Storying a Teacher’s Writing Pedagogy: A Self-Study

Abstract

Educators often struggle with both successful instruction and student engagement. As I reflected on my experiences as a teacher, I discovered that the genesis of meaningful writing instruction often came from the students themselves. Reflection on their needs and interests, specifically through the use of narrative and storytelling in the classroom, not only yielded improvements in both instructional planning and student writing performance but also allowed me to better support my students’ healthy social and emotional development.

Introduction

Then there is the instinct of making—the constructive impulse. The child’s impulse to do finds expression first in play, in movement, gesture, and make-believe, becomes more definite, and seeks outlet in shaping materials into tangible forms and permanent embodiment. (Dewey, 1915/2001, p. 30)

Several years ago, for my MA thesis topic, and in response to the challenges I had faced teaching elementary age students for 15 years in a large, urban school district, I reflected on the strength and weaknesses of my instruction to identify successful strategies in the hopes of developing a stronger and more responsive writing pedagogy. The Common Core State Standards and standardized tests had set rigorous writing goals for students but did not specify how educators are to successfully prepare students to attain proficiency according to the metrics (Lohman, 2010).

In many urban schools, educators and their students often struggle with the integration of mandated programs, language barriers, overcrowded conditions, and teacher training that is poorly aligned to unique instruction. Literacy programs often fall short of addressing all the difficulties put in place for these teachers. Faced with this dilemma, educators are often left to scramble for solutions. Out of necessity, some even make the decision to do the hard work to create their own curricula. To add to the problem, until more recent tests were developed, authentic student writing performance was not a focus of testing.

Many teachers feel uncomfortable teaching writing. Writing sections of literacy programs often resemble how-to shows for do it yourself home repair. Success seems to hinge on perfect conditions and minor challenges. What do you do with students who are two or more years behind in their skills? What do you do with students that have a fear of writing or have no interest in writing? What do you do with students who may never have received strong writing instruction before coming to you? What do you do with students struggling to learn to write in a second language?

While research studies exist that describe the effective use of writing strategies in improving student writing performance in the elementary setting, there is still need for further study on the ways in which alternative methods and strategies involving dramatization, visualization, and verbalization can be incorporated into effective writing instruction. Research supports that the integration of the arts in literacy instruction can motivate and promote writing performance and expression. The following reflection began as a search to find strategies and improve instruction, and I was surprised to find that success was invariably generated from my observations of the students themselves and the actions I took after reflecting on these observations.

One clear pattern that emerged as an important and common vehicle of expression for the students was that of storying. Raj (2019) defines storying as “remembering, retelling, or narrating an event for a particular audience that holds emotional truth for and validates its audience” (p. 7). The desire and need to express oneself is integral to the development of our identity, the development of our language, and the development of our social and emotional health. Storytelling in all its forms is one of, if not the most important, vehicle of expression that humans have developed during its history. Whether it is with words or sounds or images, we have the need to tell each other these stories on a daily basis. In my definition, stories include even jokes, songs, the answers to questions, and the questions themselves. To me, sentences and paintings are stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Even the flight of a bird across the sky tells a story, if one responds to the experience with thought and feeling.

To tell and to engage with a telling is a mostly untaught facility that allows us to navigate, enjoy, and survive life. I initially searched for a solution to the challenge of improving students’ poor writing performance and test scores, but over time it became clear to me that students’ interests, expression, and identity formation through storying were not only integral to the development of engaging writing instruction, but could also address the deeper needs of students such as healthy identity formation and self-expression, as well as their ability to communicate effectively.

Visualization and Writing

During my first few years of teaching mostly third and fourth grade students that were learning English as a second language, I struggled to improve their organization in writing, as well as their ability to use appropriate, expressive content-related language and vocabulary. Graham and Perrin (2007) recognized that “explicitly teaching strategies for planning, revising, and editing was effective” in improving student writing performance (p. 467). However, as I reflected on my teaching I saw a development in my ability to use visualization strategies to improve my students’ performance in planning, revision, and editing. Between the periods of these two reflections, dedicated writing time during the week had diminished and major challenges to effective writing instruction remained. I found that during conversations with the students about their writing the majority could not visualize what they were writing about. If they had no purpose and no interest, writing would be like pushing a boulder uphill.

