WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION

As teachers, we need to strike a healthy balance between giving our students too much direction and giving our students too much freedom. Students crave instruction; every time I give them an assignment, I’m bombarded with questions like, “So what do YOU want me to write about?” and “Will this get me a good grade?” Throughout my journey as a student, whether in middle school or college classes, I craved the same direction. I’ve had professors who encouraged creative liberty, and I’ve had professors who expected their students to strictly adhere to cookie-cutter paper prompts. No matter which professor I was dealing with at the time, I always looked to them for validation. I would ask questions like, “Do you like my idea?” and, even worse, “What idea do you think works better?” Even if I didn’t agree with their ideas, I would incorporate them heavily into my papers anyway, just to ensure my “A.” While this way of thinking can stifle creativity, it isn’t always a bad thing. I appreciated teachers who pushed my thinking further, and I appreciated the harsh graders who turned me in to a better writer. I also appreciated knowing clear directions and expectations… after all, the biggest extrinsic motivation for students to do work is for the grade.

             I know that when I grade my students, I will want them to meet my goals and expectations for the assignment. I’ll also want my students do be doing comparable amounts of work with one another; therefore, there must be some sort of common form. However, I want them to feel empowered to share their ideas, no matter how unconventional they may be. I want to provide my students with the opportunity to be creative; the opportunity to explore their own interests and passions. I also want to satisfy their craving to know what I want, what I expect, and how I’ll grade them.

            In his book, The English Teacher’s Companion, Jim Burke urges teachers to, “Give students as much information as possible. Students should understand the requirements, the standards, and the criteria” (Burke 289). I agree with this statement, because I know this is what students both need and want. However, we may leave some assignments intentionally “vague” to bring out our students’ creativity. No matter what the assignment, there needs to be some balance between freedom and structure. The goal of this blog is to find that balance.

            To answer the question, “How do we, as teachers, provide our students with enough freedom to be creative and enough structure to satisfy our need for graded form when creating assignments?,” I’d like to explore four main sub-topics: responding to student writing, student choice, unconventional writing assignments, and creative writing. Each topic has its own blog post—you can find these by using the navigation to the right. I’ll be using pedagogical research along with my own teaching experiences to explore these topics and ultimately, help to answer my research question.

STUDENT CHOICE

We know that students like structured assignments and clear expectations. As teachers, providing students with these things makes our lives easier as well—we know what we’re looking for and we’re familiar with the subject, so grading is a relatively simple task.

We can assign students a prompt that says, “Compare and contrast Ralph and Jack’s leadership in Lord of the Flies,” and expect subtly different papers, but there’s only so much students can do within this parameter. Furthermore, our teacher instinct will want to point out where student logic is flawed, or where they might be missing what we think is the most important and obvious piece of evidence in this argument. There are only so many ideas students can generate to answer a prompt like this, and teachers who know the book backwards and forwards know which ideas fly and which do not. This type of assignment is as structured as it gets, and yet it completely stifles any sort of student creativity.

So here’s the compromise between freedom and structure: providing students with the ability to choose what they want to write about within teacher-set boundaries. While I was student teaching in a seventh grade general English Language Arts class, students were given a research assignment. Each student had to identify a world issue, summarize the issue (including causes and who or what it affects), and propose a solution to the issue. The assignment instructions were clear; every student knew exactly what they needed to accomplish and understood how they would be assessed. Although the world issues were different, each student was asked to do the same task. This ensured that the assignment was fair (every student did the same amount of work) and it was easily gradable with a generalized rubric. However, because students could choose their topic, they had the opportunity to investigate something interesting and meaningful to them. Topics chosen ranged from endangered species to teen suicide.

Jessica Singer Early sums this up pretty well in her book Stirring Up Justice. She says, “The list of things I care about and want to see change goes on and on; however, this is my list, not my students’. I want my classes to have the opportunity to read, write, research, and present their own interests and causes” (Early 10). When students are given the option to investigate a topic they’re interested in, we don’t have to worry about stifling their ideas or assigning them a prompt that they loathe. Although students won’t turn in cookie-cutter papers, providing choice within specific parameters ensures that we can still grade the assignment easily and fairly. Furthermore, students will still know exactly what’s expected of them, but they’ll have the freedom to present more creative ideas.

RESPONDING TO STUDENT WRITING

In her article, “Responding to Student Writing,” Nancy Sommers explains the student writing process, saying: “In the beginning of the process there was the writer, her words, and her desire to communicate her ideas. But after the comments of the teacher are imposed on the first or second draft, the student's attention dramatically shifts from “This is what I want to say," to '"This is what you the teacher are asking me to do’” (Sommers 150). This is absolutely what I want to avoid—this quote is the reason I chose to investigate the question of freedom versus structure in the first place. Sommers goes on to say that teachers often appropriate texts from students, as described above, when they comment on their papers with a confusing mixture of grammar and mechanic comments (“check spelling” or “choose a better word”) and vague content suggestions (“expand” or simply “?”). Sommers suggests that a way to solve this problem is to work with students specifically on ideas before worrying about any surface-level mistakes.

It’s very important for students to feel like they have to power to write their own ideas and say what they want to say. When teachers respond to student writing with an overwhelming focus on surface-level grammar and mechanics mistakes, students stop worrying about content and start worrying about “correctness.” The constant strive for grammatically-polished papers often paralyzes and confuses students. It distracts their attention away from what’s important—their thoughts—and places it instead on conventions.

In a seventh grade English class, students had to research an important world issue, explain the causes and effects, and propose a potential solution. I spent a day working with several struggling students who were very behind in the process. One student, let’s call him Mitch, reads at a much lower grade level than his peers. While I was working with him, Mitch did not want to write anything in front of me—he was so concerned about his spelling and grammar, he could barely focus on the content. When I asked Mitch questions about his assignment, his verbal responses showed me that he knew all of the information he needed. However, he was so nervous about translating the information to paper “correctly,” he froze up and refused to write anything.

