Customer Reviews

Teaching Writing As Reflective Practice: Integrating Theories (Language and Literacy Series (Teachers College Pr))

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In TEACHING WRITING AS REFLEXIVE PRACTICE, George Hillocks asks, "What is involved in the efficient teaching of writing?" His book is his attempt to provide a metatheory that would be useful to secondary and college teachers of English. His metatheory, however, does not become evident until very nearly the end of his book. He begins with an overview of the nature of writing and what constitutes effective teaching. After a lengthy digression on Plato's condemnation of writing and Derrida's deconstruction of writing, Hillocks says in essence that good writing is much like good pornography. One knows it when one sees it but cannot define its instrinsic nature. Writing, to Hillocks, is discursive, much like a self-looping computer program. Here he is on firm ground as the implications for providing what he later calls "zones of proximal development" make writing a series of graded steps in which the writer draws on past experiences to combine with present cognitive apprehensions of those experiences to create a hitherto future scenario that itself represents a set of gateway activities that he believes each teacher of writing ought to use.

In order to reach that level that this teacher of writing must use this same teacher must continually engage in recursive activities, much like that looping program, that have to define and evaluate goals and theories that may have been effective in the past but are now considered passe. Hillocks admits that it would be a neat paradigmatic trick to bridge the gap between the qualitative and quantitative approaches to the teaching of writing. He suggests that this split need not be insurmountable. He mentions tools to do this but his ability to make these tools accessible is limited by his penchant to avoid the simple explanation in favor of the dense one.

His best points involve telling the reader what he probably well knew anyway. When a low level writer is engaged in a graded series of steps such that he will be provided with support, then that reader/writer will probably improve. Hillocks adds that it is crucial to withdraw this support so that the writer may become creatively independent in future writing activities. This twist should not have been buried as an afterthought before deciding that Vygotsky should have been given credit for the idea in 1978.

Most of Hillocks' book is heavy on theory and jargon. He makes his best points when he abandons the professor's lectern and talks to his readers as if they know something about metacognitive theories of writing but probably not a whole lot. When he admonishes teachers who focus primarily on the audience in the writer, audience, and writing trio of writing, I wish that he would have taken his own good advice and focus less on the expected audience of psycholinguistics and more on the good old-fashioned art of saying what you mean in the fewest words possible.

Hillocks outlines well the "whole" territory (or the main important parts) of "what is involved in the successful teaching of writing." The idea of "inquiry" and "discourse" as the double helix of what writing entails seems particularly useful to me. This was coupled well with the admonition that particular writing tasks can be broken down into their salient features, and those features can be taught both in terms of what they are (teaching features of "discourse") and of how to create them (teaching processes of "inquiry").

One of the strengths of the book is that Hillocks provides many practical and concrete examples for what he is talking about. These include descriptions of particular assignments, transcripts of student discussions, and other narratives from inside and outside the classroom. These work well to balance the critique of some that the book is a bit inaccessible.

The book is at times dense and jargon-filled, such that I think that those who already know something of composition theory will benefit most. But even for those who don't, if they are reasonably skilled readers, the book is not too dense to read; the jargon is always carefully explained. This "density" seems necessary in order for Hillocks to reach the level of abstraction necessary for a "metatheory" of writing that can be useful in many contexts.

The book emphasizes active learning and collaborative learning. It emphasizes designing and sequencing practical concrete writing activities. It also emphasizes, as the title indicates, reflection on teaching during planning, while in action teaching, and after a teaching session. These reflections, Hillocks maintains, ought to take place within a working framework or theory of what writing entails, like the one the book lays out.