Note: This post is part of a series on “Teaching First Year Composition.”

I started working on a stretch model redesign of our composition program in 2010. The Chancellor’s Office wanted to eliminate so-called “remedial” courses, but the “Early Start” plan they were introducing actually created more mandated “remediation.” Stretch courses were a way of offering more time for struggling writers to improve their skills while still offering them a university-level course. In the cover letter introducing the plan I wrote:

The attached plan for redesigning the EFL composition program as a “stretch” program draws on program designs at CSU Channel Islands and CSU San Bernardino. The original concept for the stretch design came from Greg Glau at Arizona State University. In a stretch program, the assignments and outcomes for the one-term freshman composition course are rigorously defined, and then this curriculum is “stretched” into multi-term implementations that offer more scaffolding and more time to meet the needs of students who are not outstanding writers when they are admitted. The “stretched” versions of the course meet the same outcomes as the one-term version. There are no “remedial” courses in this design.

The plan had 15 learning outcomes, which I quickly came to believe were too many. I made an attempt to combine them in 2013, but this only caused confusion, and the long list remained. Originally, when we were on quarters, we had one-quarter, two-quarter, and three-quarter versions of the course. In the three-quarter version, the outcomes fell neatly into three sets: fluency, intertextuality, and interdisciplinarity. In other words, the first quarter was about developing basic writing skills, the second about researching, quoting, paraphrasing, and documenting sources, and the third about exploring other genres, including the discourse of the student’s major. Somewhere along the way the outcomes were reorganized so that they no longer fell neatly into these sets, but these concepts remain active in the list.

In the remainder of this post, I will discuss the “fluency” outcomes. In subsequent posts, I will discuss the other sets of outcomes. Here are what I consider the fluency outcomes, with annotations to help instructors think about how to implement them:

When the list of outcomes was first introduced to the instructors, many of them were unused to working with learning outcomes. Some believed that every assignment had to address every outcome! Others felt that the outcomes were an imposition on their academic freedom. Eventually, however, the instructors saw the list as a way of bringing some uniformity and consistency to the program.

Outcomes A-F in the list above are the nuts and bolts of most writing programs. The early part of a single semester course or the first semester of a two-semester stretch course should probably focus on these things. The most difficult aspects here are probably rhetorical analysis and argumentation. For more insight about rhetorical analysis, you might look at these additional posts on this blog: “Three Ways to Persuade” and “Writing a Rhetorical Analysis.” For more on argumentation, “Teaching Toulmin Argumentation” and a post on Aristotle’s concept of the enthymeme.

Here is a .pdf of the complete list of annotated outcomes.