As a high school teacher I often see myself as an attention wrangler, an attention matador if you will. The students, the bull, my sage lesson and literary wisdom, the red muleta I use to lure them in. Except in this metaphor the bull often doesn’t notice the muleta. Instead the bull opens their chromebook and searches for anything else to do that doesn’t involve chasing the muleta. Then I, the matador, am left wondering where I went wrong. I thought bulls were supposed to like muletas. And since when can bulls use a computer?

I’m getting lost in thought here, which is a good thing. As I write, I find that getting lost and navigating my way through my thinking is what makes writing a worthwhile pursuit.

In today’s break neck paced world, mindful thinking appears to be at an all time low. I see this daily in my high school classroom. A majority of my students are only motivated to academically perform when they have quantifiable skin in the game (a grade). Is this typical of their age group? I would argue yes, but I have a hard time accepting that truth.

Quality writing necessitates a profound level of thoughtful brainpower to compose. A writer must access their funds of knowledge, they must sort that knowledge, and they must generate and arrange words to communicate that knowledge. It is mental gymnastics, and in my experience, even if students aren’t aware of the brainpower required to craft their thoughts, once they feel that first mental hurdle, they cramp up and retreat. As their coach it is my responsibility to make sure they keep running despite the inevitable discomfort.

In that spirit, I decided to do something that may help them notice their walking patterns. Once they understand their steps, they can build themselves up from a walk to a jog to a run. Developing an awareness creates clarity. The technical term for developing this awareness is called metacognition.

In Kate Chaterdon’s Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning and Academic Writing, she outlines how metacognition allows a writer to develop an awareness of their decision-making process. When a writer shifts from asking how to write and instead asks why and how they arrived at what they wrote, it “translates to questions like: What moves do I make, as a writer, to meet the needs of my audience or genre? Am I effective at meeting their needs? Are there things I could do differently? What do I do well?” (Chaterdon 2019). Given the levels of decision making that crafting complex writing requires, it makes sense that understanding the why behind that decision making would be helpful. If I understand how the plane I’m flying works, I’m better able to fly the damn thing.

To cultivate this self-awareness, I developed a strategy called the Stoplight method. This method requires three highlighters (green, yellow, red) and a physical piece of writing. What the students do with these highlighters is flexible based on the learning intention, but the main idea is that the students are asked to color code their writing. Green signals confidence. Yellow signals indifference. Red signals dissatisfaction. As the students highlight their work, they are able to see a physical indication of their writerly command. The highlighting plants the metacognitive questions in their head without needing to be asked directly.

“Why don’t I like this part?”

“I really like this part! How can I create this elsewhere?”

“Eh, I don’t really get this part. What purpose does it serve?”

Will all students ask these questions of themself? Probably not, but that’s where further scaffolds (handouts, prompts, verbal cues) come into play.

During my Teacher Workshop, I had my fellow teachers highlight a free-write they composed earlier in the lesson. Once they finished marking their text, I had them conference with a partner to discuss their color coding with one another. The results were telling and reflective of the research I conducted prior to the workshop. They shifted from discussing the content of the writing toward the thinking that went into the writing they produced. They were thinking metacognitively.

Once the focus of reviewing one’s writing shifts toward understanding the thought that went into the writing, I am confident students will be able to see the craft of writing through a less abstract, more approachable, objective lens.

How will I measure progress of this approach in the coming school year? I expect progress by the end of the school year, as shifting students’ thought patterns and translating that thinking into markedly improved writing will not occur overnight.

Joining the GMWP, conducting this research, and developing this strategy has reinforced the concept that learning belongs to the student. It is my job to provide them the space to expand their ability to think critically for themselves, and I firmly believe creating an awareness of how and why one writes the way they do is a strong step toward building confident, autonomous writers. Moving forward, I plan to bring my findings forward to my department, and eventually to my entire staff in some professional development format.

I close my eyes and I can see it now. I’m standing in front of my colleagues with a box of highlighters in one arm and a matador’s red muleta in the other, luring them to give my ideas a shot. If you were sitting in the audience, would you? Think about it.

Works Cited and Further Reading

Boston University. (n.d.). Metacognition in the writing classroom. Boston University Teaching Writing. https://www.bu.edu/teaching-writing/resources-for-teaching-writing/guides-tips/metacognition-in-the-writing-classroom/

Chaterdon, K. (2019). Writing into awareness: How metacognitive awareness can be encouraged through contemplative teaching practices. Across the Disciplines, 16(1), 50–65. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/contemplative/chaterdon2019.pdf

Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning. (2018). Metacognition. Columbia University. https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/metacognition/

Driscoll, D. L., & Wells, J. (2020). Metacognition and transfer: Reflective thinking as a catalyst for writing development. In Writing knowledge transfer: Reimagining the road to transfer (pp. 215–233). The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/cognition/chapter11.pdf

Marano, G., Kotzalidis, G. D., Lisci, F. M., Anesini, M. B., Rossi, S., Barbonetti, S., Cangini, A., Ronsisvalle, A., Artuso, L., Falsini, C., Caso, R., Mandracchia, G., Brisi, C., Traversi, G., Mazza, O., Pola, R., Sani, G., Mercuri, E. M., Gaetani, E., & Mazza, M. (2025). The neuroscience behind writing: Handwriting vs. typing — Who wins the battle? Life, 15(3), 345. https://doi.org/10.3390/life15030345

McCormick, C. M., & Telzer, E. H. (2024). The adolescent brain: A second window of opportunity for learning and adaptation. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 69, 101447. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2024.101447

Piekny, J., & Maehler, C. (2014). Development of abstract thinking during childhood and adolescence: The role of rostrolateral prefrontal cortex. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 10, 57–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2014.07.009

“Wait, What am I Trying to Say?” was originally published in GMWP: Greater Madison Writing Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I first was posed with the opportunity to do this Teachers Workshop I was in the midst of grading essays written by students in my Know Your Rights class, and through this process, I had watched students delete comments in Google Docs as I sent them in. I found this infuriating, because of course it was, I was working hard on this feedback only for them to figuratively throw it away. I would stew at my desk, thinking: Is it my fault? Is my feedback bad? Are they just not ready to accept the feedback? Whatever was going through their heads, it became clear to me that there was a barrier there, there was an issue I could attempt to resolve, and if there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s this: I love puzzles.

