As a former cross-country coach, I think about out-of-class work as being analogous to easy running. It's key to building a foundation over the long term, but to keep it going over the long term, you need to make it sustainable, adaptable, and (reasonably) enjoyable.
(In this analogy, in-class work is more like a specific workout: more structured, more targeted, and generally aiming for higher quality and intensity.)
As a community college writing teacher, I've learned that keeping out-of-class work low-stress and adaptable is key to making it actually helpful for my students. My expectation is that students will generally be making useful progress from week to week, and we check in on a more of less weekly basis to see how things are going and set goals for the week to come. But "useful progress" can take a lot of different forms, students largely set their own weekly goals, and there will be times when they're doing more in a given week and times when they're doing less.
In the context that I'm teaching in, I've found that students generally do well with this approach: they have space to take ownership of their own writing practice, just enough structure and support to provide guidance along the way, and slack in the system to help them recover if they go through a rough patch. It's not a perfect system, and there are definitely things I'm tinkering with, but it works pretty well.
Great conversation!
As a former cross-country coach, I think about out-of-class work as being analogous to easy running. It's key to building a foundation over the long term, but to keep it going over the long term, you need to make it sustainable, adaptable, and (reasonably) enjoyable.
(In this analogy, in-class work is more like a specific workout: more structured, more targeted, and generally aiming for higher quality and intensity.)
As a community college writing teacher, I've learned that keeping out-of-class work low-stress and adaptable is key to making it actually helpful for my students. My expectation is that students will generally be making useful progress from week to week, and we check in on a more of less weekly basis to see how things are going and set goals for the week to come. But "useful progress" can take a lot of different forms, students largely set their own weekly goals, and there will be times when they're doing more in a given week and times when they're doing less.
In the context that I'm teaching in, I've found that students generally do well with this approach: they have space to take ownership of their own writing practice, just enough structure and support to provide guidance along the way, and slack in the system to help them recover if they go through a rough patch. It's not a perfect system, and there are definitely things I'm tinkering with, but it works pretty well.