For better or worse, secondary and post-secondary educators play a significant role in our becoming. And as an aspiring poet, I’ve always known one thing for sure— most people eventually developed a distaste for poetry, reading, and writing in general. English curricula is often described in two ways: an easy A, or a painful responsibility. I always knew it would be a hard sell and I wasn’t sure if I had spunk required to pitch such a thing.

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I’ve come to see learning as an agreement. It’s a challenge that each student must accept independently. Educators sit at the base of Maslow’s mountainous triangle and ask, Are you willing and able to hike with me today towards higher knowledge? Sometimes students sprint ahead to the summit, prepped with hiking skills and a backpack of supportive gear. Others aren’t wearing the right shoes, some didn’t even eat breakfast. Most need frequent rest breaks. An equipped educator is a patient guide who accepts their duty to support everyone on the trail regardless. You might call this differentiating instruction. And we model effective learning by imparting certain truths; some trails lead to higher altitudes and those trails require stronger tools. Some skills are layered and toned by time and effort. The nuance of good teaching is convincing learners to follow you down paths that seem endless, grey areas that don’t make immediate sense, and to somehow push past immovable obstacles in hopes of reaching a destination where they’ve never been. In the midst of all of this, writing teachers ask you to stop and smell the roses! We ask you to describe the trees and to ponder the meaning of the night. By the time you reach high school English or undergraduate composition, there is simply little to no time to enjoy English. Learning becomes (an expensive) race to the top, a reach for the perfect score or the thrill of an A+. It might even feel counterintuitive, meandering through one’s own learning to eventually witness the sunset. 

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Anyone who has ever loved English has done so because they witnessed someone else love it first. Sometimes that someone is the author of your favorite book, and other times it’s a writing teacher who simply enjoyed the subject so much that their enthusiasm was contagious. With the innovation of A.I., the writing teacher’s goals must be two fold: to present inquiry as true autonomy and to contextualize writing as both human right and a lifelong asset to self-actualization. Yes, you could let a robot think through all the hard parts for you, or you could accept the challenge of learning more about yourself and the world through the gift of your own written voice. When we learn to write, we meet ourselves a little more each time we meet the page. We must sit with our own voice, and its initial inadequacy, and that’s why drafting feels uncomfortable. There’s a wide assumption that to write creatively you must have something you already want to say. Perhaps this is only partially true; sometimes we think we know what we want to say, and every once and awhile that original truth makes it to the page. But how often do we let students in on that fact? It’s a mindset that keeps early writers muted.

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To effectively teach writing we must ease students into the process; processing reading material, their own thoughts, and the many stages of revision. Great authors will tell you that writing lives in revision, but how much of our formative exploration positions revision as anything but a chore? The dreaded peer review checklist, the heavily red-inked first draft, it all makes revision feel like a lifelong search for weaknesses, leaving new writers feeling chastised and defeated. It takes courage and vulnerability to draft, and what confidence is gained from the feeling of a finished draft is often lost within the first week of revision. How do we even start to combat these issues while still providing engaging and accessible lessons? The first defense is leaning into daily writing and reading practices. Teaching writing must be active in that we learn when to get out of the way as educators. We lean into methods like I do, we do, you do or think-pair-share because first writing, like thought, is internal. Formative daily writing prompts and in-class writing time gives students a chance to stretch skills without the pressure of a looming deadline or wrong answer. When a student thinks through writing at the beginning of class, they’re beginning with an internalized challenge. When they’re asked to share their newly written thoughts or engage in group discussion related to that challenge, they’re inadvertently sharpening the tools of inquiry and practicing confidence through thoughtful expression. Low-lift activities eventually lead to high-lift gains. 

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I believe that students want to take the reins of their own learning in the writing classroom. So many times in the beginning of my teaching career, I worked too hard. I stayed up late and made long PowerPoints for which I expected students to listen attentively. I edited student work with a fine tooth comb, and often questioned authenticity in my search for A.I. But these practices hindered student possibility. A type of learned helplessness set in on my students, bombarded with draft edits to complete, and exhausted by long lectures. I was bypassing the joy of writing in the hopes of meeting learning targets, but those targets always seemed far away. I was burning myself out and my students, and I took their disinterest to heart. Teaching 11th and 12th grade English helped me see that all teaching must be chunked and relatively self directed to gain buy in. Lev Vygotsky would call this the zone of proximal development, a space between what students can achieve independently and what they might achieve with guidance. It is not my job to be the most entertaining soul on stage. Instead, the secondary and post-secondary classroom must be a place of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning. It’s a playground of trial and celebrated error. If writing lives in revision, then developing writers must be given the opportunity to see error as growth. A type of growth professional writers consistently experience, a place of expansion that eventually leads them to greater perspectives.  Multimodal learning, or the reverse classroom model, guides lessons through active engagement. Opening with provoking questions that lean into life experiences returns to the core goals of the writing classroom, to know ourselves and the world better than we have before. By focusing on chunked lessons with multiple formative check-ins, I am able to pivot learning goals to match real-time student needs. 

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It’s an honor to be an educator, and the longer I climb this mountain the more I understand my position is that of a guide, a person who respects the process of writing, the forest of creation. I’m here to point out the joys along the path of revision, and to celebrate when students reach their personal summits.