✏️ Mental Model: Questions in Containers

Last July I drafted a quick infographic as a mental model for creating writing tasks. Since then life happened—I scripted workshops, we welcomed our second child, and I’ve, uh, not slept much.

With summer break finally here, I'm dusting off the idea and hopefully I can expand months of notes.

How do you design writing tasks? As a mental model, I picture questions in containers. No matter what, the written word helps explore questions. But as we code the spoken word to the written word, James Moffett mused we code into something. Thus, we must decide medium.

Since most classrooms skew towards formulaic writing, from acronyms to five-paragraph essays, this question gets skipped. And since we learn best through contrast, kids manage to fail essays themselves. (I described this in detail in my post “Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist.”)

Once you have a question to explore, you may as well proceed through a flow chart to plan the task itself:

• What is the medium? What is the predominant text structure?

• Is the audience familiar or formal?

• What is the required length? How long will students write?

As I write, I’d love to write a two-parter exploring the anatomy of a good question as well as designing tasks themselves. And maybe that part will come first. Once you have your question in mind, the other aspects are like simple setting changes on a computer.

Anyways, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, that’s about all I have to say about that. 🤷‍♂️