This affected their abilities to organize their compositions, allowed them to retain focus throughout structure, as well as describe characters and events effectively. Revision for description, structure, and clarity was extremely difficult, as many students finished this part of the writing process too quickly, making sparse changes to their papers. Student memory and retention of the content of their own writing became a focus of my pedagogical improvement.

However, when my students wrote narratives, the majority nevertheless struggled with organization in their writing, the use of transitions and descriptive vocabulary. Above all, students found it difficult to know what to write about, and even more so, to find something interesting to write about, and to become engaged with their writing as a living extension of themselves. They need to see it. The teacher must somehow help students put their thoughts and feelings in front of them. I realized that my students were regularly exposed to narrative texts through both reading and writing, which led to my decision to improve their writing through this genre. I decided to have students visualize their narratives with illustrations before writing them as text. This visual organization could stand as a focus to help them say and show what was in their minds. Not yet arriving at an effective way to get students to proofread and revise their papers, and the related writing lessons in our reading program being dry, limited, and uninteresting to the students as they were, many students finished this part of the writing process too quickly, making sparse changes to their papers.

In the first few years I was teaching, I let students draw and color when they had finished writing early, yet had not made the connection to use the drawing in any manner that would directly support their writing. To motivate students to write, I made it a requirement for some written narratives that students include a similar illustration to go along, specifically focusing on the creation of labels.

After a few days of observation, drawing a simple picture that went with their writing seemed limited in use. I realized that students needed a visual scaffold, a reflection of what was in their heads that could guide their writing. I wanted to help them “speak” visually. Norris et al. (1997) found that third grade students’ writing improved when they integrated drawing and writing. Observing that my students had difficulty remembering what they read or wrote, it became clear that I had to find ways for the students to visualize and to communicate what they were writing. This prompted me to pursue drawing as a means of visualization for the students before and during the writing of their drafts.

During the time I was considering possible instructional strategies that connected drawing and writing, a student showed me the illustration she made to go with a narrative she had written. She had labeled the characters and some of the objects in the illustration. She had also written a few words of dialogue made by the characters. Other students wanted to do the same thing. After a week, two ideas came to me. I created a simple template that mirrored the three-part structure of a narrative. Students would include labeled illustrations for the three parts of their stories—beginning, middle, and end.

I taught this process as a means to help them put ideas and feelings into words because I could see that actions that were difficult for them to do would take some time to learn. I knew that visualizing what they would write about was something that would have to come before something like a conventional outline could be used effectively. I thought back to the cinema classes I had taken in college that trained me to write for the screen and how I had used illustrations to make sense my writing.

Learning from prior experience to capitalize on student interest, as well as my own studies of screenwriting, I decided to have them make a labeled storyboard for each of the three parts of their stories. I felt that they should be led through this novel visual template slowly and step-by-step. We also created an organized classroom bank of language they could use to elaborate on their narratives with their partners.

The other idea was rooted in the challenge I faced with teaching students to pre-write. Planning a paper was crucial, but somewhere between brainstorming writing topics with the students to write about and the first draft was a creative, conceptual gap for the students. I had been having students make a list of the things they wanted to put into their narratives in outline form, but the students still could not visualize specific things to put in their paper.

I decided then to try a visual pre-write and used this three-part illustration template as a way of visualizing their paper before they started writing in text. Visualizing your story before writing it down on the page was something I had never tried before in the classroom. I decided to have them create a labeled storyboard for each of the three parts of their stories. Students would now write their beginnings first, then their endings, and their middles last. I found it easier for students to connect their beginnings and their ends prior to visualizing their middle sections.

From this activity, students got to know each other, better engage, and play with each other. I explained the uses of the template to the entire class and had them first fill one out for a story we had read, including illustrating parts of the narrative. In whole group discussion, we clarified that we would use to plan our own stories. I modeled its use with a story I made up on the spot, thinking aloud as I did so, including labeled illustrations with some brief dialogue. The next day, I orally presented a brief narrative based upon the information in the template to them and left it on the wall as a model for them to access and refer to.

