Critical Writing/Literacy/Thinking

Reading Hillocks has been so helpful in clarifying my thoughts about what teaching writing looks like. I only know from my own schooling experiences what NOT to do. The three most common methods for teaching writing in my middle school and high school were

1. Learn the six traits of writing (Grades 4-6, until it came back to haunt me in 10^th grade)
2. Write a lot of essays
3. Read good writers

With the exception of the last one, I wouldn't call any of these great pedagogies on their own, and even the way they were implemented didn't really include much actual scaffolding or instruction in writing like what was described in Hillocks book. Most of my writing skills came from the last one, and I can think of only one teacher who showed me how to read like a writer in order to do this.

The alternative to critical thinking.

What I like about Hillocks is that it teaches critical thinking as the crux of writing. After slogging through the misery of 4^th, 5^th and 6^th grade writing, I finally had a 7^th grade teacher who at least created assignments that required thoughtfulness, and held us to incredibly high standards. I think what Hillocks gets at is that so few writing assessments and instructional practices require students to think about audience and purpose—like the Common Core Standards seek to address—and at least as a partial result, there are many “literate” people who do not know how to read or construct a solid, logical argument.

I would have loved to have writing instruction like what Hillocks describes, but that is not to say that it is a perfect practice. For example, one of the many competing chronologies within Hillocks is what students know and what they contribute in class discussions. At several places in the introduction and early chapters, Hillocks points out that the students don't seem to know how to make or recognize basic rhetorical arguments, then provides examples in discussions where students actually draw sophisticated conclusions about the irony of a piece of work or identify important details. It is at times unclear whether students should be treated as naïve about argument, or as he says in the introduction, do “we need to ask them to be as experts, even at the beginning of learning something new, reporting their thinking to the class and challenging one another's interpretations and conclusions” (p. 10)?

Hillocks also seems to adopt the implicit assumption early on that there is an objective “truth” to be reached, without a focus on teaching students to question what makes something a “fact.” That's not to say that logic and reasoning are not good, but we need students to recognize at the same time that the conclusions which we draw to be logical are also based on assumptions that we have because of our culture and history and those assumptions need to be examined in the process. The first example of critical literacy practices doesn't appear until page 52: “”Eventually, students need to learn that every expression, whether in words or visual images, is an intentional construction ad implies the creator's attitudes and agendas... but at early points in teaching argument, it is probably sound practice to go with the easier question.” When implementing Hillocks practices, I would question when to introduce those critical literacy pieces because I think that with appropriate scaffolding, you can and should do it early on.

I think it is easy, however, to be culturally relevant while practicing Hillocks' style of teaching. Especially when it comes to topic selection for policy (chapter 3), the fact that students have to do their own research because there isn't any pre-digested information available, hits two birds with one stone: you have their attention and you have created a problem to which there is no teacher answer. Like Beach and Doerr-Stevens note, having students write about what affects them immediately creates engagement that goes beyond just talking about something they like. As Hillocks warns, “Having a good time does not necessarily result in learning anything meaningful” (p. 2). However, creating the flow state requires that students have some choice or control in the matter, balanced with enough challenge to stimulate and move them beyond themselves. The way we employ the strategies presented, no matter how much we tend to accept them as really good practice, takes thought and care.