Partnering Formal and Informal Writing: Scaffolding Daily Assignments to Support Student Writers

Instructional Practice

Guiding Principles for Daily Writing

In this module, I share a process for brainstorming and planning instruction around informal writing assignments that will lead to a formal paper, as well as the specific Daily Writing prompts I used in my course. By the time we got to these specific assignments, Daily Writing was already an established part of my course, and students were used to having a short assignment due regularly.

Here are the guiding principles that I use when creating Daily Writing assignments and embedding them in my courses.

1. Make writing a habit.

In my classes, students complete a Daily Writing assignment for each class meeting. Daily Writing assignments are intended to be short—I expect 1-2 pages double-spaced, or an equivalent amount if handwritten. (Because they are intended to be informal, I do allow students to hand-write these assignments if they prefer.) They also should be relatively easy to complete. I tell my students to spend no more than an hour on any one Daily Writing assignment (once they have completed any reading or video viewing leading up to it).

For those who express concern that they can’t finish in an hour, I advise them to put in a solid hour and then draw a line and state, “time’s up!” if they haven’t finished. Many students report they can complete these assignments in thirty minutes.

2. Keep the stakes low, but hold writers accountable.

In my classes, Daily Writing is graded on a credit/no credit basis. If the work is completed and meets the minimum expectation, it receives full credit.

In order to minimize students’ tendency to procrastinate, it is important to do something with the Daily Writing in the next class. Often we review it at the start of class or share excerpts with peers. Sometimes, I request to collect their Daily Writing so I can review it and get a sense of where the class is. On a separate Participation Self-Assessment, one of the criteria is coming to class prepared with the Daily Writing each day. Collectively, these strategies send the message that doing the assignments is important to success in the class.

3. Give specific guidance with room for individuality.

This particular principle comes from my own personal experience as a student. I took many arts classes that included a “reflective journal” assignment. These assignments functioned in many ways that are similar to the Daily Writing I now assign as a faculty member: short, informal opportunities to reflect on ideas learned in class. However, they were often assigned at the beginning of the semester with vague instructions to have an entry for each class period. Little guidance was given, and I often felt overwhelmed by not knowing what to write. Given a specific prompt I would have had no difficulty, but the entirely open-ended nature simply led me to procrastinate and stay up backdating made-up entries the night before the deadline. I vowed as a twenty-year-old that if I ever became a professor, I would never assign completely open-ended journals.

Therefore, each Daily Writing in my class is a specific assignment with clear guidelines. Even when asking students to reflect on a performance, reading, or other experience, I provide some guiding questions to promote brainstorming. However, each also includes some degree of choice for the student, so that there is no single correct response.

4. Use a variety of formats and structures.

For some assignments, I create a list of questions and suggest that students simply go down the list, answering each one with a few sentences. Others invite students to find a quote from a reading assignment and respond to it, while others might ask for a longer personal narrative. Because our discipline, dance, is based in the body, I often encourage sensory awareness and movement description in the prompts.

Daily Writing is also not limited to writing in a traditional sense. In one assignment, I encouraged students to work collaboratively to represent what they learned from a reading in a mind map. In another assignment, students worked in pairs to discuss their responses to a live performance, then posted a video of their discussion.

Linking Daily Writing and Formal Papers: My Process

For many students, especially those for whom writing doesn’t feel like a familiar or enjoyable process, a formal, graded paper assignment looms large. In my Dance History class, I found that many students struggled with one of the paper assignments. Although I had connected the Daily Writing thematically to the content we were reading and discussing in class, it was still disconnected from the skills and preparatory steps that they needed to be successful. For their last paper in the course, I decided to design more purposeful Daily Writing assignments that would connect with the paper prompt. Through these assignments, students would become familiar with both the content and the writing processes they are being asked to use for the paper assignment. In some cases, they might even generate material that they could use in the paper directly. While the example is specific to the content in my course, the process may be useful to instructors in a range of areas.

I worked through four main questions as I designed the assignments and classroom activities that would lead up to this Paper assignment.

1. What is the prompt asking students to do?

For this paper assignment, I had an admittedly vague prompt, one that could easily lead students to a very basic, yes or no response to a question.

Is NY Export Opus Jazz, jazz?

In this paper, students examine the 2010 film version of choreographer Jerome Robbins’s 1958 work NY Export: Opus Jazz (Jost & Lipes, 2010). There is vigorous debate among dance scholars as to what defines jazz dance, and this work, subtitled “a ballet in sneakers” provides a fertile ground for examining this argument.

