Write It First

What happened when teachers completed their own assignments

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

One of the central features of my third book, The Confidence to Write: A Guide for Overcoming Fear and Developing Identity as a Writer, is a series of MetaWrites, prompts that invite students and teachers to write about writing or about their identity as writers.

Each summer the Kentucky Writing Project hosts a week-long writing institute where teachers write and engage in teacher inquiry about their teaching practice. Before this year, we invited teachers to take the Kentucky state on-demand writing assessment for Grade 11 students. This was always a nerve-wracking, yet eye-opening experiment.

However, as our state writing assessment has been nixed in favor of more authentic writing assessments, we have changed this activity and invited this year’s participants to select a writing task they assign to their students and write it themselves.

The activity asks teachers not only to compose a piece of writing for this assignment, but to keep a running record of their thoughts and feelings while they write–hence, a meta-write. What does the inner dialogue of experienced teachers sound like when they become novice writers again? A lot like their students.

We take one afternoon to do this activity. Before they start writing, I ask them to record how they feel and what they are thinking in anticipation of the writing. Then I stop them 15 minutes into writing and then again 45 minutes into writing, and then when they are finished writing, I ask them to reflect again on how they are feeling and what they are thinking. When they are finished, I collect the reflections and compile them (without names) in a handout we analyze the following day. Here are the trends:

Before

• anxious

• nervous

• excited

Pit Stop #1

• Where am I going?

• I need a structure.

• Am I doing this right?

Pit Stop #2

• My hand hurts.

• I have too much.

• This question isn’t working.

After

• exhausted.

• unsatisfied.

• ready to revise

There was one teacher whose reflections I thought were particularly revelatory. She asks her students to write a literary analysis that argues for which character in the novel they read changes the most over the course of the novel.

I am feeling a little overwhelmed and slightly regretting my choice of assignments. But I also know I can complete it. If I feel like this, how do my students feel when they have to complete the same task?

I wrote a FIVE PARAGRAPH ESSAY. I also kept trying to remember details and used some that were not important to the essay. My hand hurts.

OMG, I used too much info not relevant. Questioning my question. DID he change? Should I change this requirement? I wrote too fast and now I feel ridiculous.. My hand still hurts.

Awful. How can I change this to be more beneficial? Should it be a paper? Should it be a test? I want to let my hand sleep.

In the classroom, teachers often see writing as evaluators, but not as writers. This activity asks them to take that on. What surprised me wasn’t that teachers found the assignments difficult. What surprised me was how quickly their questions shifted from “Will I be able to do this?” to “How can I help my students do this?”

Before school starts back in August, choose one writing task you ask your students to do and sit down and write a model essay yourself. Give yourself the same parameters you offer your students and keep a running record of your thinking and feeling through the composition.

You will know when a prompt asks too much because you will be wrestling with it in real time. When you see the fatigue, the false starts, the overthinking, the impulse to quit in your students, you will remember those from your own experience.

This revelation is exactly the purpose of the activity. Not to make you doubt your choices, but so you can coach your students toward the writing from a position of experience, not authority. Completing our own assignments doesn’t make us better writers; it makes us better teachers.