When you first type “feedback in the classroom” into Google there are an overwhelming amount of resources that pop up onto your screen. And, at one point I just had to pick some books that seemed promising and hoped that they would turn out for me, thankfully Google was kind. Specifically, I learned a lot from teachers and their research like Starr Sackstein’s Peer Feedback in the Classroom, Matthew Johnson’s Flash Feedback, and Susan Brookhart’s How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students. These three educators are not only practiced practitioners of giving effective feedback in their classrooms, but they are also activists for student-directed classrooms and curriculum. Oh how it feels to be seen! I came away from this research realizing that, yes, part of feedback is about how you as the teacher give feedback, but perhaps the more important part, is how you create a classroom environment where feedback is not only welcomed and encouraged, but expected by students–where it’s a part of the culture. My plan (or rather hope) is that I can cultivate this culture of feedback and revision in my classroom, that students can expect feedback and then know what to do with it. This will not just sprout up out of nothing and will in fact take a lot of forethought on my part, but I’ve never backed away from a challenge.

Through my research, I came to the realization that my initial frustration with revision and students accepting feedback was likely because students didn’t know how to revise. I thought about my high school experience: Did anyone teach me how to revise? I came to the conclusion that students either didn’t have the strategies, hadn’t had someone model revision, or did not understand the rubric in the first place. So my plan is to remove the barriers. I want to teach, explicitly, about what the standards are that I’m grading them on: What does tone mean, what does it mean to write to an audience? I want to conference on polished writing projects with students where they take notes and return to those notes time and again. I have plans to model how to take feedback and how to implement revision strategies into one’s own work. I want to show them that the writing process is never really over, and also that no writer is perfect. My intention with all of this is to increase student engagement and accountability, but also to ensure that everyone has equitable access to the skills necessary to be successful in my classroom.

I have always been a teacher focused strongly on equity and students in front of me, that’s why I’m a teacher, as I’m sure that was the journey for many of you as well. Sometimes, a lot of times, I find myself getting lost in the dark; of feeling like I’ll never be good enough, in wondering if my students are learning the right or correct amount of information in my classroom, that I’m not preparing them for what comes after. This research has reminded me that I have the ability to grow my own practice: I saw a problem and I wanted to know how I could try to fix it, so I found the books and I did the research (not that I think I now have the equation for world peace, I’m taking it one step at a time). There will always be issues that arise in the classroom, teaching will always be a fraught profession, remember that you have the power and ability to make that important change in your classroom; so try something new, maybe something crazy and out of the box. Your students may love it, they may hate it, but hey, we all make mistakes sometimes, and our students need to see us do that every now and then.

Creating a Classroom Culture of Feedback & Revision was originally published in GMWP: Greater Madison Writing Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means for a child to see themselves as a writer — especially when that child is sitting next to kids several years older or younger. This past school year, my teaching skills made a big stretch from doing intensive Tier 3 interventions with students in K-3 to being an ELA instructor with students spanning 7th to 12th grade. It’s been quite the pivot.

Koshkonong Trails School (part of the School District of Cambridge) not only boasts students spanning from 7th grade to 12th grade, but is also place-based, project-based and environmentally-focused. Think one-room schoolhouse except we have three classrooms, a kitchen/library, indoor plumbing and is housed at the Severson Learning Center, 80-acres of land that is farmed, forested, cultivated for gardening and cares for llamas, goats, ducks and chickens. This is my first year at KT, but not my first year teaching at a school this unique. Recent past instruction at KT has been inconsistent and centered away from our students. At the beginning of this year, nearly all students did not identify as a reader or a writer. I was essentially starting from scratch and scrambled to give extra scoops in all the basics — spelling and morphology, book clubs, writing an argumentative essay.

Reflecting on last school year, I came to my coaching session for my GMWP Summer Institute Teacher Workshop with a question: How do I support a writing identity for multi-age groups? There were absolutely things I LOVED about teaching writing last year, and there were things I NEVER want to do again. It was a learning year for both myself and my students, and I realized it was an opportunity to reimagine how literacy instruction could be for my students. What if I, like Luke Reynolds, imagined it better? What growth would I see for students if I cultivated a writing identity? In particular, what if I embraced supporting that identity in a multi-age group rather than trying to backwards design a curriculum to support all of them while also burning me out?

Thus, my research began. Or returned, I should say. I started with the thesis from my action research project during my graduate program: building confidence for writers using M.A.K. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) theory (Derewianka, 2016) and Ken Hyland’s “Genre-based Pedagogies” (2003) to approach instruction. While the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted that work, I had a starting point for how I could move forward with supporting writing identity. I also had previous experience from teaching in a similar setting for most of my early career. I had spent time working in another project-based, environmentally-focused, multi-age school where I had successfully used several strategies to cultivate a writing identity — the workshop model, writer’s notebook, conferring, peer editing. I found these strategies recommended in Steve Graham and Dolores Perin’s work in “A meta-analysis of writing instruction for adolescent students” (2007) and their work with Carnegie in “Writing Next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high school” (2007).

One theme that consistently kept appearing in my research — in particular with Thea Williamson’s Author Selves in School: Adolescent Writing Identity” and Thomas Newkirk’s Literacy’s Demonstratic Roots: A Personal Tour Through Eight Big Ideas was the need for student discourse. Students need to be engaged in talking about their writing, not just the physical act of writing. Williamson even noted the need for students to engage in platicá — what we might categorize as small talk but also the kind of talk that “is critical for building trust and providing space for reflection, learning and addressing social issues” (pg. 253, 2019). My research into answering my essential question curated a list of ideas for moving forward. I realized in this process that I already knew some of the answers to this question. I had just forgotten and needed a reminder from the newer research on this idea.

For the upcoming school year, I am going to return to some of these best practices: I plan to return to the writing workshop model and incorporate writing notebooks in our daily and weekly practice. Alongside that change, I want to confer with them about their writing and set goals. I also want them to engage in peer editing and mentoring each other — they have so much to share with one another and with me about all that they know already about writing. I also want to encourage them to play around with genre — our sandbox for practicing with all those tools of language. Supported by both educational research and my own classroom experience, I know these specific practices are transformative for student writing. Revisiting these strategies allows me to cultivate student confidence and foster the essential agency they need to take ownership of their writing.

I am also going to challenge myself by giving time for students to engage in platicá, and discourse around writing (and reading!). In a school already designed to cultivate community, it is something that I can utilize to not only strengthen our community but help my students to situate themselves as writers.

At the beginning of my teacher workshop for the GMWP Summer Institute, I asked my colleagues to respond to this question: Think of a time you felt like a ‘real writer’ — in school or out. What made you feel that way? Their responses were so beautiful, eclectic and powerful! All I could think about was: What if we provided each of our students with some of these powerful memories by starting first with supporting their writing identity? What might our world look like or be?

References:

Derewianka, B., & Jones, P. (2016). Teaching language in context (2nd ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools: A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Alliance for Excellent Education.

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for adolescent students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(3), 445–476. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.99.3.445

Hyland, K. (2003a). Genre-based pedagogies: A social response to process. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12(1), 17–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1060-3743(02)00124-8

Johnson, K., & DeHaan, K. (2021). Real writers: Perceptions of writer identity. English Journal, 110(5), 80–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/27115285

Newkirk, T. (2023). Literacy’s democratic roots: A personal tour through eight big ideas. Heinemann.

Williamson, T. (2019). Authoring selves in school: Adolescent writing identity. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 68(1), 250–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/2381336919870291

Supporting Writing Identity in Multi-Age Classrooms was originally published in GMWP: Greater Madison Writing Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

And what to do instead.

Last year, I started teaching middle school English and ninth-grade Composition & Literature at Shattuck-St. Mary’s School, a college-preparatory boarding school in southern Minnesota. Like English teachers everywhere, I ask them to think deeply about literature and communicate those ideas through writing.

And yet I kept running into the same problem.

My students could come up with a three-prong claim, plug in a quote, and produce a five-paragraph essay. But many still weren’t saying anything. They summarized instead of analyzed. They waited for the “right answer.” They believed successful writing meant checking every box on the rubric rather than discovering an idea worth sharing.

Eventually I realized this wasn’t just a writing problem. It was a thinking problem.

That realization became the driving question for my inquiry this summer: How can we teach structure without teaching formulas? How can writing become a tool for thinking instead of simply reporting what students already know?

For years, many of us have relied on the five-paragraph essay because it provides support and security. Young writers absolutely need scaffolds. But when structure becomes a formula, students begin to believe there is one correct way to organize every essay and one correct interpretation waiting to be found in the text. We unintentionally reinforce that belief when students write the same formulaic essay year after year.

The common thread was simple: good writing grows from authentic thinking.

That shifted my focus away from teaching better essays and toward teaching better inquiry.

Instead of prescribing exactly what students should think, we can help them develop the habits that allow real thinking to happen.

For me, that means three instructional shifts.

#1 Students need authentic questions worth investigating.

Rather than assigning prompts with predictable answers, I want students generating their own questions about a text. The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) gives students a process for asking, refining, and selecting questions they genuinely care about. When writing begins with curiosity instead of compliance, students have a reason to write.

#2 Students need flexible structures rather than rigid formulas.

I’m excited to experiment with Gretchen Bernabei’s kernel essays. The way Bernabei teaches it, students can learn common structures used in writing by reading models and decide what structure works best for their purpose.

With this method, students still have structure, but it’s a structure shaped by their own thinking rather than by a predetermined format.

#3 Students need language for analysis.

Many students have insightful ideas but struggle to express them. Sentence stems from They Say/I Say help students move beyond introducing quotations and toward explaining why those quotations matter. They Say/I Say gives students common language used in analytical writing to help them express the ideas they already have.

Preparing for State Testing

I know that it is not possible to throw the 5PE out completely, considering that standardized testing often grades on a student’s ability to organize their writing in this specific way.

Rather than treating test writing as the goal of writing instruction, though, I want to teach it as its own genre. Just as we teach memoir differently from literary analysis or argument, we can teach on-demand assessment writing as a genre with its own audience, purpose, constraints, and conventions. Students can learn to write effectively for a test without believing every piece of writing should sound like one.

