Troy Hicks - Creating Confident Writers

NORTON BOOKS IN EDUCATION

Troy Hicks and Andy Schoenborn

A Norton Professional Book

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For my sons who are in their final years of high schoolBeau, Shane, and Cooperand who may not always share my same passion for reading and writing. ;-)

Please know how much I enjoy it when you ask me to look over the occasional essay or share the idea that maybe, just maybe, you feel the book you are reading in English class isnt so bad after all.

T. H.

For my students, past and present, whom I continue to learn with. For my children, Dean, Kendal, Olivia, and Everly, who encourage me. And, to my wife, Julie, whose unwavering love and support made this book possible.

A. S.

Everything I need to know about writing I learned in Mrs. Goldmans third-grade class, Greenbriar School, Northbrook, IL, 1979.

Mrs. Goldman gave us a task, to write instructions for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then she produced the sandwich fixings and told us to go ahead and make our sandwiches following our directions to the letter.

Most, maybe even all of us, had left some things out. Things like what you are supposed to spread the peanut butter on the bread with, or how much peanut butter and jelly to use, or which sides of the peanut butter and jelly covered bread should be pressed together.

I have a picture of me in the midst of the experience, wearing a red-checked plaid flannel, a messy mop of blond hair covering my ears. Because I am smiling you can see my wayward front teeth, traumatized in a skateboard accident so badly that I would get braces for the first of two times the next year.

My hand is knuckles deep inside a jar of peanut butter because I am one of the people who forgot to say that one should use a knife to spread the peanut butter across the bread. I am smiling as a classmate looks on at my foolishness.

In that moment, something clicked about writing. I understood that there is a purpose behind what we write; that our writing must be useful to others. I understood that in order to be useful to others we must consider our audience prior, during, and after the act of writing. I learned these things in a flash of discovery and they have been with me ever since.

They have served me well. They kicked off a writing journey that shows no signs of stopping.

Some things have changed in the intervening forty years. My hair is nearly gray now, and I keep it above my ears. With the prevalence of peanut allergies, I cannot imagine a teacher encouraging her students to shove their hands in a jar of peanut butter.

Based on my twenty-five or so years working with first-year college students, I think something else has changed. Not many of the students I work with would have ever smiled while doing anything writing-related in school. They arrive in our first-year writing class having internalized writing for school as a grim slog through proficiencies, laden with prescriptions meant to help them pass assessments, assessments that seem far removed from the kind of liberation of discovery I routinely experienced during my school years.

They are not confident writers; even the ones who report getting good grades do not have a self-concept of being a writer at all. They are instead students, performing to meet the standards, jumping through one hoop and the next. What they describe is depersonalized, joyless, and sort of heartbreaking as I think about how, for me, writing has consistently been a source of personal liberation since third grade.

Even when I was writing for the purpose of assessment, I knew that I was capable of more. Sure, I can jump through that hoop, but watch me set it on fire as I cruise by.

The underlying causes of my students attitudes toward writing are myriad, systemic, and could fill a book. I know this because I wrote one, and upon its appearance in the world I began to hear from teachers expressing nearly identical frustrations, teachers who were looking for a way out from under these systemic pressures that seem to separate student writing from the joyous and genuinely rigorous activity it can and should be.

We must collectively do better by our teachers to remove the constraints and provide the necessary resources so teachers can work with their students as the professionals they are.

I believe this will happenbecause it must happenbut in the meantime, we need to do our best under conditions as they are, which is why Im so pleased to see Creating Confident Writers enter into the world.

Invite. Encourage. Celebrate. These are the three principles of Creating Confident Writers, and I know they work because this is what Mrs. Goldman did for me and my classmates forty years ago. She trusted us with the work of writing and therefore we became writers.

In Creating Confident Writers, I see a book that is both concise and filled with concrete and actionable approaches that will help classrooms embody the values of invite, encourage, celebrate. It provides ways for us to treat students not as students, but as fully-fledged humans. It respects teacher autonomy and class difference and provides a framework for thinking about writing that can be adapted to any classroom and occasion.

Now, we should not think any of this will be easy. I did not leave Mrs. Goldmans classroom as a fully-formed writer. Neither will adopting this book be a sufficient step by itself. It is the start of a journey for everyone involved. Creating Confident Writers is an invitation that puts students and their learning central to the process.

Forty years past my epiphany in Mrs. Goldmans class, I do not think I am a fully-formed writer. I am continually frustrated by my inability to achieve that which I intend with words, but Ive never wavered in my belief in the process. Similarly, as a teacher, I learn something new about how to better engage students every semester. It is sometimes difficult to know that there is no terminal proficiency, but it is also energizing to know theres always more to be learned.

The simultaneous difficulty of writing and the joy in using writing to connect to others, even its merely how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, is worth celebrating on a daily basis.

I am grateful to Troy Hicks and Andy Schoenborn for providing a book that helps us plan, experience, and achieve these feats worthy of celebration.

John Warner

Author of Why They Cant Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities