When the classroom assignment is to write, the teacher needs to listen and watch. Listen to the comments and mutterings of most children. “I don’t know what to write.” “I can’t think of anything.” “I hate to write.” Listen to those who struggle with and then balk with the idea of writing. In contrast, watch. Watch the other, fewer children who eagerly pick up their pencil or fire up their computer and begin putting words to paper or screen. What is the difference between these two groups of children? Why are some children writing and others not. You listened and you watched. What did you learn?
To unpack your learning, let’s examine several other commonplace classroom activities to understand writing and why children fret about writing. And, if children fret about writing, so do their teachers.
The teacher says,
“Take a minute to think back on yesterday’s trip to the museum. What one memory about the entire trip do you remember most clearly? Think and then tell the person on your right about your memory.” Some start talking immediately. Others look up, look down, look to the right and left and then start talking. Everyone is either talking or listening or talking over the talking. Talking is easy if not natural for most children.
“It’s almost lunch time. Your ticket for leaving the classroom is to write one sentence. In your sentence, tell me one thing that you learned from our reading and talking this morning about global warming. The first words of your writing could be, ‘This morning I learned that …’”
“Let’s have some volunteers go to the white board. Each will show and then tell us about their outline for our writing project.” Hands shoot into the air to volunteer but just as many or more dig into pockets as if to prevent their person from being chosen to do board work. Public review is anathema to many children.
As teachers of the language arts, we know many things about writing and speaking. Writing is a learned behavior. It is different than speaking which is universal and natural; everyone who is capable speaks. Infants are speaking, or it seems like speech, by their first birthday. Writing is a cognitive activity that is mentally acted out on paper or screen. Children typically write using letters to form what may seem like words after their third birthday or even later. Children speak at the drop of a hat but it often takes much more to drop to cause them to write. Writers are hemmed in by rules of grammar, structure, organization and vocabulary. Speakers go with the flow and use their listeners’ body language to guide their speaking. Writers receive a delayed feedback, if any, from their readers. Writers create sentences and paragraphs while speakers use phrases and idioms and body language to convey meaning that would be difficult to put down in writing. Speaking is almost never critically reviewed; writing almost always is analyzed for form and substance. We put up with many errors in speech that would be jumped upon if written. Hence, many children become reluctant or at least circumspect writers.
From our three examples, we know that cognition resulting in speech is free flowing, especially when the subject is loosely structured. Any memory of yesterday’s trip to the museum will do even if the memory was of the bus ride or lunch. Better if it was an exhibit, but the assignment was to remember something and speak about that memory. Easy.
We know that a brief writing assignment is good. A single sentence starts the words flowing. After lunch it will be easy to have the writer add another sentence or two or ten. Beginning with a first word is a start and once a child is writing words the next idea and words about that idea come easier.
Public exposure of writing and possible criticism are downers for reluctant writers. It is like standing in front of the class in your underwear; critiquing is a mental exposure that shuts down all motivation to write. Children who find writing easy seldom are bothered by a display of their writing. In fact, posting their writing on a bulletin board or in the hallway boosts their writer’s ego. For the reluctant writer, a display of writing shuts down the super-ego. Their writing may never be good enough for display. Why – because it is their writing.
If writing is a somewhat unnatural act, it also is a very idiosyncratic act. Google any article or report on the teaching of writing. Then, check the posted comments on the article or report that follow. The opinions and responses of others will cover the universe in their agreeing and disagreeing. One can find a study to support almost any conjecture about writing and all studies will contain some truths.
So, professional teacher you are charged with teaching children to write. Where do you start? First, you start with the knowledge that writing and improving writing skills are a life-long endeavor. Neither your singular assignment nor your school year of writing assignments will create a finished writer. Your instruction lies within a long continuum of work. Second, writing is in the eye of the reader. Unlike the evaluation of other academic work, an assessment of writing is subjective and most often judged with a holistic-type task. When ten readers examine the same piece of writing, they will generate a range of responses, usually similar but seldom identical. Third, writing is personal. Every child’s visit to the museum results in different mental images and memories. When children write from their experiences, it always will be idiosyncratic.
Back to the beginning of this article. Some of your children-charges will have no difficulty finding their words. For these children, get out of their way. Let their fingers and fists fly. Your work is not in starting their writing but in assisting them to contemplate what they have written afterward and consider if what they actually wrote is what they wanted or needed to write. And, perhaps, if they could find ways to improve their writing, given what they know about structure, grammar and spelling. Non-critically, they, at any age, can reread their writing for clarity and self-correction.
Regarding the reluctant writers, consider Forrester’s words to his protégé Jamal in the movie Finding Forrester (2001).
“No thinking – that comes later. You must write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think!”
Seem wrong? Not. Too often children become brain-frozen by overthinking how to start. Unfreeze them – “Start writing, please. Don’t think about it too much, just tell me in your words what you are thinking.” Later on, when children know more about how language works, they can think about the quality of their writing.
Give reluctant writers an opening sentence. Like when Forrester gave Jamal a paragraph from his own writing as a beginning for Jamal’s writing, he said “Start typing that. Sometimes the simple rhythm of typing gets us from page one to page two. When you begin to feel your own words, start typing them.”
I have watched children sit on their hands when assigned to write in the belief that the clock and recess or lunch or going to music class will relieve them of their agony. I have watched these same children do this over and over again regardless of the subject or of the other incentives offered. For these children, professional teacher, you must prime their pump. If not with a pre-written first sentence, then use oral language to prime written language. “Tell me how the Earth and the sun and the moon go around. Help me to know which goes around the other. Tell me and I will write it down.” Then, a child can work with her oral words recorded through your writing. She is in motion as a writer.
I have watched children fret about writing and then watched fretting become their learned behavior. A fretting writer begets a fretting teacher who knows that if a child frets about easy daily assignments the same child will fret and freeze when given on-demand writing assignments in her annual academic assessments. Today, teachers have a lot at stake when children do not become fretless writers.
I also have watched insightful teachers remove the fretting for their reluctant writers by understanding what it is that makes writing difficult for a reluctant writer. And, I have watched these same insightful teachers relieve their own fretting because fretless writing also is a learned child behavior.