Teaching as a Writer

by Libby Falk Jones

I’ve been teaching in the college classroom since 1967 when, as a second-year graduate student armed with The Norton Reader, I walked into a freshman composition section at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  Barely six years older than my students, I addressed them as “Mr.” and “Miss” until midterm, when they told me they wanted to learn one another’s first names.  The first day, I passed out a syllabus with the term’s reading and writing assignments, most stolen from third-year teaching friends.  Standing at the blackboard through the term, I led class discussions from questions on index cards, questions I designed to take the students to the major insights I thought the readings offered.  In the margins of students’ essays, I wrote copious explanations of grammatical rules, hoping not to see those same mistakes in the writers’ next papers. Despite my inexperience, my students’ writing improved, a testimonial to my enthusiasm and Annie Dillard’s claim that the blank page will teach us to write.  Perhaps more important, my students liked me; I got good evaluations at the end of the term.  I was hooked.

More than thirty-five years later, I’m still hooked on teaching, still feel the adrenalin pumping when I walk into that writing classroom the first day of the semester, eager to discover my students and myself.  I’ve taught eight-year-olds and eighty-year-olds, taught the writing of arguments, news stories, and poems, taught in my own classroom, the writing center, and other teachers’ classes.  I’ve learned some better ways of teaching writing.  And teaching writing has also helped me become a just plain better teacher.  Following are ten key teaching lessons teaching writing has taught me, ten writerly components in composing a teaching life in any discipline.

1. Work with the learner through the learning.

Working with the writer through the writing is a mainstay of writing center work.  The piece of writing – or exam or other learning product – is important; it’s what brought that student into the writing center, and it needs the writing consultant’s attentive engagement.  But more important than that one paper or presentation is the writer/learner herself.  Good teachers know that the particular assignment is an entrée to that mysterious complex of attitudes, knowledge, and skill that compose a learner.  Conversations about assignments may not always lead immediately to better products, but they should always lead to better learners – people who know ways to improve learning, who will, at least eventually, produce better products.    When we teachers learn to use learners’ presenting parts to diagnose their systematic accomplishments and challenges, and when we couch our feedback from that perspective, then we can teach strategies to think and problem-solve that will last a lifetime. 

2. Analyze your audience. 

Writers know you can’t persuade your audience until you know what they know and what they need.  Often we teachers make untested assumptions about our students’ knowledge and needs.  We must devise ways to find them out.  In addition to diagnosing from students’ learning products, we can ask students directly about their learning processes.  We can ask the writer to provide a context statement for the piece: how and why she created the pages we have before us.  Or we can conference with the learner.  A ten-minute conversation where the learner explains a point or unpacks his thinking on an exam question can give great insight and suggest productive ways of responding.  Who wants to write extensive comments the writer or learner doesn’t read or understand?  Angelo and Cross’s Classroom Assessment Techniques gives many practical suggestions on finding out how and what our learners are learning.

3. Work smarter, not harder. 

This maxim arises from writing across the curriculum work, where teachers in all disciplines may initially view writing as an add-on, making their work harder.  Teaching is hard work anyway; writing teachers know that working harder is not always better.   Put another way, less is often more.  We need to use our energy effectively.  One way to do this is to frontload, to put more time into responding to an early draft or proposal, when the project is more fluid and the learner more likely to make use of our suggestions.  Then we can evaluate the final draft or finished project with a checklist and brief comments only.  Another way to work smarter is to put energy into organizing study or project groups to work together in or out of class.  Research shows that peer learning not only improves performance, it also encourages the connections that keep students from dropping out.  Helping students get effective peer feedback benefits them and saves us time in the long run.

