post by Jill Davidson, Associate member of The Educator Collaborative

Finding Time For a Writing Practice

Many years ago, reading What You Know by Heart: How to Develop Curriculum for Your Writing Workshop by Katie Wood Ray changed how I viewed my role as a teacher of writing. It helped me recognize that being a writing teacher required me to “write like a teacher of writing” (1). Why?

We write so that we know what to teach about how this writing work gets done. We write so
that we know what writers think about as they go through the process. We write so that our
curriculum knowledge of the process of writing runs deep and true in our teaching. We write so
that we can explain it all. (3)

Dr. Anne Elrod Whitney identifies four areas where we can develop authenticity in the writing classroom: through process, genre, audience, and teacher and students (16). Being an authentic writing teacher “means showing students what our real, unfinished, in-process writing looks like, and it means engaging in real tasks and writing those for real readers” (20). In their book Creating Confident Writers: For High School, College, and Life, Troy Hicks and Andy Schoenborn describe teacher-writers as “authors in residence” in their own classrooms whose experience “with the complex and, at times, emotional underpinnings of writing creates an empathy for student writers who are working through their own processes” (xxix).

Being a teacher-writer requires us to develop a regular writing practice. If we are going to share our writing lives—our process, our (finished and unfinished) products, our struggles, and our celebrations—we have to somehow find time to write amid everything else vying for our attention. What works for me may not work for you, but here are some ways I sneak in time for regular writing.  Each of them has become a ritual that allows me to experience writing for a variety of audiences and purposes.

Maintaining a Writers Notebook (WNB)

This is, without a doubt, the strategy that continues to have the greatest impact on my writing life—personally and professionally. It is a place where I capture possibilities for writing, percolate topics, draft, and collect short pieces of text that inspire me. I try to keep my notebook with me wherever I go so I can jot down ideas and observations in the moment, but if it isn’t possible, I capture a reminder on a sticky note or with my phone and add it later. This is one of the most important ways my notebook supports my writing life.

The contents and sections in my WNB tend to evolve with each new notebook because I want it to be a tool that works for my writing life as it exists. My current notebook contains only three sections:

• The first few pages are reserved for my To-Be-Written list. This tends to be a combination of
  topics written on the page, and post-it notes and scraps of paper I’ve used for “notes to self.”
• Following my TBW list, I write from front to back. If a piece of text has inspired the writing, I
  record it or paste in a copy next to the draft.
• If I have time to plan an upcoming piece of writing in advance, I often start a two-page spread in my notebook to capture ideas and information over as part of my planning process.
• Starting at the back and working toward the front, I record sentences and passages from my
  reading. This section acts as an archive of possible mentor texts and models for mini-lessons.

Blogging

A few years ago, my literacy colleagues and I started a blog for sharing ideas and book recommendations. To maintain our schedule of publishing twice a week, each of us writes at least two posts every month. Having a deadline and a commitment to my team keeps me writing regularly. It also means that I lean heavily on the To-Be-Written list in my notebook. As I read, write, and talk with colleagues I’m always on the lookout for possible topics. Because my notebook supports my writing life, having a dedicated place to store and generate blog ideas is an essential part of my blogging ritual.  Blogging on a regular schedule forces me to move beyond my perfectionism and the temptation to revise a piece endlessly. Writing for an audience gives me much-needed insight into how students feel when they have a due date for handing in their work to be evaluated.

Twitter

Although my tweets are much shorter than my blog posts, composing tweets requires me to make many of the same writerly decisions about message, audience, purpose, and word choice. I like the challenge of crafting my message within the character limit, but I really wish there was an edit button!

Quick Writes

Linda Rief defines a quickwrite as “a first draft response to a short piece of writing, usually no more than on page of poetry or prose, a drawing, an excerpt from a novel or a short picture book”(3). We begin every literacy team meeting with a quick write and have written in response to print texts, video clips, images, and tweets. For the first few minutes we write silently, and then spend time discussing our reactions and responses to the text. This ritual of writing together not only guarantees a few minutes of writing and reflection, it also grounds us in the work of authentic reading and writing before we move into the “busy-ness” of agenda items.

Morning Pages

One of the key tenets of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity is the practice of the morning pages. Cameron recommends 3 pages of handwritten stream-of-consciousness writing daily. Although I sometimes stray from Cameron’s definition, I have returned to the daily early-morning writing that I let lapse during quarantine. Every morning, while the rest of my family is still sleeping, I spend at least 30 quiet minutes writing. Sometimes I am working on a specific piece of writing and on other days I am capturing thoughts in my notebook, more in keeping with the morning pages Cameron promotes. This early-morning writing solitude has become, once again, an essential component of my writing practice. I hadn’t realized how much I missed it.

A 30-Day Writing Habit

For the last 3 years I have invited teachers in my district to kick off the new year with a 30-day jumpstart of their writing practice. Beginning on the first day of school after winter break, I email participating teachers a daily invitation to write. This is usually a link to a short text and a few possible quick write suggestions. The goal is to generate a volume of writing in our notebooks so we can look back over the month and detect patterns that are emerging, ideas coming to the surface, and find places where we know there’s more to say.  This year 98 colleagues took part and knowing that I was writing as part of a community kept me motivated all month.

Reflection Journal

This is a daily writing ritual I started a few years ago and I honestly didn’t even have a name for it until I sat down to draft this post. It is best described as part anecdotal reflection and part bullet journal. Every Sunday night, I record a few goals for the week. These can be anything from productivity (turn off email notifications while working on a project) to health (walk at lunch) to self-care (if I say yes to one more thing, I have to say no to something else). Every evening I take five minutes to reflect in writing on my pluses and deltas for the day. It takes under five minutes, but it is another daily writing routine that has become part of my writing life.

References

Cameron, J. (2016). The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (25th Anniversary Edition). New York, NY: TarcherPerigree.
Elrod Whitney, A. (2017). Keeping It Real: Valuing Authenticity in the Writing Classroom. English Journal, 106(6), 16-21.
Hicks, T., & Schoenborn, A. (2020). Creating Confident Writers: For High School, College, & Life. New York, NY: Norton.
Rief, L. (2018). The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students’ Thinking and Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Wood Ray, K. (2002). What You Know by Heart: How to Develop Curriculum for Your Writing Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.