Using Essays and Other Forms of Writing

I believe that being able to write well in an academic setting is important, and I would absolutely assign my students essays if it suited the goals of whatever course I was teaching.  I think students (and instructors) should be able to work within many different forms of expression, and for people in academia, that obviously includes essays.  As long as students are at school (at least for the foreseeable future), they will be asked to write essays, so additional opportunities to practice those skills and get feedback from others are necessary.  And, as some of my fellow students have noted, being able to make a clear, sustained argument in writing is a skill developed by the essay and applicable to other forms of writing and speaking.  On the other hand, I can imagine courses where writing a formal essay wouldn't (necessarily) be helpful for achieving course goals, but writing, say, lab reports or lesson plans would be.  It would still be important for students to think through why they're writing those things and why they're writing them the way they are, and to be able to express those reflective thoughts to others, but that might be accomplished through informal journaling, one-on-one conferences, or regular in-class small group discussion.

The one university-level course that I've had experience teaching addressed the foundations of education (history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and politics), and we did assign our students a final essay in which they would analyze a school using the course concepts, attempting to synthesize everything.  This activity was pretty successful, and became more so once I started building time into class for students to talk to each other and me about their paper ideas and early drafts.  The students appreciated the in-class work time, as they found that sometimes a question wouldn't come up for them until they'd started working, and then when they had a question, they could immediately ask me or another student.  They were definitely more comfortable about writing the essay the semester I instituted this practice.  In the future I'd like to find more ways to get more of them thinking more deeply about their analyses, rather than staying at a surface or maybe mid-range level.  I think that taking additional time to directly model that type of analytical thinking and behavior in class would help, walking them through my thought process as I did a sample analysis, so they'd know exactly what I'm looking for.  I could even record myself doing that and put it up on Moodle for students who missed class or wanted to review the process.