Below are some questions that you might want to consider as you prepare for your course.

1. What is your teaching philosophy?
2. What skills and attitudes do you want your students to take with them?
3. What will your policy toward late work be? It’s best to establish this very early in the semester.
4. Will you use peer-review workshopping in the class? Remember, many of your students will not have had the experience of reading peers’ work. Therefore, they may not know what is expected of them. Often, when students are asked to critique their peers’ writing, they think solely in terms of correcting sentence-level errors. If you choose to use peer-review, it may be best to offer a checklist (such as the one provided in “From Idea to Essay”) in order to guide students in the process. In addition, since students enter first-year composition classes with varying skills, you may have to make a decision about how to group students for workshop.
5. How much time are you willing to put into the course? Composition is one of the most time-intensive courses to teach.
6. Will you use in-class writing assignments (in addition to prewriting activities)? If so, how? Will you require students to turn them in?