In order to answer the question, What is the best way to scaffold student learning of writing, we must first consider what it is we are supporting. Too often, as English teachers, we focus our attention on the facts of the forms we want students to create: it must have so many paragraphs; it must have a thesis statement; each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence; each paragraph should include so many sentences; there should be two sentences of commentary for every concrete detail; and so on. That approach leads to providing students assignment prompts full of such details and scaffolds that heavily lean toward outlines and graphic organizers.
George Hillocks, in Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice, suggested a different approach that he called inquiry and his students called a structured process approach to teaching writing. In this model, we begin by considering the process of creating the content of the genres we are asking students to create. Such an approach requires analyzing genres to understand the problem solving that writers engage in to create those genres and imagining the processes such writers actually go through as they compose. Scaffolding in this model focuses on small-group activities that help students practice and then articulate the procedures they use to generate and develop ideas.
This workshop will take participants through a structured writing process both as writers and as teachers of writing.
