At Ethical ELA, we believe in the power of writing to inform and transform. We write to write; to reflect on our teaching; to recognize that for change to happen, we have to act deliberately; to challenge the status quo; to celebrate the “good” in what we do for the students with whom we are entrusted; to cultivate a culture of teaching for a better humanity; to show that teachers do have agency; and because, as William Faulkner wrote, “If a story is in you, it has to come out.” This week, Lesley Roessing, tells us her story of becoming a writer and inspires us to be writers together.
Teachers as Writers: Becoming Part of Your Classroom Writing Community
by Lesley Roessing
At the end of each summer Writing Institute and my Teaching Writing & Writers course, I ask participants to share what surprised them the most—about the course or about themselves. Every summer more than half of these practicing teachers write, “I never thought of myself as a writer before” or “I didn’t know that I was a writer.” That would astonish me, but it was during my own Writing Institute experience with NWP’s Pennsylvania Writing & Literature Project that I discovered myself as a writer.
Even though I had worked as a writer, having written publicity for Doubleday Publishing, I hadn’t thought about myself as a writer as part of my new career in teaching. Sure, I taught writing. But I didn’t think of myself as a writer, other than a technical writer, a writer with accuracy but not any voice. Then I participated in the Institute where we had a free-writing exercise every day for four weeks. And there I discovered my voice. I realized that, through my writing, I could make people laugh—and cry; that I could write about facts but also tell stories.
After the Institute ended, I looked through the literacy journals, and noticed that most of the articles appeared to be written by university professors and contained a lot of jargon—methodology, pedagogy—with which I was uncomfortable and words that didn’t match my voice, and a lot of citations. But one day I was reading my copy of NCTE Voices from the Middle and came across a call for a short piece about a lesson that worked in the classroom. I thought, “Maybe I can try that,” and I wrote about a strategy that I created and was employing in my classroom in place of grades, “Miles for Motivation.” That first “article” was only 3 pages long and written in my own voice as an 8th grade educator. When it was accepted for publication, I felt like, not only a writer but a real author. A few educators from across the country contacted me about the article, and I felt like an “expert” (which we all are—we are the experts in our classrooms). [“Miles for Motivation” will be published, with NCTE’s permission, on Ethical ELA January 1st.]
I continued to write and publish in a variety of journals and found that the benefits were greater than I ever thought.
1) As I gained confidence in myself as a writer, I started writing with my students. I added a step in our writing process—after we deconstructed a mentor text, I showed them how I reconstructed a writing, using the ideas, strategies, and skills that I acquired from the mentor text, but making it my own.
2) I begin teaching writing more like I wrote—with choice, time, and sometimes collaborating with others.
3) As I wrote for publication, I shared my drafts—my sloppy copies, as Russell called them. I also shared editors’ letters and comments. I received an email from Art Peterson, then editor of the National Writing Project journal The Quarterly, where he listed ten things he liked about my manuscript, ten questions a reader might have, and ten revision suggestions. I had been teaching our 3-person peer review groups the same process: to state one thing each liked about the author’s writing; one question they, as a reader, had; and one revision suggestion. Excitedly, I showed them the email and was able to demonstrate that this was an authentic strategy utilized in the real publishing world.
4) Every time I had an article accepted and published, my students celebrated with me. They felt that they were being taught by a real author and that my methods actually had meaning. And that successful writing deserved celebration. They even insisted that I display the journals containing my publications for Parents’ Night.
5) Most important was that, as I wrote about strategies I employed and lessons I designed and used in my classroom, the writing made me examine how I was teaching, what I was teaching, and why I was teaching it, and I was forced to analyze what was effective—and what was not. When writing, I had to back up my words with research and results.
6) I also shared student work within my writings; in that way, my students became published writers. I think they put more thought and care into their writing because they could “be in a article or a book.” My first book, The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension, became a class (or all my team classes) collaboration. The book contains 149 examples of student work from my and other colleagues’ students. My classes were involved throughout the entire project. They wanted to be apprised whenever I received an email from my editor, when Andrew’s title won the team naming contest and was approved by the publisher, when their photographers taken by our social studies teachers were accepted for inclusion. They wanted to try new response strategies for the book.
7) We truly became a writing community and talked about writing and read like writers—all of us, including me.
The point is not that I write but that all teachers of writing should think of themselves as writers and should be writing—in whatever way best suits them, personal or public. Every teacher has something of value to reflect on and share. I hope more K-12 teachers will write articles to share their strategies and lessons with other educators. And share their writing with their student writers as part of the classroom writing community. There are many opportunities for publication from state affliliates’ newsletters and journals to national journals.
Take the plunge. Show your students writers that you are a writer also.
Works Referenced:
Roessing, Lesley. “Miles for Motivation.” Voices from the Middle, 10 (4), 2003.
Roessing, Lesley. The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2009.
Lesley Roessing is Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project and Senior Lecturer in the College of Education, Armstrong State University, Savannah, GA.. Lesley is the author of The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension (Corwin, 2009), No More “Us” and “Them”: Classroom Lessons & Activities to Promote Peer Respect (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), Comma Quest: The Rules They Followed; The Sentences They Saved (Discover Writing Press. 2013), and Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically & Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). Contact her at Lesley.roessing@armstrong.edu or follow Facebook.com/coastalsavwp.
As editor of Connection, the peer-reviewed journal of the Georgia Council of Teachers of English, she invites you to submit an article.