The Issue with Prompts

Fecho in Teaching for the Students writes about dialogical teaching or teaching that is inquiry based and open to interpretation, aware and embracing of diverse contexts, and inclined toward a seamlessness in teaching. He suggests that teachers consider how they create writing projects as an important step in developing a dialogic classroom.

If you rely too much on writing prompts (e.g., write an essay giving your opinion about file-sharing of music) that are unconnected to the current class dialogue, and students are given little opportunity to reflect on and revise drafts, you haven't moved toward a dialogue that will foster seamlessness. Students, either overtly or tacitly, are being taught that what we learn and o one day does not necessarily connect to what we learn and do on other days. (107)

Dialogic writing, then, should connect to the class dialogue  but it also needs to have a balance of academic and personal writing so that the writer can bring multiple voices to the work. What this means for us is that this combination of academic and personal contexts  involves thought and reflection across spaces and time and creates opportunities for meaning making.  To make writing personal, students need to be able to make choices about what to include or exclude, and they need to make choices about how best to represent the ideas on a page or screen (107).

Writing projects need many voices intersecting  so that the writing goes beyond the author alone, according to Fecho.  Students also need an opportunity to abandon a work and later return to it. For this reason, we do not take every piece of writing to publication. The first argument essay you see here went from peer or teacher conference to word-processing; there were not multiple drafts and, in fact, many papers were only written during the time in the computer lab. Some students did not or could not write during class and never wrote outside of class. And, the first argument essay was not really in conversation with other authors, so the multi-voicedness is really missing for many of them. We tried the personal argument essays without research, mostly because the computer labs and technology for research was taken up by MAP test. And, because the topics were so personal, I could not provide articles or stories for students to enrich their arguments. Nevertheless, many students found other ways to get other authorial voices into their arguments (e.g., citing the principal's reasons for assigned seats or quoting a parent or teacher).  I guess the idea here is that multiple contexts and cultures are always transacting and make it into the students' writing, but as a teacher, I can do more to help it be more seamless and even more conscious, I think.