Ironically, I suspect stronger thinkers become stronger test writers. Students who know how to ask questions, analyze evidence, and develop original ideas are better equipped to adapt those skills to any writing situation, including standardized assessments.

Moving Forward

When I began this project, I thought I was searching for better strategies to teach literary analysis. By the end, I realized I was really searching for ways to teach students how to think. If students leave my classroom believing writing is a tool for thinking, I’ll consider that a success.

That realization is one of the greatest gifts I am taking away from the Greater Madison Writing Project Summer Institute. There is something incredibly powerful about gathering thoughtful, passionate teachers who are wrestling with authentic classroom challenges. Rather than offering one-size-fits-all solutions, the Summer Institute creates space to ask meaningful questions, learn from experts and one another, and leave with practical strategies we can immediately bring back to our students.

Ditch the 5-Paragraph Essay was originally published in GMWP: Greater Madison Writing Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At the start of the semester, I ask my English 100 students to write love or hate letters to writing. Their answers are always fascinating, but rarely surprising. These letters lay out a clear trend: Most students have very fond memories of writing in early childhood. They see composition, especially creative and playful writing, as an important and valuable means of expression. Then, at some point (usually around middle school), something happens (usually tied to school) that makes them hate, dread, or even despise the act of writing.

Dear Writing: I hate you. Maybe I don’t hate you, as hate is a strong word. But I most definitely dislike you. I understand that you are important for many reasons, but I believe in a world where you aren’t as important as you are. Ironically, I am writing this letter to convey this idea to you. (Ella)

Middle school was where our relationship became fuzzy. As bigger, more complex versions of yourself became schoolwork, I began to slowly resent you. Whether it was research papers on difficult subjects or essays with plain prompts, I found myself not wanting to spend time with you. (Emilia)

…loving you isn’t always easy. When you ask me to write about things that don’t come from me, topics i dont care about or dont fully understand, I start to drift. My mind loses focus. I reread the same sentence over and over, unsure why I’m writing it at all. I wish I were better at staying focused. I wish my words came out strong and confident, instead of hesitant. Sometimes I feel like I know what I want to say, but I don’t know how to make it sound the way it should. As I spiral in my head and my backspace button on replay, I feel lost. (Stephanie)

Despite the fact that many of my students have strong, negative associations with writing, I am astutely aware of the fact that, in the modern, digital era, they are deeply immersed in complicated composition networks. As Mueller describes in “Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom,” our students are “composing in more outwardly social venues, entering into highly interactive exchanges prone to drift across multiple institutions, even transcending institutionality” (244).

How do we square these observations? How can it possibly be the case that (1) our students are increasingly (and enthusiastically) engaged in vast, complex social networks mediated primarily through writing, and (2) that they they strongly dislike the act of writing? As it turns out, students seldom see the kinds of composition they do outside of the classroom as ‘real’ writing (Davis and Marsh 176). In fact, over 73% of students believed that “their online writing made no difference to their school writing” (NCTE 3).

This belief is, according to scholarship, unfounded. Davis and Marsh observe that the skills student employ in their extracurricular writing (considerations for genre, audience, purpose and the use of a complex lexis, for example) are exactly the skills we hope to develop among our students in the writing classroom (181). But we can not expect our students to bridge this gap on their own. The forms of extracurricular writing our students engage in, despite requiring significant rhetorical techne, are often looked down upon, particularly as they’re situated outside of academic and professional contexts.

I hope to assert the following claims:

1. The kinds of writing done by students outside the classroom are rhetorically significant and meaningful;
2. It behooves us as teachers of writing (at any level) to legitimize these forms of composition;
3. Legitimizing the forms of writing that our student writers joyfully engage with helps strengthen their relationship with/to writing, and to improve their identities as writers.

There is no single, straightforward answer to any of these claims. To truly take extracurricular student writing seriously and build it into our classrooms is no easy task, and it is in line with ongoing projects to incorporate the multimodal and experimental spearheaded by scholars like Yancey, Wardle, and Selfe. Rather than an encompassing curriculum, I hope to describe a single activity that I incorporate into my practice, intended to help students recognize the kinds of writing they engage with as legitimate and worthy of rhetorical situation.

The Activity

For this activity, I put my students into groups of 4 or 5. They were given a packet that included three example texts and a handout to guide their reading and conversation. For this activity, I chose a Reddit advice post, the summary page for a popular piece of fanfiction, and a Discord recruitment post for a video game community. You could use any pieces you like; I selected these texts because they were written with serious consideration for audience, and each text demonstrated distinct characteristics that we had been working on identifying in preceding class sessions.

I asked students to read each text on their own. Then, with their groups, they were guided through a discussion on the topic.

Students engaged in thoughtful and meaningful conversation about these texts. They were asked to consider the rhetorical construction of each, and to pull out specific elements that informed how they were written. Some students were familiar with some (or all) genres of text; some of these genres were unfamiliar with students.

At the end of the discussion, students were asked to identify what “writerly skills” were employed by the authors of these texts. This question assumes that students have already been given a vocabulary to work with, and that some amount of class time has been dedicated to identifying, using, and practicing writerly moves. We then transitioned to a full-class discussion, where students were invited to share their lists, consider which of the skills they identified would be useful in our classroom context, and reflect on how they may incorporate these skills into their own writing.

Wrapping Up

In the digital era, our students engage with writing in new and interesting ways. However, they rarely see these forms of engagement as “writing,” and are even less likely to see the texts they compose for these situations as being meaningful or useful in academic contexts. Through activities like this one, I aim to bridge the gap between the writing our students do and what they think writing ought to be, and to foster and develop skills they are already employing without realizing it.

