 And so, in previous iterations of the course, assessment usually involved some quizzing, some discussion around readings that we were doing, those sorts of things. But what I found, I felt a little dissatisfied with how the students were perhaps engaging with the material because I realized they weren't writing as much as I myself as a working professional was expecting myself to work, which is writing all the time. So I changed my assessment strategy to remove quizzes and to focus more on writing-based activities. And what I wanted to do is I know that writing can be very difficult and create anxiety for people of all levels, whether they're professionals or beginning students. And so what I wanted to do is tear these writing exercises into different sort of stakes. So the game changer for this course became creating low-stakes writing prompts. And these low-stakes writing prompts might be something that in the classroom, for example, we would stop the lecture and give them something to write about that had to do with the topic we were just talking about, or they could create something fictional based on one of the craft topics that I was talking about. So for example, if I was talking about dialogue and how characters might speak to one another, then I might pause that lecture and offer the students an opportunity to write some dialogue and sort of apply what they had learned to date and see how that was going. Finally, what these prompts did is I built them from week to week so that they were helping the students generate material, build confidence, and build their major assignments as the course went on. So in weeks one to four before their first assignment was due on week five, the writing material, the experiments that they were doing each week were sort of taking them step by step higher towards creating the fully developed assignment for week five. Now this became, you know, when we were in a blended classroom, this worked really well because they could see each other face to face and then they would see the work that they did online. When we moved to the online environments in the last four weeks of the semester, it really fostered this sort of this visibility that otherwise wouldn't have been there so they could see each other's creative efforts in this online environment. And it was really powerful in sort of having students support one another, see what the work they did for one another, and also just sort of applaud and admire the efforts that they had done. Pedagogically what worked really well with this is that again, it put students at ease to know that these were not being graded, they were very low stakes as I've mentioned, and it allowed them opportunities to experiment, to take risks with material, to do really kind of cool things. And in fact a lot of times I would encourage them just like try something very different. What we found overall over the course itself was that the writing actually got a lot stronger and more confident than I had seen in doing 16 different iterations of this course over the last eight years. It wasn't enough that they just submitted those and uploaded them in Canvas, but my TAs and myself, we would go in each week and we would read all 260 of them, and we would comment on up to 10% of the assignments and offer a few sentences of feedback, not critical feedback, but supportive, or we really liked how you interpreted this assignment. And what we tried to do is rotate through the students throughout the semester so that the students always heard from a different TA, they always heard from myself, and during the entire semester they at least had feedback on several of their assignment. So another benefit that we noticed from these low stakes writing prompts were that when we offered feedback on to the prompts themselves is that often the feedback that we would provide would be in the form of a question. Like really loved what you were doing with this character in this scene. Where do you see this going in terms of your major assignment? So our goal this way was to connect the low stakes writing prompts to the bigger goal later on down the road without raising any anxiety because students do feel, we all feel that anxiety when we have to write something larger. And so what was really lovely is that the students would often reply back in the grade book, of course, because you can do that when you're commenting back and forth, and they would respond to that. And then it created this dialogue between myself and the student or my TA and the student in which we could sort of have this ongoing discussion over the week if the students chose to respond in terms of how they were working on their assignment. And we could offer, again, other provocative questions, sort of help the student come to their own realization of why they were making these choices they were doing. And so again, our questions might have something to do with the craft talks that we have been giving during the week to sort of allow the student an opportunity to articulate consciously the choices that they were making.