While usually, I would find it necessary to revise the prompt into a more complex question that would invite elaboration, for this assignment, I chose to keep the prompt vague but do some work in class to help the students see it as a jumping-off point for their own questions.

2. What are the pieces that students need in order to be successful?

In other words, clarify, as Applebee and Langer (1983) describe it, the “difficulties that a new task is likely to pose for particular students.” 

When I looked at my prompt and my rubric, as well as my own assumptions and aspirations for this assignment, I started to consider what a student would need to know and be able to do to be successful with this paper. I considered both the content—the dance-specific information—as well as the writing skills needed. Knowing that I have a diverse range of learners in my class, I considered that it was possible that any component of the task, or combination of components together, might pose a difficulty for some and be quite easy for others.

My list included:

• Create an arguable thesis
• Describe the movement in the dance and select details to use in their writing
• Research basic background information on the dance and film
• Create a structure that would convey the information clearly in support of the thesis
• Understand arguments made by dance scholars about the nature of jazz dance
• Quote from those arguments to support their own discussion
• Examine their own subjectivity as a jazz dancer and viewer to understand how their point of view influences the way they see the dance
• Create an engaging “hook” to capture the reader’s attention

3. How can I scaffold these steps through class activities and Daily Writing?

In answering this question, I was addressing Applebee and Langer’s (1983) second step in instructional scaffolding, “select strategies that can be used to overcome the specific difficulties anticipated” (p.169). After looking at my list, I determined that several of these ideas could be addressed through a Daily Writing assignment. My own experience of the writing process is somewhat non-linear, and one of the challenges I have as a teacher is in sequencing writing assignments for students because I know that the process could unfold successfully in many different ways. However, I know it is important to provide a clear structure for students to work within and a timeline to keep us all on track during a very busy semester.

I considered the reading assignments we would be doing as well, many of which came from the first four chapters of the book Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches (Guarino and Oliver, 2014) where scholars argue about the definition of jazz dance. One of the supports provided to students in this assignment is that it can be completed with minimal out-of-class research; while students are welcome to research additional viewpoints to bring in, the readings assigned in class provide an excellent framework for engaging with the ideas. Students can then focus their attention on developing strategies for responding to those ideas and crafting their own arguments. Because the students would need to read these chapters and have time to unpack them in class, I determined that the associated Daily Writing should come in later. I also took into consideration the timeline of the semester and the other activities we would be doing, including allowing time for students to watch the film.

I reordered my list and made notes about how the various components could be addressed through Daily Writing and/or in-class and other homework activities.

1. Examine their own subjectivity as a jazz dancer and viewer to understand how their point of view influences the way they see the dance

Write Daily Writing based on prompt

Share and discuss in class

2. Understand arguments made by dance scholars about the nature of jazz dance

Read chapters from Jazz Dance book

Discuss points of view of each author in groups

Read “Part I: They Say” in They Say, I Say

Write Daily Writing to capture understanding of each author’s argument

3. Quote from those arguments to support their own discussion

Discuss each author’s argument in more detail

Watch clips of different examples of jazz dance and consider how each author might respond

Describe their own response to the author’s argument

Read “Part II: They Say” in They Say, I Say

Write Daily Writing to practice framing a response to each author

4. Describe the movement in the dance and select details to use in their writing

Watch the film NY Export: Opus Jazz and make notes about movement they see

Write Daily Writing to practice creating a detailed movement description

Exchange Daily Writing to give feedback

5. Research basic background information on the dance and film

Read biographical information on Jerome Robbins and do reading quiz

Work independently to watch documentary and research

Optional: Attend tutoring session on library databases

6. Create an engaging “hook” to capture the reader’s attention

Read examples of hooks used by other authors in Jazz Dance book

Describe strategies those authors used

Write Daily Writing to practice creating a hook and setting up for a thesis statement

Exchange Daily Writing and give feedback

7. Create an arguable thesis

Read and evaluate several possible thesis statements

Discuss features of a strong thesis statement

Draft a working thesis that conveys their developing ideas

8. Create a structure that would convey the information clearly in support of the thesis

Use information and ideas developed in above assignments

Draft the paper as a longer Daily Writing assignment

Exchange and review papers with a peer or tutor, paying attention to the development of the argument

4. How do I prompt the Daily Writing assignments?

To complete the design of instructional scaffolding, Applebee and Langer (1983) explain that teachers must “structure the activity as a whole to make those strategies explicit (through questioning and modelling) at appropriate places in the task sequence” (p. 169). The design of the informal writing assignments, then, functions to make explicit to students, through both the prompt and their own experience of engaging with it, the knowledge, skills, and processes that are essential for the formal writing project.

