A Generalizable Approach: The Apprenticeship Model

Teaching with writing almost always means teaching writing, and teaching writing tends to involve, e.g., in Expos courses here at Harvard, a version of the "apprenticeship model." According to this model, students learn how to approach an actual writing assignment through the lens of the particular skills they'll need to succeed at it. Generally speaking, the model follows a cycle that looks like this:

1. Start with introducing a writing prompt that includes goals and addresses the purpose of the assignment (i.e., Here's where we're headed and here's why it's worth doing)
2. Then introduce a concept or skill needed to get started with the assignment (e.g., summarizing a reading or identifying the assumptions and/or implications of reading's main claims)
3. And offer models that illustrate better and less good examples of that concept
4. Next, students get the chance to practice what they've learned by applying the new concept or skill (e.g., drafting a summary or raising questions about the assumptions of a source's argument)
5. Finally, students get feedback (from the instructor, or from peers in small groups) on what they've done, and maybe get the chance to revise things and/or reflect on principles for making improvements.

Sequencing and Scaffolding Assignments: Wash, Rinse, Repeat the Model

Depending on the complexity of the assignment this cycle might end after one iteration, or it might repeat itself a number of times, bringing in additional skills with each pass and leading up to something like a research essay. Either way, the process is always, at its best, incremental and cumulative. That is, each pass through the model takes up an individual skill and then puts that skill into combinations with the skills that have previously been learned for that assignment. When all of the core skills needed for a given assignment are accounted for and presented in the best order, our activities are as well sequenced—and the assignment as a whole as well scaffolded—as possible.

Applying the Model to the Assignments You're Teaching: The Broad Brush Strokes of Writing Assignments

This can seem easier said than done, but the good news with academic writing is that the broad brush strokes of most assignments are the same. Whether you're teaching a shorter essay or a large research project, you're mostly helping your students on a journey that goes from:

1. Reviewing the prompt and framing the learning experience
2. Engaging with raw material (readings, lectures, data)
3. Turning raw material to evidence for analysis (developing a thesis or hypothesis)
4. Lending a form to evidence-based analysis (identifying the best genre to present your argument or findings)
5. Realizing a full draft
6. Revising (instructor/peer feedback, reverse outlining, etc.)
7. Reflecting on the learning experience (instructor feedback, cover letters)

For shorter essays, this journey might last a week or two. Indeed, you might be asking students to do something more like a summary or a response paper that they'll be submitting for the next class. On the other end of the spectrum, your students might begin the early portions of a capstone assignment in the first weeks of class. In that case, the journey will have its own sub-journeys and take most of the semester.

In the subpages of this section (Formative Assignments, Summary, Single-Source Analysis, etc.), we'll take the apprenticeship model and the broad brush strokes outlined here and use them to provide templates for teaching some of the most common genres of academic writing assignments. If you're just teaching students the ins and outs of summary, you can go straight there. As you'll see, though: the more complex genres (research project, multi-modal project) are themselves extensions of and combinations of the less complex ones, and with that in mind each subpage will offer some guidance on how to teach the different genres in sequences that are themselves effectively scaffolded.