Making Writing
September 1, 2019
I’d just wrapped a mini-lesson on using evidence to support a claim. The writers that filled up the room were shifting away from our meeting spot and toward the back of the room, where an assortment of loose parts awaited them: blocks and marbles, LEGO and clay, buttons and string, paint chips and paper clips. Pebbles. Acorns. A deck of cards. Markers.
There were other things as well–a wide assortment of materials for students who were not my own.
Students whose languages I did not speak.
They knew what they were to do: Make a claim about something unfair in your community, I’d challenged them. Be ready to explain your structure and the meaning inside of it. You have twenty minutes to build. Go.
Marielle scooped up a handful of blocks and several marbles. Three paint chips. The queen of hearts. A slender tube of clay.
In the space of two minutes, she used the blocks to build three houses, resting red paint chips in front of two of them and a blue chip in front of the last house in the tidy row she’d created. I noticed that the houses with the red chips were very close to one another, but the house with the blue chip was set far apart. This seemed intentional, and I wanted to know more.
“Tell me what you’re making,” I said.
“This is like my neighborhood right now. Well, just a piece of it. In this house, there is a mother, a father, and a baby. They love each other, and the neighbors love them. Love is red. In the second house, there is a mother all by herself and a baby. They love each other, and the neighbors love them. So, another red chip. Love is red. But in the third house, there’s just two women. They’re married. They have no baby. And no one talks to them. People don’t know them. They stay away. Blue is cold. So, I picked a blue card. People talk about these women. They say mean things.”
I nodded, and then I asked Marielle if she was ready to make a claim.
“If we don’t know people, we can’t love them,” she said, pointing out the distance between the first two houses on the street and the third, where the two married women lived. “And we need to be loving to people in order to know them. So love is not just what happens after we know people. Love is what we have to do first,” she explained, moving all three of the houses closer to one another and placing the queen of hearts beside them.
“That is a beautiful claim,” I sighed, wondering where her argument might take her. “How do you hope your writing will change people, Marielle? What do you hope they will do with this information?”
“I want people to be loving to those they don’t know,” she said, rolling the clay along the table and then working it with her hands.
“How?” I asked. “What would that look like?”
She shrugged, placing the clay on the table in front of her. She sized it up, waiting for it to reveal something to her. She didn’t know how to respond to me. Yet. “I want to learn about what we do to love people who are far away from us. People who are different,” she said. “How do we move closer? How do we turn the blue to red?”
And so, Marielle had a claim. What’s more, an argument was beginning to take shape right in front of her. She was thinking metaphorically, and I suspected this: If I’d asked Marielle to complete the same task using a pen or a pencil or a keyboard instead of loose parts, she would have only scribbled the simplest of claims, if she offered anything at all.
And I would have assumed that she wasn’t capable.
I would have assumed that she could not write.
Instead, I documented the fact that she met the expected learning target for that day’s lesson, and then I began to prompt the use of print. Her ability to use it well would be documented separately. Eventually. When it was time.
“Jot down as much of what you told me as possible,” I smiled, pushing an index card toward her. “We don’t want to lose your great ideas.”
Before the bell rang at the end of our 43 minute class period, Marielle jotted a note that listed the most essential elements of her claim. She explained her color choices. She sketched something that reminded her of the distance between the houses, too. She captured the structure and the meaning behind her build, but she wasn’t using complete sentences yet.
And that was okay. She’d crafted a foundation that was far more complex than anything she might have had I demanded the use of print this early in the process. I knew she’d build onto it tomorrow and that the structure and the meaning that loose parts enabled would find it’s way onto the page if I took care to bridge her there.
Bit by bit.
Not draft by draft.
This is what it looks like when we make writing.
I’ve used this question to start many different conversations with many different teachers and the young writers that they support in recent years. Some responses validated my own experiences and thinking, and some of them pushed and even challenged it.
Hard.
Here’s what I’m learning, from my work on the ground, inside of the spaces where others have begun this work:
When I got serious about creating more inclusive workshop environments, I committed to seeking diverse perspectives. I pushed myself out of the familiar bubble of writing and workshop experts that grew me into the young writer and teacher that I initially became. I moved my workshop out of the public school setting. I started reading outside of my echo chamber. Then, I began connecting myself to those who not only challenged my thinking but who taught me how to see myself better.
They taught me that my writing workshop was not a neutral space and that I–that all of us, in fact–are biased practitioners. They challenged me to consider this and to do better work here.
I was drawn to design thinking because it rooted me in empathy first–as a writer and as a teacher. My studies uncovered tangible approaches that helped me transform my practices. More important, they put me in professional circles with other teachers who are striving to become increasingly empathetic themselves. In these circles, empathy is an action, not merely a feeling. And this changed everything for me.
We often hear that making isn’t a movement but a culture, and it’s true. Don’t you find yourself wondering how to create culture, though? I used to think it was all about shifting them–the makers and writers I support. And it is.
But, it’s also about me, too.