As you consider your own classroom and writing context, I ask you to consider the ways that your students are composing outside of institutions. How does text mediate our lives? What rhetorical principles do they utilize without even realizing it? Even things as simple as text messages and memes are rich for these purposes. Writing is already an important part of our students’ lives, but it falls upon us, as teachers, to help foster and cultivate positive experiences with and relationships to the act of composition.

Works Cited and Further Reading

Baldwin, Kathleen Marie. “New media rhetorics: Redefining multimodality for the 21st century FYC classroom.” Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies 3.1 (2015): 250–263.

Davis, Octavia, and Bill Marsh. “Networking, storytelling and knowledge production in first-year writing.” Computers and Composition 29.2 (2012): 175–184.

Fishman, Jenn, et al. “Performing writing, performing literacy.” College Composition & Communication 57.2 (2005): 224–252.

Mueller, Derek N. “Digital underlife in the networked writing classroom.” Computers and Composition 26.4 (2009): 240–250.

Peary, Alexandria. “Walls with a word count: The textrooms of the extracurriculum.” College Composition & Communication 66.1 (2014): 43–66.

Selfe, Cynthia L., ed. Multimodal composition: Resources for teachers. Hampton Press (NJ), 2007.

Selfe, Cynthia L. “The movement of air, the breath of meaning: Aurality and multimodal composing.” College Composition & Communication 60.4 (2009): 616–663.

Shepherd, Ryan P. “Digital writing, multimodality, and learning transfer: Crafting connections between composition and online composing.” Computers and Composition 48 (2018): 103–114.

Shepherd, Ryan P. “Social Media and Its Connection to University Writing.” Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer (2024): 125.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made not only in words: Composition in a new key.” College Composition & Communication 56.2 (2004): 297–328.

Wardle, Elizabeth. ““Mutt genres” and the goal of FYC: Can we help students write the genres of the university?.” College Composition & Communication 60.4 (2009): 765–789.

Bridging the Extracurricular: was originally published in GMWP: Greater Madison Writing Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I didn’t necessarily plan to leave the school district at the start of this year, but even the best-laid plans can fall apart when tested. Let me backtrack a bit to explain. At the end of last school year, my resolve was put to the test. Our small school and its student body experienced something upsetting. As a result of both this rocky end to the school year combined with the normal end-of-the-year reflection that a teacher goes through after the slog of April and May, I began to question whether I wanted to continue teaching or not. I know about the statistics for teachers leaving education. The National Center for Education Statistics determined that 8% of public school teachers left the profession at the end of the 2020–21 school year. Another survey conducted by the National Education Association determined that 55% of educators were considering leaving the profession earlier than they had planned for a multitude of reasons. Add to that the statistic that nearly 50% of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years, and it paints a bleak picture of the current state of education. I didn’t want to be one of those statistics, so I decided to take the summer to recover, reflect, and reinvigorate myself in order to come back to school with renewed energy for myself and my students. This was also the time when I heard of the opportunity to participate in a year-long Sustainable Teaching and Learning institute.

I think of sustainability as keeping teachers and learners engaged in what they do on a day-to-day basis. Data from the Wisconsin DPI shows that students are experiencing mental health concerns at a rate unparalleled in modern times and many teachers are leaving the profession at a rate not seen in recent history. Both of these data indicators seem to show that the current system is unsustainable for our students and teachers. Being more mindful and careful in our practices can sustain us and keep us in the profession without sacrificing our mental and physical health, and at the same time, be more responsive to students who are also experiencing those same concerns. This year I wanted to focus on creating a more mindful practice for myself and my students with the goal of not falling victim to one of the aforementioned statistics in the aftermath of the events that ended last school year.

I used my two sections of ninth-grade English as the guinea pigs for this alongside myself. At the start of each class from mid-November until mid-April, students would fill out a daily mindfulness check-in. The check-in was based on an app that I used for my own mindfulness practice called DAYLIO. The check-in allows you to create an entry for each calendar date that asks you to rate your mood for the day on a 1–5 scale. After students selected the rating on the scale, they were asked to check a few of the most common things that had an impact on their day and to provide a few reasons as to what impacted their day in written form. For me, the app allowed me to reflect on what had influenced my days throughout each week or month. On the student side, my setup didn’t allow for the same ongoing reflection, but they did complete a summative reflection at the end.

Since you are reading this, you may have surmised that my practices didn’t have the outcome I had hoped for when I first began my journey with a focus on sustainable teaching and learning. While not what I was expecting, the experience this year was helpful in learning more about myself, my students, and ultimately what sustainable teaching looks like. In the face of all of the odds against teachers staying in the classroom, here’s what I learned about our students and about teaching. First, joy can be found in the most mundane places. Students observed that their mood was affected by simple things like what was being served for lunch that day (orange chicken was a popular choice), which snacks their parents had purchased from the store on their most recent grocery run, wearing a comfortable outfit to school that day, and even getting into a book that they chose from the school library. As a teacher, I realized how much of an impact physical health had on my well-being for the day. The days with nice weather where I was able to get in an evening walk or treat myself to a coffee had direct impacts or the small joys of an unexpected snow day. Seeing my reflections submitted at the end of each day also alerted me to a pattern: I was not as engaged as I would have liked in my teaching.

