How to Make an Assignment with Clear Expectations
We’ve all been there. You created what you thought was a great assignment. Your creative juices were flowing, you actively anticipated potential pitfalls, and your rubric was totally reasonable. But in the hands of your students, it was an utter disaster. No one did what you wanted, and even your best student’s score is shockingly low.
When you learned how to make an assignment, it’s unlikely anyone told you what a humbling experience it can be. It’s one of our favorite parts of the job, and we love the feeling when all the pieces come together. But we rarely get to enjoy the illusion that we’ve discovered how to make an assignment perfectly: teenagers are tough critics, and whether they’re directly telling you what they think of your masterpiece or just not getting it, you’ll get plenty of immediate feedback.
What we’ve come to realize over the years is that when we think about how to make an assignment, one of the key steps is telling our students exactly what we want from them. Every time we assume they’ll know what we’re talking about or produce the quality of response we’re looking for, someone proves us wrong, and so we’ve learned to be explicit.
While we like to joke that no one would ever accuse us of using too few words, we do believe there’s value in starting every assignment with clear expectations. We’ve seen the quality of our students’ work improve, and in Steph’s work as a tutor since leaving the classroom, she’s seen the frustration students feel when they don’t know exactly what to do.
Today we’re sharing a few of the things we’ve learned about how to make an assignment with clear expectations for students.
How to Make an Assignment with Detailed Directions
When it comes to making our expectations clear, our primary strategy is to provide lots of directions. We’ll explain this in more detail below, but our rationale here is that when we give students the information and tools they need to produce a quality response, they are better able (and more likely) to meet our expectations. Whether it’s in the overall directions at the beginning of the assignment or within the questions themselves, we do our best to make sure these six things are included in every assignment:
1. The purpose of the assignment
The second students think you’ve given them busy work, they’re out. We like to make it clear for students that there is a purpose for each assignment we give them, and providing them with a purpose also helps them to understand how this fits in with the larger unit we’re working on, whether it’s a guided reading assignment or prewriting for an essay.
2. A length requirement
We like to tell our students how much they need to write on a given assignment. Students (well, let’s be honest—humans) tend to put in the minimum amount of effort, especially on tasks that don’t align with their individual priorities, so we like to establish that minimum for students rather than allowing them to write single word responses. Most students will meet that minimum requirement.
3. The expected format
On a similar note, we like to tell our students exactly how we want them to respond. If a single word answer is okay, we tell them that. If we want complete sentences, we tell them. If we want them to write a 5C paragraph, we tell them (and probably provide sentence-by-sentence directions). If we expect them to use a provided sentence frame . . . you guessed it, we tell them.
Pro Tip: If you want a multi-sentence response, make sure you provide enough space for students to write one! When you (or, let’s call them out here, textbook publishers) only provide a teeny-tiny space for an answer or a single line for students to write on, it sends students mixed messages. Our students struggle to decipher clear messages, so let’s not send mixed ones!
4. Any textual evidence requirements
Most students will not provide textual evidence if they don’t have to, so if we want to see a quotation in their response, we make that clear. On the flip side, if it’s an assignment where we’re asking for a lot of textual evidence, we also tell them when they don’t have to provide textual evidence.
We don’t stop with just telling them whether that textual evidence has to be there or not. We specify whether that evidence needs to be integrated into their writing, and when our students are learning to use textual evidence correctly, we may even specify the method of integration we want them to use. This is not only a helpful practice opportunity in between writing assignments, but it helps students establish good habits they can take with them into other classes.
5. Definitions and clarifying phrases
If we think there’s a key word that students won’t know or might misinterpret, we’ll go ahead and provide a definition for them. Unless the purpose of the assignment is to get students engaged with a dictionary themselves (like when we have our AP students paraphrase poetry), we’d rather keep them focused on the skill we’re actually trying to practice.
We’ll also rephrase questions (“In other words”) or important phrases as needed.
6. Where in the text to look
If we want to make sure students are referring to a specific place in the text, we tell them where to look, whether it’s a chapter number, a page number, a paragraph number, a line number, a section . . . you get the idea.
There’s definitely a downside to this that you’ll want to consider: if you’re creating a guided reading assignment, for example, including specific locations may mean that students hunt for answers rather than reading. But sometimes that’s okay, and if it’s a close reading assignment after students have already done an initial read, directing them to the right place is incredibly helpful.
Helping Students Navigate Your Directions
If, like us, you tend toward the wordy, you’ll want to make it easy for your students to navigate your directions so they don’t get overwhelmed and skip over them.
Steph had a tutoring session just the other day with a student who shut down because their teacher had made her directions so overwhelming that the student didn’t know where to start.
