Inquiry Based Creative Writing

As a follow-up to my renewed effort to place the journal at the center of the writing process, I'm trying to create a more self-directed second unit in my creative writing classes. Fortunately, I have a lot of experience with project-based learning. I did some research on this in my graduate work and I've taught AP Capstone Seminar for many years now, which is 100% project-based.

When it comes to importing these ideals into the Creative Writing classroom, I've been stuck on how to do much of anything. How can students ask questions about writing in a meaningful way? How can students select their own texts for reading and their own writing tasks to grow those skills? It all seems a little too esoteric to just hand the wheels over to students and say, "go."

My solution was inspired by, of all things, Springboard. I remembered that College Board's Units were often driven by a pair of questions. One about a theme and one about a writing task. I pulled a bunch of models from old Teacher Editions, buffed and bent them to my means and printed out a sheet of examples.

After they had selected groups, Day 1 of Inquiry Based Creative Writing looked like this:

• Students entered to folders on their tables: placing instructions on their tables decenters instruction away from me and the front of the room - the learning is happening in front of them, at their shared group space
• In the folder, students encountered directions that included:

1. an overview of the context for me pushing them into student-directed inquiry and the purpose of them writing questions
2. A run-down of what actual, concrete product they would turn-in by the end of the period. For this I wanted them to write two essential questions as well as a group mission statement and what their final product would be (what did they imagine writing at the end of this project?)

• I also provided sample research question sets (pulled from Springboard as I said above), qualities of a good research questions (I started with the AP Seminar qualities of a good question and heavily changed it to apply more readily to this type of creative inquiry), a list of common themes across literature (to help with writing question 1) and finally a list of literary devices (to help with writing question 2)

And to prove that it worked, here are some of the question sets that my student groups wrote all on their own:

How can foreshadowing play into a story without giving anything away? How can general villainy be turned into something redeemable by not undermining the character's bad nature in the beginning of a story?

How does our current society stigmatize aging and growing up? How can we take objects and ideas and descriptively bring them to life?

How does prejudice fuel rebellion? How can personal experiences be used to further character development?

How does your autonomy affect your sense of identity? How can a writer build a dynamic scene?

How much does reality have to change before it becomes fantasy? To what extent can writers mix escapism and reality?

Successful first step? Proof is in the (question) posing, I'd say.