End of semester thoughts and questions

It's the end of the semester (grades were submitted yesterday), and I am thinking about how I'm going to teach my first-year writing (FYW) course next semester. I've got some ideas, based on this semester's events and on some related readings I did, for changing the grading scheme to a kind of contract grading approach that has been gaining popularity in the last decade or so. I more or less do contract grading anyway, at least in the sense that for major assignments, at least 50% of the grade is based on labor/process. This will take it even further, though, by making everything complete/incomplete, including final drafts of papers. To me, it's a logical outgrowth of my feeling that final drafts of papers--at least in a FYW course--should not be treated as some high-stakes product that should be weighted more heavily than the process that went into it. So I'm cool with trying out the contract grading approach for FYW and seeing how that goes.

The problem (as always) is in figuring out what to do in the class--whether to adapt stuff that I've done before or go in a really different direction (or in a different old direction). This semester I let students do research on their own topics that they developed in consultation with me. It was a diverse batch of topics, but very enlightening in some cases as to what is on the international students' minds. A sampling of topics written on this semester:

• Boston (public transportation and Chinatown)
• various aspects of social media and technology (pros and cons of social media, internet and online gaming addiction, VR, social media in advertising)
• climate change and the environment (the Brazilian Amazon, climate change and crop production, air pollution, animal extinction)
• politics, race and media (anti-Asian racism, multiculturalism in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hip hop and politics)
• mental and physical health (the uses of melatonin, factors influencing sleep, international students' mental health, Asperger Syndrome)
• various other topics (beauty standards across cultures, pet abandonment, online vs. traditional learning, and others) 

It's always a challenge to work with students on so many different topics, and though I learn a lot in the process about all kinds of things, the process was rather exhausting. So I was thinking, for next semester I might narrow the range of topics they can write on and use some common readings for the research so that I can help them more efficiently with issues such as source usage, critical reading strategies, and other issues.

But then in my course evaluations, I saw this sentence from a student: "He let us choose topics by ourselves which is very good in facilitating inclusive learning." So now I'm back to the drawing board. Fortunately, we don't start classes until January 18, so I have some time to think about this.