The second thing I learned is those little social interactions can add up. Whether it is a run-in with a coworker, a disagreement among friends, or the takeaways from a staff meeting, the impacts affect the day and your outlook moving forward. This realization was also a contribution to my decision to leave my district this year. I truly believe that our school has great people doing great things, and reflecting on my entries from the year helped me realize that it wasn’t the environment for me. If sustainable teaching and learning means keeping teachers and learners engaged in what they do on a day-to-day basis, then I realized that I was the opposite.

Maybe sustainability doesn’t mean keeping your nose to the grindstone even when it’s tough, but rather, acknowledging that doing so isn’t sustainable and that there are ways to address the burnout that stems from it. Find joy, acknowledge the little social things that impact your day, and don’t fear becoming a statistic. I was so concerned about being a statistic in the category of teachers who leave that I lost track of those two things. I have become a statistic, but I’m proud to say it’s part of the 92% of teachers who have stayed with the profession; I’ll just be in a different school district next year.

Becoming a Statistic–on My Terms was originally published in GMWP: Greater Madison Writing Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

School offers many opportunities for teachers to be “triggered.” The copy machine is down — again. A parent is upset about a grade because they don’t understand that “approaching proficiency” is exactly where a student SHOULD be in October. I haven’t checked a single item off of my mile-long to-do list all week. A behavior incident ate up my prep hour with meetings and referrals instead of grading. Ugh. The grading.

We hear a lot about “triggers,” those moments that activate our fight/flight/freeze response and can turn an okay day into a dumpster fire.

A few years ago, I learned a word for the opposite sensation. In her 2018 book, Deb Dana, a social worker, coined the word “glimmers.” While triggers bring negativity, glimmers are small moments that do the opposite, invoke joy, calm, or gratitude. They are “micro moments that begin to shape our system in very gentle ways.”

When I started this journey into sustainable teaching last July, I expected that sustainability would mostly be about removing tasks from my plate and avoiding triggering moments — or at least mitigating my negative reactions/responses to them.

What I’m learning is that most of the triggers I experience are out of my control. I can check email fewer times a day and I can batch my planning and copying to make the most of the planning time that I have, but I can’t control my students, their parents, or the copy machine.

And some of the best days that my students and I shared this year took me more work to pull off, not less. But it was all about glimmers.

For the first 8 weeks of school, my Creative Writing juniors and seniors had read, written, revised, and reflected upon poems. We talked about what moved us as readers and we noticed the techniques that writers use to convey their unique-yet-universal understandings of being human.

I often find the end of any curricular unit anticlimactic. We spend so much time writing and revising, we turn it in, and then…move on to something else while my students wait, anxiously for me to reduce their writing to a grade. (ugh.)

Students are often reluctant to share their writing, especially their poetry and especially with the isolation that comes from staring at the Chromebook screens that have been all-too-common since COVID. But I also know that through this sharing, we feel more connected and less alone.

While it’s ancient in “kid years,” I love Neil Pasricha’s (2013) TED talk, The 3 As of Awesome, to introduce students to the idea that we see what we look for. Look for bad things? They’re all over. You’ll find tons of them. Look for good things? Guess what? They’re there, too. And these glimmers are all around us.

Pasricha’s blog, 1000awesomethings.com, started in a dark place: amid a divorce, his close friend died by suicide. He remembers, “As these dark clouds were circling me and I was finding it really really difficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow.”

“I was trying to remind myself of those simple, universal pleasures that we all love we just don’t talk about.”

So, when my students entered the room on this particular last day of a poetry unit, anonymous poems written by their classmates were already spread around the room’s tables. We watched Pasricha’s TED talk and read a few of his “1000awesomething” entries before focusing on a small glimmer in our own lives for the class’s write-in.

The bridge from appreciating small individual glimmers in our lives to seeing the good in our classmates’ writing was a natural one to cross.

I made this crossing more explicit with these remarks:

Today is about celebration. I have to offer “constructive criticism” and score you according the rubric, but you can all provide 100% appreciation and support to each other. Your job is to celebrate the ideas and creativity of your classmates.

Think of the time and effort that you’ve put into your poem’s drafting, revising, and reflecting. Give each of your peers the care and attention that you hope they’ll give your poem.

We will celebrate poems all hour.

The response format was a simple Google form with two questions:

(1) What is the title of the poem you are celebrating?

(2) Complete this template with specifics from your peer’s poem: When you wrote [ quote from the poem or describe what they did that was effective], I like the way you [what technique is effective here? what did the author do that worked? name it.]. This helped me understand [what meaning?] because [explain how that technique example helped create the author’s meaning].

(Admittedly, the set-up took more rushing and last-minute preparation than I’d prefer. Poems were due by midnight. The next morning, I came in early, printed each student’s poem without their name (and kept a title/name) record so I could send everyone an email of their positive feedback later. And I was careful to choose poems for each table so that students wouldn’t encounter their own poems and had those poems out on groups’ tables when the students arrived.)

But when the students began, it was all worth it. For an hour, cell phones rested in our class “cell hotel” and only one tab, our Celebration Google Form, was open on every Chromebook. We aimed to complete five poem responses in an hour, and many students traveled to other tables once they’d celebrated the five at their tables.

At the end, students felt good. They were impressed by their classmates’ writing and were eagerly awaiting their email of positive feedback.

One student, at the end of class, told me, “I bet you feel like the happiness fairy now, getting to send everyone their comments.”

And I did feel like the happiness fairy. The glimmer fairy.

I don’t know how long it will take me to sort and send celebration emails to all of my students, but I know that they (and I) are eagerly awaiting them.

I’m realizing that eliminating triggers isn’t possible. Fewer things to do would be nice. But joy is sustainable when you plan for glimmers.