Soon after, we started our narrative cycle. After brainstorming and choosing story ideas, specifically imaginary, I passed out the template with the assignment that they were to make one illustration each of the next three days. This helped me divide the class into small groups for differentiation. The first day, students would only be making an illustration for the beginning of the story, including their characters, the setting, and the situation they found them in. They were required to label the character names, important objects, any descriptive terms for the setting, or the feelings of the characters. I figured that they could add some dialogue, so I allowed use of dialogue in the illustrations for those who felt comfortable using them. This process allowed them to express, gave them the tools for expression of themselves, to tell, to learn about others while also experiencing their own expression and content. Along the way, the students became more confident in using language and description, stating cause and effect, thinking through their writing, getting validation of who they are in safe space of play, and speaking through their characters. It wasn’t them, and it was them.

When they had finished the illustration for the first part of their story, they had to describe their main characters, their setting, and the situation the characters found themselves in at the beginning of the narrative. If they were ready, they could tell me the event they created that changed that situation and any ideas they had to illustrate it. Elaborating on these two elements of their story really excited the students.

Over the next few days, I made observations of students as they worked, making suggestions and working with students who were struggling with elements of the assignment. I also worked with small focus groups that needed extra attention and time. Several challenges arose. One of these was assisting students in their drawings. Some became frustrated because they did not know how to draw what they needed to express their thoughts. I decided that students would need to develop a simple visual vocabulary for drawing what they needed. I started a simplified visual journal/dictionary for the students in which I taught them how to draw stick figures, faces, houses, mountains, buildings, cars, dogs, and streets. These were done in a very simplified way that allowed everyone to communicate in drawing in a quick fashion.

Over time, we would add to them as a class and add to them as individuals. As students began to see the illustrations of others, they learned from each other how to make more sophisticated and specific drawings. I made another model template that included a story in this simplistic fashion to encourage everyone. Identity and need. I tried this out as a trial run with a few students in a small group and realized that, while the template needed to remain simple and easy to understand and give space for student illustrations, it would also be good to include transitional sentence starters for them as suggestions to begin their three parts as well as brief reminders of what to include, such as characters, setting, situation, problem, and solution. During these trial small groups, I was reminded of a recurring problem. Many students had difficulty starting their writing. The decision to break with the conventional narrative instructional requirement that students think of their beginnings first, their middles after that, and finally their endings yielded positive results and great improvement over previous lessons on narrative structure.

Another challenge occurred when we created our illustrations chronologically—beginning, middle, and end. Students typically became bogged down in the middle. There would be no clear difference between the middle and the end. The simple beginning-middle-end sequence didn’t work that well. After listening to students elaborate on their frustrations, it became clear that it would be easier for them to identify a beginning situation followed by a change, as well as an end situation that would be different than the beginning. Ends, beginnings. Identity, maturity, development, understandings of world around them, and their relation to it. They know how to start and maybe end—or a moment—but they are young and need help with endings. This is from a lack of life experience. We can’t expect to know how things end or how a story gets to its end.

In the meantime, I left the template as it was, but the use of it changed. They would identify and describe a situation with characters in a setting, create a change if they could, then decide upon an ending. The overall frustration diminished. Students would confer with each other on what would be an interesting change they could introduce, as well as what a good ending for their story could be. The middle would come later.

It became much easier for them to imagine how a character would get from point A to point C, and then get from point B to point C. As I reflected upon my own struggles with screenwriting, the middle act, that long, murky road of character and plot development, always presented the biggest challenges, even for professional writers. And students now had a framework that they could use to assist each other. From then on, most students could choose to plan their narratives visually, which most of them did. Each illustration would eventually become a paragraph. This became a lot easier for them to understand. Without consciously intending to, I had also made other areas of writing instruction easier. This practice now made it easier to teach paragraph structure and meaning.

Many students could now visualize their “movie.” Their ideas and feelings were validated, who they are, they can see their reflections in their work, some for the first time as young kids. These visual aids made it easy to identify and discuss the central action of that part of their story. Before this, many stories typically had a beginning, an event that happened, and then small events that kept happening until an abrupt end. Characters did not change or learn anything. The reality of the central character at the end was essentially the same as it was at the beginning. With visual exploration, a student could identify any development going on in their stories much easier than if we were looking at a single block of writing. While the sight of this block of writing often intimidated the student from wanting to reread their work, let alone proofread or edit it, discussing their illustrations in parts was much easier to do (see Fig. 11.1).