When I was creating the prompts for my Daily Writing assignments, I took into consideration the amount of time I would be spending in class on the assignment before students worked independently. For most of the prompts shared here, I determined that I might not have significant time in class to set the students up for the assignment, so I wanted my prompts to be something that was relatively self-explanatory. If I had more time to set each one up in class, I might have given shorter written prompts.

Examples of Daily Writing Prompts

I decided to start with the assignment that I felt would be easiest for most of the students, one where they were asked to reflect on their own history and experiences relative to jazz dance. In my approach to guiding students to view and respond to dance, I encourage writing in the first person. I want students to understand how their lived experiences as dancers give them unique insights into what they are viewing and shape their receptivity to other ideas. Since many students have developed, though not formally articulated, their own ideas and personal definitions of jazz dance, I felt it was important to ask them to unpack these first before moving onto the scholarly debates.

Daily Writing: Subjectivity, or, My Life in Jazz Dance

“Subjectivity” refers to your sense of self in relation to the world you live in.

In some academic disciplines, students are taught to ignore or downplay their own lived experiences and cultural identities for fear that these will weaken their writing by showing bias. In other academic traditions, we understand that all knowledge is created by human beings who have subjectivities; by examining our own subjectivity we can better understand how we make meaning of phenomena in the world and better develop and support our scholarly ideas by drawing on lived experiences to inform our analysis. Rather than trying to ignore or mask our influences—which many scholars say is impossible—we examine them and write about those that are relevant. We make our backgrounds known to our readers, leaving them to discern if we have adequately developed and supported our argument.

With that in mind–and knowing that you will be writing a paper about jazz dance—write about your life in jazz dance.

Some ideas to get you started: What does the term “jazz dance” mean to you, and what experiences have you had that shaped that definition?

What cultural groups related to the history of jazz dance are you a part of (and perhaps, what cultural groups are you not a part of)?

What is your experience with music, improvisation, and dance in social settings?

What are your preferences as a mover? As an audience member? How do these shape your relationship with jazz dance?

Are there aspects of jazz dance that are not part of your lived experiences? What are these, and how do you feel about these unfamiliar aspects?

To provide a framework for responding to the authors they were reading, I decided to have students use the book They Say, I Say (Graff and Birkenstein, 2009) to support their understanding of how to engage in writing as a conversation. The templates in They Say, I Say provide an easy entry point for responding to any author, particularly those who express a strong viewpoint about an idea the writer wants to engage with. I found that they also work well for practicing writing, because one can jump right in with a template and begin to craft a clear statement that links one’s ideas with something another author has stated.

Daily Writing: “They Say”

“Whenever you enter into a conversation with others in your writing, then, it is extremely important that you go back to what those others have said, that you study it very closely, and that you not confuse it with something you already believe.” (Graff and Berkenstein, 2009, p. 33)

Using techniques for summarizing and introducing quotations (They Say, I Say chapters 2 and 3), set up a conversation by introducing key ideas from the author (Cohen, Boross, Siegenfeld, or Wray) you focused on in class.

Choose the key ideas based on how you might use this author’s work in a later paper—or as Graff and Berkenstein (2009) advise, “summarize authors in light of your own arguments” (p. 35). Make use of the templates and advice in They Say, I Say.

Be sure that you include appropriate citations for the author(s) you reference.

Daily Writing: “I Say”

After reading the chapters 1-4 in Jazz Dance, consider:

What provokes you?

What ideas do you want to respond to?

Choose an idea from each of the three authors you didn’t focus on in the last DW, and practice writing a brief response (“I Say”) using each of the template types (Yes/ No/ OK But). While you will need to give a brief “They Say” to situate your response, focus on the “I Say” portion and practice using the techniques/templates in your book.

(Hint: If you can’t find something that you actually agree/disagree with, take the position that you do to get practice using the templates.)

Previously in class we have done activities to support movement description where we view a clip of a dance together and work through various strategies for describing movement. Therefore, I wanted students to work more independently on this task. I created a very basic prompt to give students reminders and invited them to focus on describing those aspects of the work that would be the most interesting relative to their focus for the paper.

