This week I challenged my Spanish class to write a personal travel blog containing specified features and structures. It was my goal to make the connection between the grammar and vocabulary and the real-life functions of using the language. The blog was my way of trying to marry them together. I provided what I thought was a lot of structure on the first day of explaining the project, which will be there unit assessment. It will work as a sort of online portfolio of their work, and will be assessed through rubricking throughout and at the end.
Though I had thought that I had included plenty of scaffolds for the cognitively demanding work of writing descriptively in the preterite tense in Spanish, several students showed despair, not knowing where to start or how to develop the ideas for what they might describe. I concluded that I hadn't included enough framing and supports around the language needed to accomplish the task, so I developed some guiding questions that, when answered in their writing, would be sufficient to produce the type of narrative required. This seemed to help, as certain students indicated that they had "just gone through and answered the questions." I was happy with this, but wondered at the same time what that structuring might have done to the open-endedness of the assignment. I learned my lesson for the prompts for each day's writing tasks, and developed more and more banks of questions and graphic organizers to build a safety net around student writing. The feedback so far has been that this is a helpful scaffold, but their writing samples will tell the true story.
Other students required none of these extra supports, and one student even went so far as to create a fictional travel account during a Zapatista movement in Mexico. This was not at all what I had been expecting, and I was fascinated and delighted by the out of the box thinking of that particular student. In some way she had felt free enough to develop an original idea and run with it beyond the scope of the project. I am glad that the project guidelines were flexible enough to accomodate and allow such creativity.
I am finding that the open-ended assignments and questions need to always be buttressed by the structures and forms that hold them up, though knowing how much to offer and how much to allow students to discover freely requires intuition and an appreciation of the nuance of learning a language by doing.