Planning for a Community of Glimmers was originally published in GMWP: Greater Madison Writing Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the middle of winter, I was taking a lap around my classroom as my Creative Writing students got their notebooks out for our write-in. I happened to linger next to a student’s table as he was flipping through his notebook to find a fresh page, and saw him turn a page where he’d written “Fuck the System” in giant pencil letters.

“Hey E” I said, with a curious tone in my voice. His friend next to him noticed what I’d seen and started giggling. “What’s that about?”

“Well” E said, “that’s just how I feel sometimes.”

“Me too actually, E. Me too.”

Last summer, we began our focused exploration of sustainability with this amazing cohort of teachers. In my opinion, this is a crucial topic of focus for today’s educators, if we’re at all interested in sticking around for a while.

To me, sustainable teaching means teaching in a way that conserves your energy and protects your peace.

It means creating routines and habits for your classroom, your teaching agenda, and your planning that feel meaningful.

Sustainable teaching is simultaneously working in a system and fighting against the system. . . in small, manageable steps.

Sustainable learning means listening. . . finding meaning, significance, and connection in the content.

It means thinking for yourself, asking questions, and being willing to struggle sometimes.

. . . .

Last year, during a pre-observation meeting, my supervising principal asked me about my “why.” I told her that my “why” had evolved a lot in recent years, and it honestly comes down to the fact that I’m dedicated to showing up for my students, because they need good teachers.

Recently, I’m resonating with the term “burned in teacher.” I think that’s me. I can’t say for certain (never say never), but I don’t think I’m going anywhere. I’ve recently become more and more determined to hold boundaries and keep this work sustainable for myself, so that I can keep showing up for our students for many more years.

I work hard to keep humanity at the center of my classroom, remembering that everyone has a story . . .

like the students who suffer with depression, anxiety, ADHD, or OCD

like the students who have lost a sibling

like the newcomer students who are learning English

and everyone else.

How am I working on sustainability in my classroom?

Routine and Reflection.

Because I’m teaching two new preps this year, I have to give myself permission to not work too hard trying to make things perfect. It’s never going to be perfect, and it will be the farthest thing from perfect this year, in my first year through it. I can now see this truth through the lens of experience and patience.

My classes consistently participate in independent reading and write-ins.

We have regularly scheduled days in our school library: a beautiful, newly renovated space where my students love hanging out. Our library days bring us joy and peace, and a little retreat from our everyday space.

My assessment is rooted in process, growth, and accountability. For each major summative Creative Writing piece, students are assessed equally on evidence of planning, a final complete piece of writing, a conference with me, and annotations and a reflection on their piece.

One student wrote in his end of semester reflection:

“I think this unit helped me understand as much about writing as it did about myself. It felt like the realest form of the writing experience I had ever had, the true writing experience, marred with setbacks and crumpled up pieces of notebook paper, but that’s real. And that’s just what it had to be.”

. . . .

So when I first saw E’s big scrawling letters spelling out “Fuck the System” I was a little surprised. E is soft spoken, gentle, and easygoing. His demeanor is relaxed. In fact, his outward facing persona is a lot like mine. So I empathize with the way he expresses these thoughts in his notebook. Like I said earlier, I feel the same way sometimes. But as I continue focusing on sustainability, it’s less fuck the system. It’s more like: reject the system when the system isn’t working for you, and, whenever possible, build your own system.

Build Your Own System was originally published in GMWP: Greater Madison Writing Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Question what matters most

What is sustaining you as a teacher? Is teaching sustaining you? Your answers will be as personal as mine. The questions are worth the exploration.

I discovered a truth for myself. How I do something is more important than the results of what I do. I didn’t come to this easily. It only became crystal clear after I left full-time classroom teaching and found myself leading a national social justice children’s literature non-profit. I became the president of this organization because no one else wanted to enter the quagmire of historic animosity and distrust between the white peace activists on the board and the newly stoked anger of a board member of color who wasn’t feeling heard. Why did I agree to lead? Because I was passionate about the mission and had a vision of what was possible. I promised myself that the manner of my doing would satisfy me. I would not wait for any specific outcome to be the measure of my success. My passion remained, my vision was NOT embraced, and yet I completed my term with an appreciative, diverse, and healthily functioning board all passionate about the organization’s mission for social justice and children’s literature.

I realize now that this truth regarding the manner of doing over results grew organically out of my life as a parent, gardener, and teacher. To be specific, I learned over time that proceeding with honesty and kindness was the only way to be with children and growing things, and ultimately that included myself, everyone else, and everything I touch.

In the early 1990’s I was getting accustomed to being a single mother of three. I’d landed a job in human resources, hiring and scheduling home care workers, many of them single moms like me. Among my despairs, I knew I could never get them a decent wage despite championing their self-esteem. I asked myself, Why am I here? My answer was simple: for the children, mine, theirs, the rest — and for our learning together. And so, teaching, with benefits for the family, it was! Classroom teaching was never easy for me; I was too readily anxious, too prone to rehearsing what I’d do over and over after hours. What sustained me in the 19 years I taught 4th & 5th grade, along with the earnest quirkiness of the children, was the support I felt from co-workers, family, and benevolent administration. The latter eroded over time and, as a consequence, I left sooner than I’d planned. I felt I’d failed when I left because I could not tame the anxiety that developed with traumatized behaviors and little backup. I wished I’d found a way to heal and stay. But then I was scooped up into a program to identify and support academic talent in middle school kids of color and poverty, a job which worked especially well for my family and made my heart soar. In time, I recognized the manner of my teaching, the kindness and honesty I brought to the task, was what mattered then and now. At seventy-one, I’m still teaching part-time, though soon to retire more fully. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m scooped up again!

