The reason I did this was to provide a way in to talking about the last two sets of reading we did as well as provide support for the essay. After all, two of the subquestions really were intensively linked to the last two sets of reading.

I gave the students a heuristic for thinking about the essay question. It was an outline that broke down the essay questions and provided a strategy for using the texts for attacking that question. I was of two minds regarding that heuristic. It felt in many respects too prescriptive, yet I realize that this is the first graduate class for many of my students and they have not yet developed the skills for tackling a dense question like this. I have to remind myself that in many respects I am still dealing with undergraduate type of thinking. It is a tough balance between providing support and being an enabler. After all, I can’t write the essay for them.

The essay serves as a formative assessment to see if there are still gaps in the students’ understandings, but it is also a writing to learn activity. By writing this essay the students are really forced to think through these ideas and to make connections. They come out on the other side with a much deeper understanding of the issues than they had before writing the essay. But it is a painful experience.

It’s painful for me too because I feel as if no matter how much support I give, it’s never enough.

One thing I’m going to do next time not give the students the heuristic all at once. They tended to focus on the first subquestion and had to be prompted to move on to the second and third subquestions. But was important for them to do so, because that’s where they would be talking about the new readings. So next time I’m going to do this almost as a progressive problem based learning activity. I’ll give them the first subquestion, then after a set period of time, give them the second, and so on.

During the second half of class I did a minilecture where I just recapped the readings we’ve done thus far. Nothing exciting, but hopefully it served to remind the students of the different texts.

We ended with writers’ workshop. I provided a model for how to synthesize readings and then had them work in groups to create a synthesis of some of the readings. Each group was able to create a synthesis, so I’m hoping to see that in the paper.

I need to continue reminding myself that this is an induction course and that I’m trying to move them toward thinking as literacy professionals. Yes, the content is important, but more than anything it’s the ways of thinking I want to see developed.