Daily Writing: Movement Descriptions of Opus Jazz

Watch the entire DVD of Jerome Robbins’s NY Export: Opus Jazz including the special features.

Choose one or more sections that particularly interests you relative to Paper 3. You might choose to focus on a section that, in your view, clearly demonstrates features of jazz dance, or a section that includes movement vocabulary that you feel is not accurately described as jazz dance.

Use this Daily Writing to write a detailed, evocative, rich description of the movement you see.

In looking closely at the movement and generating your descriptions, consider the following categories of dance elements:

Body

Space

Time

Movement Qualities

Relationships

Focus your writing on those ideas that seem most pertinent to you and give your reader a clear and engaging picture of what you see.

Finally, I created the Daily Writing prompt for the “hook.” The actual writing students were asked to create was very short, but required focus and creativity. Despite my suggestions that students begin drafting their formal paper early on, I knew that most had not yet done so. I also know that for many writers—myself included—even when we know we can start anywhere in the paper, we feel we need to start at the beginning in order to get the “push” to launch our essays. Therefore, I decided to assign a prompt for creating a hook in the hopes that students might create vivid openings to their papers that would not only engage their readers from the beginning, but would also grab the writer’s attention and provide some initial motivation to keep going with the paper.

Daily Writing: Hook for Paper 3

Use this Daily Writing as a chance to focus specifically on your “hook” for Paper 3. How might you grab your reader’s attention and lead into your more formal introduction and thesis? Perhaps a detailed movement description, personal anecdote, choice quote or epigraph, or problem/dilemma can serve as an engaging entry point for your paper.

For some examples of effective hooks, see Chapter 22: “The Transmission of African-American Concert Dance and American Jazz Dance” (Miller) and Chapter 32: “Performing Energy” (Sigenfeld) in your Jazz Dance textbook.

This DW should be shorter than usual, only 1 or possibly 2 paragraphs. However, if you have more of your paper drafted, bring that as well to class so that you can consider how your hook grabs readers’ interest and sets up for the ideas to come.

Lessons Learned

What did I learn?

Purposefully scaffolding the Daily Writing prompts to lead into the formal Paper assignment was a useful strategy for strengthening the instruction in my course. I developed strategies that connected both the content we were reading and viewing in class and the writing skills I wanted students to develop, all in assignments that helped students to begin drafting material that they could potentially use in the paper. As an instructor, I felt more focused in my use of class time during this unit, because I could easily respond to students when they asked “Can we talk about the next paper that’s coming up?” and I could show them the purpose and relevance of the assignments I was asking them to do for each class session.

While I did not do formal research on the assessment process for this Paper, I did informally note that the papers as a whole had clearer thesis statements, were more cohesive in connecting ideas from multiple sources with the author’s own ideas and movement descriptions, and were more sophisticated in their use of quotations. Compared to the last course in which I gave this assignment (where I used some, but not all, of these Daily Writing prompts) I saw more variation across papers in the kinds of arguments being made and the level of nuance brought to the thesis statements.

In the future, I will work on developing similar sets of preparatory assignments for each formal paper throughout the course. In the History II course, I plan to pilot a process for students to sketch out the preparatory assignments themselves to guide them through working more independently on the writing process.

Recap and Takeaways for Instructors

1. Examine your prompt and rubric.

What is the assignment asking students to do? Is the prompt specific enough to communicate your goals, but broad enough to allow for student choice? Will you give additional discussion and verbal instruction in class to support the written prompt, or do the assignment guidelines need to convey everything the student should know about your expectations?

2. Make a list of all the things students will need in order to be successful.

Include both content knowledge and writing skills. Consider how you can sequence this knowledge and skills in your instruction. For instance, there many be content knowledge that is new to students that will require significant attention in the instruction, but you may also have on your list items that students are already familiar with where a quick review or independent assignment may be adequate.

3. What activities will support students in developing and/or refining the knowledge and skills that they need?

Decide which items from your list might be supported through an informal writing prompt. Re-order your list, considering the timing relative to your class meetings and other activities in your course, such as assigned readings, as well as the priority you place on each idea. Consider giving one informal writing assignment due at each class meeting for a face-to-face class for peer sharing.

