Instructors and students can use the fourth hour to engage in active learning exercises that promote course goals and learning objectives related to any of the five broad areas that students are working towards achieving a degree of confidence and proficiency in while they are enrolled in FYW courses:

1. Developing Rhetorical Awareness and Knowledge
2. Understanding and Engaging with Reading and Writing as Processes
3. Developing Critical Thinking, Reading, Writing, and Researching Skills
4. Composing in Manual and Digital Environments
5. Developing Knowledge and Understanding of  the Conventions of Academic Writing

Such active learning exercises can be, but are not limited to:

• workshopping drafts
• invention and brainstorming exercises
• composing
• editing
• revising
• active or guided reading
• active or guided discussion of writing strategies, reading strategies, research strategies, critical thinking skills, or academic conventions, including the structure and use of  language and dialects, for instance Standard Written English

Instructors are encouraged to use the fourth contact hour as a student-centered workshop, or lab-hour with a focus on hands-on composing and exercises related to course assignments. 

While instructors are encouraged to be creative in their approach to designing curricula for the workshop/lab-hour, it is important that this additional class time NOT be dedicated to 1/ instructor-dominated discussion, 2/ actual or practice test-taking, 3/ unstructured “study hall” activities.