I’m preparing a presentation on Sequencing Assignments for our Annual Writing Retreat. I plan to chart the Trajectory of an Assignment,
which shows an assignment starting at the informal writing phase and moving through multiple drafts to self-critical awareness on the part of the student. I will, also, demonstrate Building an Assignment Sequence by showing five increasingly difficult First-Year Seminar paper assignments I have used with my Jane Austen & Film First-Year Seminar.

My best advice for Assignment Sequencing:

• Start at the back end: know your goals.
• Build forward, adding challenges and difficulties to achieve goals.
• Make pedagogy transparent by discussing with students the reasons behind the assignments.

This last is often overlooked, but I find when I share with students the deliberate reasons for my assignments, they become more deliberate in their decisions about their own papers.