4. Teach for surprise. 

Our scholarly lives are dedicated to discovery, yet how often in our daily teaching practice do we encourage or reward a genuinely different perspective?  Often we ask for and receive only what we want to hear.  No wonder students’ main goal is to psych us out.  “Tell me what you want me to know,” they plead.  Writers know that what we think we want, what we think is our subject, is often dull and limited, only a starting point for discovering what we really have to say, what has not yet been said.  Student writers and learners need time and prompts to move beyond the obvious, the predictable.  They also often need help in spotting the chinkholes that can become windows to new vistas.  Teachers need to listen for the good but unarticulated insight hovering around the edges of the spoken, to ask what didn’t get on the page.  Donald Murray’s Learning By Teaching gives other helpful suggestions on teaching for surprise.

5. Hook learners with your lead. 

Newswriters know that a fresh, apt first sentence draws readers into the story.  Teachers need to use the first encounter with students in a class to begin to create a culture of engagement, discovery, collaboration, and hospitality.   For my first class, instead of walking in on the hour to stand in front, I now get there early and move among my students, shaking hands and introducing myself.  Now I spend part or all of the first class finding out who my students are and what they hope to gain from the course.  We may do class interviews or write letters to each other or draw course-related family trees or give brief oral presentations.   Our opening activities should send the message that who is learning is as important as what is learned.  If we begin by distributing a syllabus with every detailed assignment locked in, we reinforce students’ passivity, their sense that education is something teachers do to, not with, students.  Such an attitude is not likely to lead to the habits of life-long learning we value.

6. Create some safe spaces for experimentation. 

Writers and learners need permission to fail occasionally, or they will never take the risks necessary for genuine growth.  We should design some assignments as exploratory: journals, informal writing, in-class freewriting, question-posing—what Peter Elbow calls low-stakes assignments, evaluated merely by their completion rather than their quality.  We can design other assignments to encourage good learning practices—attending help sessions, keeping a study log, etc.—and give students some small credit for completing these.  And we can allow room for students to resist our best professional advice, to create their own hoops instead of only jumping through ours.  Teachers need such safe spaces, too.  We need to be sure to build into our teaching lives peer groups or mentors who can support us in trying new approaches to teaching and reflecting on the outcomes.

7. Vary teaching approaches. 

Monotony is the doom of good writing and good teaching.  We can encourage our students to find their own best learning styles and to strengthen their abilities to learn in less-preferred ways.  We can give students some choices in ways they learn and ways they demonstrate their learning.  And we ourselves can try different ways of approaching material.   The ever-increasing varieties of learning technologies are a ready means of varying approaches.   Not only will variety help our students learn better, it will also keep us fresh. 

8. Revise as well as edit.

Most writers love to edit: to fine-tune, sharpen, prune, groom for public presentation.  Of course we tinker with our classes, and small changes made in response to students’ needs can make a major difference in everyone’s satisfaction.   But teachers need to be sure to build in time for genuine re-vision: for asking big questions about our goals and approaches, for radically rethinking what we are about in our teaching.  Consider keeping a teaching log or journal to chronicle experiences and lay the groundwork for bigger changes.  We need to break the teaching silence, to tell our teaching stories and really listen to the experiences of other teachers.  Parker Palmer’s book, The Courage To Teach, suggests ways for reflection and sharing.

9. Build on strengths. 

The academy cherishes critique, and we know we learn when readers point out our errors, especially if they explain why these are problems.  Yet we also learn when readers tell us what worked in our drafts, when we’ve stated an important idea, how that transition helped connect the two thoughts.   Teachers need to be sure to give positive specific feedback on learners’ work, not just a global “good job!” but detailed notes about where learners have been successful.  Teaching from what Herman Blake calls an asset, rather than a deficit, mentality can result in higher student motivation and better, quicker learning.

10. Learn to let go rather than finish. 

Writers know that writing is seldom finished: rereading will always suggest possible improvements.  Like writing, teaching is something we will never get entirely right.  Yet sometimes we do our best revising when we move to a new topic.  Haunted by what-ifs, we still must come to appropriate closure in our courses, then let go.  We need to find a way to end by celebrating whatever’s been achieved.  Then note the limitations, make resolutions, and start a new draft.  Reinvention is our burden and our joy.

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“Teaching as a Writer.” From The National Teaching and Learning Forum 13, 2 (February 2004): 6-8.