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.