I see the stress of administrators piling more and more on teachers with less and less substantive support, while respect for the profession and education itself plummets, and now there is the added chaotic political realities that are stirring new fears and uncertainties for so many students and families.

Can you locate your passion in the midst of this? Is there something more important than teaching for you? In honesty and kindness for yourself, you can make a change, find what works for you. But if you are in the middle of teaching and want and need to be there, please contemplate the following questions.

• What are you teaching? What social sanctioning are you upholding, what traditions are you maintaining? Are these things you want to do?
• Can you secretly give up trying to succeed in the ways your district, your peers, parents, and the general public expect of you?
• And perhaps a bigger question, can you give up trying to succeed as you expect of yourself?
• Can you embrace a different measure of success? Can you put the quality of what you’re doing, honesty, and kindness, before the rest? And when you can’t, can you anyway, by being honest and kind with yourself?
• Are there qualities besides or along with honesty and kindness that are most important to you?
• ‘Education’ has two etymological origins, one is educere, to lead out, and the other is educare, to train or mold. What is your definition of education?
• Might it be to lead? A good leader cares about how they lead and can never be certain of exactly where they are going!
• Might it be to train and mold students? There are so many expectations involved on so many fronts, focusing on the manner of your training over your outcomes will likely help!

There is a way to sustain yourself, to give yourself grace, and still live your passion. And it might just sustain your teaching, too! Where would it take you if you made a promise to yourself that the manner of your doing will satisfy you, and you will not wait for specific outcomes to measure your success? Where would it take your teaching and learning, and the learning of your students?

Question what matters most was originally published in GMWP: Greater Madison Writing Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To be a K-12 teacher is to be awash in responsibilities, expectations, and choices that can be both rewarding and draining. One way to think about the sustainability of teaching is to look at it as an energy balance.

• Kids all participate in morning meeting! → + 20 joules
• Find out you don’t have buses for the field trip → — 40 joules
• Kid tells you that 3/3 = 0 → — 10 joules
• Kids peel off the desk labels → — 5 joules
• Kid remembers 3/3 = 1 → + 10 joules
• One kid tells another where the band aids are. → + 8 joules
• Kids discuss why -3 + 5 = 2 in front of the instructional coach → +30 joules
• Find support for a kid with food instability → +40 joules.
• Find a broken pair of headphones → -15 joules.

After fielding hundreds of these energy transactions every day, you can feel when you have a surplus of energy and when you are running at a deficit. Having been a geologist for a time, energy leads me to think about crystallization. Here’s a primer.

A brief geology lesson

The two types of rock shown above are chemically very similar, but look quite different. The magma that formed the dacite (1) lived under pressure and was suddenly released in an explosive eruption (2). Crystals did not have much time to form as the magma erupted and cooled quickly.

The granodiorite (3), on the other hand, formed when magma cooled slowly within the earth, allowing crystals to form and grow. Crystals form at different times during the cooling process and so are different sizes. The lovely large pink potassium feldspar crystals had more time to grow while magma slowly cooled. The small white and black crystals cooled more quickly and form the groundmass of the rock. The key is that crystals are a lower energy structure of matter.

The beautiful power of structure

Over time I’ve started to think of teaching as the search for crystalline structure — a lower energy state that is durable and beautiful. By slowly building sustainable structures, I hope to prevent catastrophe — i.e. me erupting in front of my classroom.

This year I have focused on finding structures at every level that will preserve my energy and make teaching more sustainable for me, my school, and my students. Note that structure is not the same as “strictness” and it applies to me as much as it applies to students.

Examples of building structure:

• I simplified my curriculum from 9 chapters that each quickly spiraled through 2–3 different topics to just 6 overarching units, each of which connects to a few big ideas.
• Each unit has a printed workbook where students keep notes, practice, and homework, thus eliminating most of the need for last-minute copying.
• Each week has essentially the same pattern: develop new concepts, assess, and practice in a gamified format. I’m excited to lean more into these patterns, using regular protocols so students can spend more energy learning math and less energy just figuring out what they’re supposed to be doing.
• Classroom routines like the bathroom pass and comfy corner have written, posted, and practiced protocols.

By giving myself and the students more structure, I’ve found space for our ability to grow as mathematical thinkers and more energy to give to a career I love.

Deciding what to let go

Focusing on structure also means determining what I don’t want to spend energy on. The groundmass in which our beautiful pink crystals grow consists of discarded pencils and unfinished iReady lessons — the structures I decided to let go of. Maybe someday my teaching practice will solidify to a point where those elements will also grow into beautiful structures, but for now they are just a bit messy.

Demands on teachers are only likely to grow as funding cuts continue and our students face more and more adversity from systems beyond our classrooms. I hope that by prioritizing, building, and refining structures in my teaching, I can continue to build a sustainable practice for our classroom community.

Photo attributions

1 — Creative Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki File:Pumice_%28upper_Holocene;_Johnston_Ridge,_north_of_Mt._St._Helens,_Washington_State,_USA%29_1.jpg

2 — Public Domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:026MSH80_eruption_mount_st_helens_plume_05-18-80_resize_(22027450832).jpg

3 — Creative Commons: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cathedral_Peak_Granodiorite_(Late_Cretaceous,_86-88_Ma%3B_Yosemite_National_Park,_California,_USA).jpg

Teaching as Crystallization was originally published in GMWP: Greater Madison Writing Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.