Connecting reading and writing

While I am learning about teaching reading and writing basically for the first time in this course and the last one, I am still, well, feeling ill-prepared to actually put it into action.
In the last course I wondered if I ever had taken a class on teaching reading. I actually hauled out my transcript yesterday and - no, I did not take any classes on actually teaching reading, or writing in earning my history-teaching degree/licensure. Seems odd in hindsight, but my classes were mostly history content related with just a sprinkling of methods classes. My second licensure (now woefully out of date) is actually in media technology - so I did mess around with the stuff in the library - but still, not actually teaching reading. harrumph!
Anyway, the structures I read about in the last class for note-taking and such are great and so far what I am reading in Kucer and Burns is interesting - a foreign language in some ways, because the earliest grade I have taught was 9th. The (false) expectation that 9th graders are literate has defined much of how I teach.

Okay, okay, what to do with this. It seems from what I have read that a lot of the writing assignments discussed are more free flow, less formal, and more personally expressive than critical analysis, or document based analysis. These latter two forms of writing are what I, and the State of NC, believe my 10th graders should be doing in the course I teach. The latter two forms are also what the College Board believes my 12th grade AP students should be doing as well. And I probably could build skills with this IF all of my students had teachers following Burns and Kucer K-8, but that is not the case.

90 minutes/day, 16 weeks, fifteen year olds. The challenge in isolation seems overwhelming and impossible.

Yes, yes, it takes a whole school to teach each child. The image of the onion, the layers and the term conundrum comes to mind.