4. Develop informal writing prompts connected to the formal assignment.

Remember, these are informal writing assignments, so your prompts might not need to be detailed and specific, especially if you will use class time to give further explanation or have students start their writing. As low-stakes assignments, the prompts should encourage students to experiment with ideas or processes without pressure to have a polished product.

5. Remind students of the connections.

When you give the informal writing assignment in class, help students understand how it is connected to the formal assignment they will do later on.

When students begin working on the formal assignment, encourage them to draw from material created in their informal assignments. If the exact text does not apply to their paper, help them understand how the process they used to create their informal assignments can be transferred to meet the goals of their formal paper.

Learn More

Resources for Scaffolding Writing Assignments

The process of scaffolding writing instruction is one that is highly applicable to the college classroom, both in discipline-specific contexts as well as general composition courses.

Massengill (2011) describes a discipline-specific approach to instructional scaffolding in a sociology seminar course. She expects students to build both content knowledge and writing skills as they prepare to write an essay applying theoretical concepts from assigned readings to create an analysis of consumption as seen in contemporary media. She notes that when given the assignment, “Students inevitably read this assignment and protest that they do not know how to do it” (p. 374). She then explains:

I work to model in class the kind of intellectual work that students will need to do in the paper. Most importantly, I lead students through an exercise designed to make clear to them how they can use these texts – not just cite them or summarize them – to construct a theoretical framework. In effect, we practice higher-level thinking skills in class, modeling the process that students will need to use, individually, to write their essays. (pp. 376-377)

Massengill’s article is particularly useful for instructors because she offers detailed descriptions of the teaching activities she deploys, including informal writing activities, such as pre-draft assignments, in-class freewriting, and drafts for peer review, as well as seminar activities where she works with students to break down the idea of scholarly writing as entering a conversation with other authors. Massengill also shares inspiring excerpts from her students’ essays and their reflections on the writing process and encourages educators to adopt these kinds of activities for helping students to integrate thinking and writing in a college classroom.

McNaught and Benson (2015) describe efforts to revise a first-year writing course where preparatory assignments were structured with timely feedback in a scaffolded assessment process. In describing the benefits of this process, they note how breaking a large project into smaller tasks provides support to the learner and decreases the likelihood of students procrastinating. In their instructional design, students complete an outline of an essay and submit it for feedback prior to commencing with their writing. They note that this approach “helps students to choose the most effective and efficient path in the beginning rather than losing time, particularly with a research cycle phase of writing and planning” (p. 77). In their study, they note an increase in the percentage of students successfully meeting the benchmark criteria in this course when the scaffolded assessment was introduced. Because the assignments used in their instructional scaffolding were assessed, with instructors spending substantial amount of time giving students feedback, their article is particularly useful for readers who want to make the scaffolded assignments part of the grading criteria in their course.

McNaught and Benson (2015) do raise an important point about instructional scaffolding, however. Just as scaffolding on a building is intended to be removed, instructional scaffolding is intended to help students work through academic processes they may not yet be able to complete successfully and then removed as the students internalize their learning and apply it to future projects. As the authors note, “[i]f the use of scaffolded assessments results in students being dependent on the approach, rather than being up-skilled by its use, then it potentially has a negative long-term impact, albeit a very positive short-term impact” (p. 84). They describe the importance for instructors to make students aware of the use of the scaffolded assessments in class and build their understanding that, as they progress to more challenging courses, such supports will not be provided.

In this module, instructional scaffolding was presented largely through the use of Daily Writing, informal, low-stakes writing assignments that targeted specific content or skills and helped students generate material that may be used in some form in a later assignment. The importance of this kind of writing is echoed by Bean (2011), who concludes that “my single most valuable teaching strategy for promoting critical thinking is to require regular exploratory writing in response to disciplinary problems that I provide” (p. 121). In Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, he offers a wealth of examples and strategies for incorporating informal, exploratory writing into courses. Among these are “Invention Tasks for Formal Assignments” (pp. 138-142), which include:

Tasks for Scaffolding a Major Assignment (p. 139)

Rapid First Drafts (p. 139)

Practice Essay Exams (p. 140)

Thesis Statement Writing (p. 141)

Paragraph Templates (pp. 141-142)

Readers may find Bean’s work particularly valuable because he oscillates between general strategies applicable across disciplines and specific, topic-focused examples that illustrate potential applications of his teaching ideas. For those still not convinced of the utility or practicality of these approaches, Bean offers his responses to common objections along with helpful tips for assessing exploratory writing and managing the instructor’s workload.