All elementary school teachers are teachers of writing and yet many of them are not writers themselves.  I started my career as a writer and so this week I’ll be posting a few tips on how to teach writing in a way that resembles the real world.

Tip #1 Not everything that you start writing turns out to be good.

The summer in between graduating college and life starting I spent some time writing movies.  I wrote the story of my freshman year five times before I was able to figure out the first scene of the movie.  I spent months writing what I called a modern day western before a friend told me that the movie had already been written.  Then I wrote “Earwax” a story of unrequited love in the workplace and “Earwax”  just flowed out of me (no pun intended).  I had been thinking about the topic of the movie for months and the day I started writing it, like a baby, it was ready to be birthed.

Lesson for the classroom:

I think it’s great that teaching the writing process allows students a chance to revise and make their writing better.  However, most teachers never allow students to change what they’re writing about once they get to the drafting stage of the writing process.  Whatever students start writing about, they’re basically stuck with it for the week or the month or however long the writing process takes.  Whether they want to or not, they’re taking their piece all the way through to publishing even though real writers don’t publish everything.

Many teachers complain that their students won’t revise when they ask them to.  Revising does have to be explicitly modeled and taught but, part of the problem is that students may be revising a piece of writing that they have either a) lost interest in b) don’t know much about c) decided is awful and don’t want to continue writing or d) would rather be writing something else.

Writers in the real world can change their minds.  Can our students?

I allow for experimentation by having a week of prewriting before we even get to drafting.  During the five prewriting days I model coming up with an idea and drawing pictures to get down sensory details.  Students each day get to either continue what they were prewriting the day before or start a new idea.  Some students write about the same thing every day and they end up with five days of material on Friday.  Other students have five different ideas by Friday.  On Friday students decide on their best idea and that’s the one they continue taking through the rest of the writing process.

This extended prewriting time allows students time to safely experiment with different genres and different stories that they might not feel comfortable writing if they knew they’d be stuck with it for the next two weeks.  The most striking example I can think of is a student who got up the nerve towards the end of the school year to write about witnessing the murder of her parents in Mexico the year before she entered kindergarten.  After drafting she decided that it was too painful to keep writing but we were both glad she had tried.  The student would never have gotten to that point had we stuck with writing about “what you did last summer.”

How do you handle a student who wants to change what they’re going to write about?