I began inviting writers to use mediums and modalities other than print because they were dragging me there, quite literally. Some even kicked and cried each time I invited them to put down print. These writers were resistant to pencil, paper, and keyboard, but more than willing to tinker and play with other materials and tools, including blocks and paint and voice and movement and music. I had no idea where they were going, but I was willing to watch them, listen, and learn.
Practicing empathy–following these writers without lowering my expectations for them– illuminated my own blind spots. When I started offering everyone abundant and wildly diverse materials to write with, it made me realize just how much I was imposing my own biases on those whose experiences, cultural histories, and fluencies were very, very different–but no less complex or worthy–than my own.
This was when I discovered that our writing workshops are not neutral spaces. They’re reflections of each designer’s culture, values, and perspectives. My early workshops, curriculum, instructional practices, and assessments were a reflection of me and the giants whose shoulders I stood on. I created them after studying best practices and making a few assumptions about what my students needed or wanted. This wasn’t a bad thing, but it wasn’t enough, and it still isn’t.
If you’re the primary designer in your own world, no amount of inviting others to visit will make it any less of a reflection of you. No amount of inviting others to visit will make them feel at home there, either.
I learned this from experience. It was, and it remains–humbling.
I’m reminded of the first time I planned to offer loose parts to writers inside of my own writing workshop. I was a skeptic then and the kind of teacher who taught from the front of the room. My mini-lessons were teacher-centered, and although I would have argued if accused of this then–so was the process I moved writers through. Nonetheless, I began trying to use a bunch of loose parts that I was not particularly comfortable with to create my own argument, absent of print. I was doing this because every single “resistant” writer that I supported at the time was identifying as a maker of some kind, and I was convinced that if they could make writing somehow, I’d be able to engage them. So, I tried this myself. And I was out of my element. Confused. Even a bit afraid. And I noticed a bit of defensiveness rising up in me.
This was when I began to understand just how impossible writing might be for those whose preferred tools are not pen or pencil or keyboard. This was also when I began to understand how threatened chirographically biased writers and teachers might be by the suggestion that writing must be distinguished from print. What’s chirographic bias? It’s the belief that print is the superior mode of expression and that those who use it are somehow more intelligent than those who are fluent in other modes.
This work has helped me understand writing, writers, and most crucially–myself–in ways that I would not have, otherwise. It’s also tempered the curse of expertise that’s been a regular threat throughout my career. It’s made me a life-long and uncertain learner, and it’s this, I’ve realized 26 years in, that has made me a real teacher. Not my certainty, my expertise, or my accomplishments. My uncertainty. My humility. The awareness of the fact that I need to know more and the fear that I might be doing it wrong. That I’m always doing it wrong. And I am. Here’s the icing on that cake, though: I’m never bored, and I’m never burned out, and I’ve made such incredible friendships along the way.
I’m wondering if this kind of thing has happened to you, because I want it to. For your students, and for you. If it hasn’t, how might you provoke it?
Some (like me) find it powerful to reflect on questions like these. My own answers offered new and different perspectives about who I am as a teacher, why I do what I do the way that I do it, and how it might be serving or hurting others.
When we make writing, we begin to widen our assessment aperture. We see more, and we are intentional about seeing better. I’ve invited writers at the middle and high school levels to reflect quietly and independently on the questions above. I’ve let them know that they need not share their responses with others, but that they are welcome to, if they choose. I’ve also made it clear that the work of all writing teachers is to see their students.
How might we do that better?
I’ve asked that of students, and I’ll ask it of you, too: How do we get beneath the surface of things with our students? How do we begin to see who they are as humans, where they really come from, and what they truly want and need?
I’m not sure that it’s enough to write a Where I’m From piece at the start of the year, and I think this is far bigger than the basic All About Me project. Multicultural days and food festivals and the celebration of diverse holidays aren’t helping, and I know they aren’t helping because when I was in the classroom, I was the QUEEN of this kind of thing. For a few years after, I helped other teachers organize the same. It didn’t help.
Fifteen years later, here’s what seems to be, though: STORY.
Story helps. The stories we tell about ourselves as writers and teachers, and the stories we invite students to share. The ones they make. The narratives they build.
I believe this.
I believe it because too many young writers and the teachers who love them–the ones who have been willing to take some risks with me over the last few years–they’ve shown me, time and again, that story is a part of every kind of great writing, and inviting people to use mediums and modalities other than print brings those stories to life.
It brings them to those who need to hear them most, too.
How might we use questions like the ones I’ve shared above to help young writers make stories that matter? How might we help them find their audiences for those stories? How might those stories, on the hearts of the right audiences, make a real difference in this world?
Each Sunday this month, I plan to share some new thinking about how we approach narrative writing in our classrooms and workshops. And WHY. I promise tangible tools. Lessons. Resources. And I’ll be sure to offer ideas that appeal to primary, intermediate, middle, and high school writers and teachers alike. If you’re interested in learning more about the ideas I’ve shared here and how to make them actionable, stop by. I’m but one person, all. All of us need to hear from you.