching endeavors in their annual evaluation materials, self-reflection on teaching, and/or their promotion and tenure materials. Below are some sample templates for framing the conversation:
- “I take WI teaching seriously by ______ {include the extra labor that makes your WI courses effective but is beyond traditional teaching requirements}”
- “The {specific assignments/activities/etc} in my WI courses help to create effective communicators, which is a key university outcome.”
- “Students in my WI course appreciate {specific details of my course assignments/feedback/etc} because _______.”
Originally Approved by the CWB on 3.22.2017
Edited and Updated by the CWB on 12.2.2025