Here are our three go-to strategies:
1. Use typography (bolding, highlight, bullets, fonts, etc.).
We love a good font, but it’s not just for aesthetic purposes. Putting your section headers in different fonts makes them stand out to students and breaks up the text. Bolding and highlighting key points draws students’ attention to them. Using bullet points instead of long paragraphs keeps students from getting overwhelmed.
2. Use graphic organizers to make the directions less overwhelming.
When we scaffold essays by providing sentence-by-sentence directions for students, we like to do it in a table with room for students to write their own sentences. While it means our documents are many pages, it’s easier for students to follow the directions without getting lost in the text. (And as more of us go digital, there’s no need to be conservative with our document length to save paper!)
3. Break the assignment into smaller pieces.
It took us far too long to realize this, but our students do much better when we give them many small assignments instead of one massive one. Especially when you’re providing detailed directions, dole it out one section at a time, and students will likely produce better work.
4. Provide models and examples.
We don’t always do this because we’ve found that students sometimes try too hard to mimic the exemplar rather than coming up with their own ideas, but it can be really helpful to students to provide a sample response, whether you’re demonstrating what good commentary looks like or how to integrate a quotation correctly.
5. Create a screencast to guide students through the assignment.
During the pandemic, we became big believers in screencasts.
In the past, we guided our standard-level sophomores through assignments, reading aloud, clarifying directions, and then giving them time to respond while walking around and answering questions. Obviously, this approach didn’t work as well during the pandemic, so we started recording screencasts where we essentially did the same thing, asking students to pause the recording each time they needed to complete a task.
This was a game changer for us, and we kept doing it even when we returned to the classroom. Students loved being able to work at their own pace and access the directions whenever they needed them. And creating screencasts instead of guiding students from the front of the room frees us up to work one-on-one with students who need extra attention.
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What to Do When an Assignment Falls Flat
Even though we try to be proactive about writing detailed directions that set clear expectations for students, we’re still learning how to make an assignment (it’s a lifelong skill, much to our chagrin), and you’ll still need to make revisions over time.
When student performance on an assignment doesn’t turn out the way we’d hoped, here are some of the things we ask ourselves:
When Reviewing the Questions
If all students got the question completely wrong, was the question phrased clearly? Do students need a hint to point them to the right place in the text? Is there a foundational skill students are missing that made the question too difficult? (This last one is a big one if you’re in a district with pacing guides, and you assume students already learned that skill. We all know how things can fall through the cracks despite our best efforts!)
If you’re using a detailed answer key or scoring rubric, did your question actually lead students to produce the answer you wanted? When we went back and revised some of our AP reading check quizzes, we realized students weren’t producing the information we were looking for because we weren’t being clear enough about what we were asking them to do. We (mistakenly) assumed that suggesting a 3–5 sentence response and providing ample writing space would elicit detailed responses, but because our scoring guide was looking for them to hit specific points, we needed to ask them outright to include those details.
Were you asking for too much or for something too specific?
When Reviewing the Rubric
When you compare your rubric to the directions you gave students, can you see a clear connection? Have you specifically told them to do the things you’re evaluating them on?
Does the way you set up your rubric (especially the point values) align with your gut instinct when looking at a project? If not, how can you adjust your point values to make sure “C” work gets a “C” and “A” work gets an “A”?
The Benefits of Making an Assignment with Clear Expectations
Is creating student assignments with clear expectations more work? Definitely. But in our experience, it’s worth it to learn how to make an assignment that fits the bill.
You’ll be happier with the results. When you ask for what you want, your students are much more likely to give it to you, and when they don’t, you’ll have a clearer understanding of where they need more support or reteaching.
Your scores will be more indicative of what your students are actually capable of doing and understanding. Often, students’ scores make it seem like they don’t understand the material when the reality is that they just haven’t put in much effort (or at least not the level of effort you expected). Setting minimum requirements helps to make the gap between mastery and effort smaller.
You’ll feel more confident in the fairness of your assignments and scoring.
Other people can help your students be successful because they know what to do even if they weren’t in class. Whether it’s tutors, parents, or other teachers, providing clear directions allows others to help your students, and who among us can’t use another set of hands?
Your students will learn the routine, which will allow you to scale back your directions over time (if you’re concerned that providing this level of detail is too much scaffolding).
Nothing ruins the joy of feeling like you’ve finally figured out how to make an assignment that sings more than a stack of work to grade that falls far below your expectations. But a lot of times, we’re not aware that we haven’t communicated our expectations clearly, even when we’ve been doing this for a long time. Even today, we went back and forth about the answer key for a question we’d written, trying to anticipate whether or not students would produce the response we wanted. Setting clear expectations is just as valuable when you consider how to make an assignment as it is when writing your syllabus or setting your classroom rules.
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