Death or the Desk

I am by no means a morning person, but I will occasionally wake up at a decent time when it is for something important. This past week I found myself lucky enough to receive the opportunity to write with some other great teachers at the Kentucky Writing Project Summer Institute in Lexington, Kentucky, and although that meant driving a much longer distance than I really cared to drive each morning, I would have complained a lot less if I had known at the beginning of the week how much I was to have grown as a writer, educator, and person by the end of this experience. I hope that I can share some of those experiences here as well as what they mean to me on so many levels.

Creating those meaningful learning experiences is what all of the National Writing Project affiliates do on a consistent basis no matter the venue or length of time they use to build that meaning. I knew this as I walked into the space at the Kentucky Educational Development Corporation site in Lexington, and although I knew I would recognize several of the participants involved in this great work, I started this week wanting to be changed by the process. I felt a similar energy animate the other nine or ten teachers in the room even though we taught different levels and often in different places. A shared weeklong writing experience represented the perfect mechanism by which we could all celebrate student writing and student work together.

One of the very first things we did was create a Writer’s Notebook that would serve as a receptacle for our journey over the next few days. Such a simple tool offers a great method for organization as well as an easy physical collection of writing samples that may remind students of the development of their ideas, thoughts, and creativity throughout the course of a term with them. As I found myself decorating and recording practices in this notebook throughout the week, I found myself asking myself why I had never considered setting up student notebooks (or related writing “theme notebooks”) in such a way, but I did not discover any answers other than that I am an idiot suitable explanations.

And simplicity remained an easy enough theme that continued through the rest of our learning. Since I am a grammar enthusiast, my mind nearly exploded when we dived into a method for grammar instruction based on mentor sentences and mentor texts that was again so easy to incorporate into any existing curricular structure that I was nearly upset that I had not considered doing so in my own classes. We already have texts we hope to use within each of our courses, so why would we not make use of the great examples for writing we are using to correct the error of presenting them with so many incorrect examples that they then have to fix, often without even knowing how to do so? Even just subtle shifts like these in our understanding of what our students know how to do under our tutelage can return extreme gains in their comprehension of and abilities to use language successfully.

The end of the week only emphasized another simple strategy that I had used before, though its placement in our work this week allowed it to remain fresh in my mind: Writing Walkabouts. This method by which a teacher or leader takes students to a location where they want their students to respond to something or things via writing creates another low-stakes environment where students feel free to explore via whatever format they feel is appropriate for that time and place. Writers must ground themselves within that place and time and understand that the circumstances that led to them being there may never bring them there in the same way again. They must embrace the power of their own creativity to see what they can create with the limited amount of time that they have. We did a Writing Walkabout in the Singletary Center for the Arts on the University of Kentucky’s campus, gathering first together to write in this new space before breaking off into our own individual paths to see where the writing took us. When we returned to discuss the effects this trip had on us, we composed a poem together where we each supplied a line to arrive at some greater meaning; none of us knew where this poem would end our week, but we all knew from whence it had arisen. The potential to reach that center of power exists within each one of us as a teacher, and it exists within each of our students if we are strong enough to show them how to reach their own ideas.

For that was one of the points of this week—to make sure we as teachers knew the power of the writing we need our students to do so that we could return Prometheus-style to our schools to propagate it in our own communities. Teachers are no strangers to taking part in learning sessions over the summer, and I do look forward to the chance to take part in professional development that I have chosen for myself as part of my own career trajectory. As a teacher I know I have to find new learning and new strategies not only to add to my repertoire but also to keep my instruction interesting to myself, too. Perhaps more importantly, efforts like this can also keep instruction fun long before I have to worry about burnout souring what should be a beautiful enterprise of the human spirit. I continue to be glad that other teachers and a coworker joined me for this wonderful adventure that even days later will not allow me to settle my mind yet!