This is a great example of what Peter Elbow calls, “the kind of play-it-safe defensive writing that students often produce when they are scared or anxious about writing-as-right-language—a medium where he has probably been corrected over and over for wrongness” (Elbow 4). Mitch knew the content the teacher asked of him, but couldn’t translate it to paper because he was so scared of being “wrong.” Here is a student that has “probably been corrected over and over,” and this pattern has paralyzed his confidence. As teachers, we need to create a safe space for students to write their ideas with a focus on content rather than form. When we respond to student writing, we must be encouraging and help students push their ideas, rather than scolding for misspelled words. Yes, form is important—this is where the balance between freedom and structure comes in. Students do need to work within certain parameters when writing, and it’s important for them to learn about grammar and mechanics. However, we need to allow them the freedom to develop their ideas first and foremost.

CREATIVE WRITING

Teacher Larry Johannessen writes, “It took quite a bit of discussion to convince [some] teachers that a good writing curriculum should provide students with a wide variety of writing experiences and that narrative and descriptive writing would help students learn important thinking and writing strategies. Writing about personal experiences is an opportunity for students to think about their own lives,” (Kahn et. al 56). More often than not, creative writing is trumped by more conventional forms of writing in the standard secondary English classroom. However, as Johannessen suggests, the overshadowed form of writing offers students many benefits. Creative and descriptive writing is a wonderful way for students to understand their lives and the world around them. It also gives students the opportunity to exercise their creativity and let content flow without worrying too much about adhering to constrictive academic form.

Although creative writing definitely deserves a place in the classroom, students often panic when handed this type of assignment. Students are so used to writing conventional, scripted assignments, they worry that they’ll either complete a creative writing assignment poorly or “wrong.” I saw this mentally when I told my seventh grade students they would be writing a short play script about their lives. Students immediately froze up, and suddenly a dozen hands shot in the air with the same concern: “I don’t know what to write about.”

            Here I gave the students a lot of freedom, and I saw that they craved more structure. As a compromise between the two, I offered the students several models. We had just read the play “Sure Thing” as a class before the students were given the assignment. I asked them to write their scripts mimicking the style of “Sure Thing.” To ensure that students felt comfortable with the assignment and knew what to do, I also wrote a model of the assignment using examples from my own life.

In his book Image Grammar, Harry Noden says, “Imitating structure—whether it’s the structure of sentences, the structure of paragraphs, or even the structure of entire works—is a technique teachers have used successfully for decades” (Noden 78). Students really benefitted from this technique. Before they were given a model to imitate, students were confused and high anxious about what was expected of them. However, once they saw several examples and discovered how to make their stories fit within that general mold, students let their creativity shine. They wrote wonderful scripts that told their very important life stories. This experience serves as a great example of balanced freedom and structure. Students were given the opportunity to write creatively about their lives, but they needed a structured frame to do so comfortably.

UNCONVENTIONAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADING PROCESS:

           Often, students are only assessed by conventional “products.” By this, I mean cumulative tests and formal academic papers. This is the case in the seventh grade classroom I’m currently student teaching in—the only grades entered in to the grade book are final written assignments and unit tests. All other work—homework, quizzes, participation, daily journals, worksheets—are not even taken in to consideration when assessing a student. This has always baffled me. Why don’t they receive credit for all of the work they do along the way? Every bit of their learning process is ignored, and the product becomes the only thing that matters. Furthermore, these products don’t allow students to be creative, experiment, or take risks. I believe students should get credit for being creative, experimenting, and taking risks.       

In his book Teaching English by Design, Peter Smagorinsky writes, “Our problem with schooling in general is that it focuses on the final products without providing opportunities for students to engage in—and be rewarded for—the informal, tentative, experimental processes that lead to them” (Smagorinsky 83). The classroom I’m in is an example of this; students are not rewarded for their learning process at all, nor are they given many opportunities to partake in any sort of “experimental” activity. Assignments and grading are as structured as they can possibly be. As a result, students are rarely given the opportunity to exercise their creativity and take the risks that foster authentic learning.

Donald Murray advocates that in an ideal classroom, “the student is encouraged to attempt any form of writing which may help him discover and communicate what he has to say. The process which produces ‘creative’ and ‘functional’ writing is the same” (Murray 6). Here, Murray points out that form can be very limiting for students. If a blog or a video is more conducive to the student’s message, why should we limit them to writing a formal analytic essay? This idea goes back to my central question of balancing freedom and structure. Allowing students to convey their ideas in any form seems a bit chaotic. My first thoughts jump to, “What if they’re not doing the same amount of work?” and “How am I going to grade them all fairly?” These are the questions that providing structured form answer—when we remove this structure to foster creativity, we need to find an alternate way to answer those questions.

Although I don’t have a concrete example from my seventh grade classroom to illuminate this issue, I can use my experiences in a college classroom to shed some light. In my current English class, I was asked to write a “paper” that describes my writing process. This “paper” could be in any feasible form—I chose to convey my writing process with a creative video edited in iMovie. Other students chose many other forms, such as board games, picture slide shows, and play scripts. While we all chose drastically different forms to answer a common question, our professor graded our projects with ease. We all submitted a self-reflection that explained how much effort we put into our project and how effectively we answered the prompt. This provided us with a bit of structure to all of the creative freedom we were allowed.

            This example shows that is it possible to bring Murray’s ideal into the classroom. Providing students with a (relatively) common prompt and asking them to reflect critically on final project gives the assignment its structural build. This satisfies both the teacher’s need to grade fairly and the student’s need for structure and expectations, while allowing the student to take an enormous amount of creative liberty.