At this point, I am fairly excited about the variety I can establish in my course. Identifying in bits and pieces with each of this week’s professors, I also subscribe to the belief that writing and learning go hand in hand, and a course such as this relies heavily on that understanding. Students will learn a great deal about their writing being objective, logical, and substantiated as they write and revise pieces suited to given situations, audiences, and purposes. In designing this course, I agree with Wardle and Downs that design is outcome based. I first must decide what I want my students to produce. What will they accomplish? What will this course make of them? At the same time, I am also considering Yancey’s point that different times comprise different writers. When I consider what my students will become through my instruction and their dedication, I need to identify what their futures need them to be. When Yancey states that teachers often replicate instruction tailored to their own experiences, I completely understand. I remember my own experience in E110 in 1990. I easily recall that I did not know how to write, how to develop my stance, how to prove a thesis, but I learned quickly in that class. I replicate that instruction in every course I teach so that my students know the importance of the driving statement and elaboration. I even think of the outcome in terms of a lesson I learned in seventh grade: We are not allowed to express an opinion unless we can support it. Right there is one of the most important outcomes: Students must be capable of forming and supporting an opinion. I plan to carry on those lessons while at the same time fostering the composition growth of a very different group of communicators. In my undergraduate experience, I had little need for email; no one wrote text messages; social media did not exist; and a lucky few paid $20 to video conference for five minutes at Kinkos. Today’s students do all of these countless times per day, and each activity involves composition, some organized gathering of thoughts and messages. My intended outcome is that my students clearly state and support their positions across multiple communicative platforms. Yes, they will employ inquiry driven research and compose critical analysis in response to readings. They will compose human ecology proposals and solutions. They will keep a portfolio (our classroom management system even supports electronic portfolios). And just as important as the many more pieces they will create is digital composition, especially with an understanding of developing a responsible, intelligent electronic persona through which each student will publish his or her work. Right now, a host of assignments and publication platforms is swimming around in my mind. I am quite eager to pen these ideas into a sensible syllabus.
E688: Seminar in Teaching Composition 
Mary,
I love this sentence: “My intended outcome is that my students clearly state and support their positions across multiple communicative platforms.” The first part (“clearly state and support”) seems very traditional, the second part (“across multiple platforms”) very innovative, and your phrasing fuses them together.
I think that idea could be what knits together all the various activities and projects you are currently planning. I’d love to see you include a sentence like the one above in a course overview or plan that you address to students (like the course plan on this site), and then explain to them how this idea will get played out and developed in the various project they will complete over the year.
I’m eager to work on this with you next week!
Joe
First, this response made me think even more about Wardle and Down’s statement about making a writing class outcome-based. As I have been planning my own E110 syllabus, it has been easy to get sidetracked in details and policy, yet I continue to return to what a friend of a colleague from the 2014 E668 class told me, “I just felt that having one major focus per MP would help me focus my instruction.” Also, from reading First Year Composition, it is apparent that each major assignment has a clear goal and has been purposely placed.
Second, you mentioned Yancey’s statement about teachers attempting to replicate instruction tailored to their own experiences. Yancey’s “Composition-in-Three-Genres Project” really took me back to my freshman composition class at Bloomsburg University. When assigned a multi-genre project at the end of the course, I used an abandoned mine town called Centralia about thirty minutes from campus as the focus of my project. It was such a pleasant experience for me not only researching, but hiking the empty streets and fields, and ultimately, sitting in the kitchen of the 80-something year-old mayor who told me all about the culture of the twenty remaining residents. Not only at the time, but over the past seventeen years, I have told so many people about this experience. Ultimately, I want students to feel so engrossed in their writing projects that they will not only talk about it with friends and family, but the experience will live on inside them forever.
To relate, the intended outcomes and enjoyable student learning experiences are intertwined and must be considered together. With purposeful goals and our own positive writing experiences in mind, we will have two crucial tools to create writing projects that will leave a lasting impression on our students.
I too believe that an outcome focused writing classroom supports the idea that writing creates responses. Writing cannot exist in a vacuum; it needs an audience. Developing a portfolio with “human ecology platforms” reinforces the purpose of writing: to recognize one’s realities and then change that which does not best serve. Writing allows us these changes because through clear, supported ideas we can find others with like minds: to be able to share ideas across “multiple communicative platforms” beyond the essay is opening students up to the Neo-Renaissance on its way. Just as the printing press help to create and spread new ideas in 1485, so these students will learn how to share their ideas on platforms that will circle the globe. Understanding how to focus one’s thoughts and provide the support behind them through research can turn their “outcomes” into lasers of thought. I am excited to see the final curriculum you will be creating. I, at age 56, am still struggling with the new technologies: the electric typewriter in our house was the “new” technology in 1970s and then I got a “self-correcting” typewriter. I thought I had found nirvana. I did not even see a computer until I went to the U of D’s computer lab and typed my papers on their Apples. Seeing what your students will produce across “multiple platforms” will be inspiring and world-changing.