Well, that post title is a bit long and perhaps not too useful.  Let me clarify: the Rose chapter sets us a writing assignment about culture shock.  Students read a text that discusses stages that immigrants go through upon coming to the United States.  The text classifies the immigrants experiences into several phases and discusses the key feature of each of these.  The students after reading this text move onto 5 other texts written by and/or about immigrants to the United States…stories, if you will, about these specific individuals and their experiences.  The student is then asked to apply the classification scheme of the initial text to the specific cases of these immigrants they then read about.

The Gittschalk ad Hjortshoj chapter has us consider how writing assignments should be constructed.  What I liked most about this chapter is the authors’ insistence on clarity.  They note how often we are unclear about the writing assignment and yet have very specific expectations of our students that are implicit.  They say that we don’t tell them specifically and clearly what we want and then we criticize their writing for falling short of these expectations we never really communicated to begin with.  That’s the short version but it really resonated with me.  I am thinking of an assignment I gave to a class of pre-service teachers.  I wanted them to organize their semester’s work into a binder with the goal of being able to refer to it in the future, when they were teaching themselves.  I saw it as a resource and as I was asked to do this as a student in my own education courses, and create such a binder for each class I teach I was clear (in my head, that is) about what I wanted….what I expected.  I expected that the games we played in class should be included but that in doing so one would have the directions written out and maybe some extensions and variations of the game.  I expected a section on activities we had done and again I thought students would benefit from noting variations to these activities that we had talked about in class.  I expected some reflection after each activity that might guide the students when reading this years later as to the challenges one might face in implementing some of these activities and a list of the required supplies.  In short I expected them to make a binder like mine 9similar to how the authors say that we often expect students to write as if they were experts in the field).  I got some beautiful binders and I got some terrible ones.  Students had the necessary sections but just threw all their work together.  I doubted they would keep it and years later refer to it when teaching prime numbers and looking for a good activity.  The next time arund I was much more specific about what the binder should entail.  I explained its purpose (to serve as a resource when you begin teaching).  I even brought in a few of my old ones for students to leaf through.  The results were much, much better.

Now that you have some info about the chapters and my own connection to them I should touch on my official assignment which was to consider the Rose assignment in light of the chapter on how to develop good writing assignments.  I think Rose made clear what the writing should entail thought perhaps the purpose might have been a bit more fleshed out.  I suppose it’s clear enough in that it says we are applying a classification scheme but I wonder if some note as to why one would want to do this in the first place might help.  The idea of scaffolding assignments is in there too.  The author noted brief in class writing around this topic that precedes the actual assignment I described.  Rose notes that time is spent on vocabulary and on lower stakes writing first.  Finally I think that Rose considers his students in that he adds a secondary option for students which is to use their own experiences as immigrants (those that can, obviously) and apply the classification scheme to that.  This clearly builds on students experiences, centers the work around their experiences and values these students as experts in the area of immigrants and their stories.  I don’t quite recall that in the chapter on developing good writing assignments but it does seem like a valuable thing to do.