The Literature Workshop: Thinking in the Writing Assignment

I stumbled across The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers by Sheridan D. Blau when I was perusing Kelly Gallagher's Web site. On his blog, Gallagher had listed his top 15 favorite professional texts, and Blau's book was near the top of his list. I added the title to my Amazon wishlist, Christmas arrived, and this unpretentious text is my favorite gift from the holiday season. It's a rather small volume as professional texts go, and there's nothing flashy about the book, but whoofta, is it a gold mine of ideas!

Blau titles Chapter 7 of his book "Writing Assignments in Literature Classes: The Problem" and his analysis is so spot-on that I decided to dedicate a blog post to the illuminating chapter. Blau laments the lack of thinking found in so many secondary students' writing, and I am quick to agree that after I've read 20 class essays and still have 80 more to go, they've all started sounding the same. The ideas in the students' writing do not veer from any of the "safe" topics that were discussed in class, and very few students promote any independent thinking of their own.

Although it's easy to point the finger at the students and groan, "Ugh, they just won't think," Blau aptly notes that the way in which a teacher frames the assignment generally produces the papers it deserves. Touche.

I find at the middle school level, much of my instruction is focused on structure rather than content. My rubric contains criteria such as "a clear topic sentence in each body paragraph is supported by at least two pieces of textual evidence adequately explained". Many students at the middle school level require the scaffolding that I automatically provide with Step-Up to Writing outlines, and yet I also have had many students over the years who are ready to fly. They're ready to deviate from the formulaic writing prescribed by Step-Up because they "get" how to organize their essay. They're now ready to explore and experiment.

So there's framing mistake #1 on my part. Upon reflection, I think I have focused too much on structure, and in doing so, have stifled the importance of thinking. My second mistake is the stuffy prompts I often assign such as "What is the theme of this story?" Sounds open-ended enough on the surface, but if you've been in the classroom, you would know that we have beaten theme statements over-the-head relentlessly for probably near two weeks, and students have been buried in discussion about theme so that by the time students start drafting, it'd be difficult for them to come up with an original theme that has not already been discussed.

I'm curious if any other middle school English teachers (or perhaps high school teachers, too) find themselves focusing more on structure rather than on thinking? I'm also curious if anybody feels like I do in that some students have become reliant on the teacher to provide outlines and despite having "written" a handful of essays would be at a complete loss if the teacher didn't provide a graphic organizer complete with RDFs and Explains.

It's these very students who make me most reluctant to push students off the diving board into the "thinking pool" because I fear the lesson/unit/project/assignment would drown with a satisfying gurgle. How do you train students to think and ease them in, starting in the baby pool and moving steadily to the deep end? What's too much scaffolding and what's not enough? These are rhetorical questions, I know, because there is no right answer. Each class is different. Each student is different. But these are the questions I grapple with in my pursuit to provide the best learning experience for my kids.