Fig. 11.1

Illustrated pre-writing

These illustrations were also useful in the writing conferences as reference points and stimulators of conversation about the students’ narratives. During the conferences, the students and I now had a point of reference from which to clarify ideas before writing began. These images helped us clarify foundations of ideas from which to write from (Norris et al., 1997). Images transcended the language of words and allowed us to search for the appropriate words and meaning from those very images.

I had never reached this stage of engagement in my instruction. I took advantage of this by highlighting the advantages of using the writing of other students as a model for their own writing. Other advances followed. I learned about the kids and I could design lessons and instruction with more intuition about what students needed and what would work. I realized that I had to take risks with my instruction if I wanted to improve my practice. I concluded that, over time and with some application, I could become more effective through a process of dedicated reflection on my trial and error.

From these efforts, there had developed a significant change in students’ development of writing organization, grasp of text structure, and use of appropriate, content-related vocabulary. Students had labeled their illustrations; the vocabulary and sentence structures in their texts became more sophisticated and specific. The texts were more descriptive, showing that students were becoming more interested in their work, becoming especially proud and excited when their illustrations were shown alongside the text. In addition, the writing output of all students increased dramatically. The process of visualization translated to writing with more elaboration and articulation (see Fig. 11.2).

Fig. 11.2

Final draft from pre-write seen in Fig. 11.1

My happy discoveries mirrored those of Norris et al. (1997) who found that drawing was instrumental in giving students opportunities and time to think about and reflect on their own ideas before they started to write. I saw my students use their drawings to help them improve their own writing. My students worked through narrative problems and developed oral language using their illustrations as reference points for discussions about their writing. They then used the oral language they learned to write better stories.

Storytelling and Writing

For the next several years, I continued to develop an instructional model for third and fourth graders that focused on the use of student illustrations to improve story structure. Compared to the students from my first year of teaching, my students appeared to care more about their work and enjoyed making and using their illustrations to improve their writing. There was less fear of the act of writing. Nevertheless, I realized that most of my students still struggled with their writing. Their drafts often lacked the descriptive elements necessary to communicate crucial character and plot development. The student writers were not adept at using dialogue as an effective tool. Most importantly, students lacked dramatic tension and personal energy in their writing. They lacked a literary “voice.”

An author’s voice is apparent in fiction when they choose words and phrases that express their emotion, their point of view, and their attitude. An author’s written voice can mirror their attitude when speaking in person. An author’s voice is distinct from other authors. This imparts the author’s personality to the reader.

When students first start to write fiction, they often lack this distinctive voice as they struggle with written expression. At some point, they start to write what they want to write in the way they want to write it, and through this, communicate their individual identity. They are then able to see a reflection of themselves in print for the first time. This allows them to reflect on their ideas and refine them, refine themselves.

At this point in my teaching, a close set of realizations propelled me forward. Like before, these transformations in my thinking were initiated by unexpected experiences with my students. And, as in the past, success depended on attendant reflections, followed by experimentation in the classroom. A pattern in my pedagogy was evolving. But this time around, I was becoming aware of the pattern and using this knowledge to build a reflexive, conscious approach to my instruction and to the observations I made of my students.

Around this time, I took notice of how, without direction, students would be drawn to go to the writing wall and read the other students’ stories along with the accompanying illustrations. Many students remarked that the illustrations looked like pictures in comics. A lot of conversations between students began to happen around those illustrations and the stories. These text-enriched illustrations freed them to discuss whatever interested them from the stories, including those ideas prompted by the images.

Up to this point, I had never considered comics as useful texts for rich literacy instruction. Sealey-Morris (2015) observed that, when comics are compared to conventional printed text, “the mixture of images with words presents no less than a whole new set of interpretive tasks.” (p. 37). As I watched and listened to students discuss their images with their peers, I was reminded that, as with comics, my students’ comic-like pre-writes clearly promoted their oral language development.

Sealey-Morris (2015) further elaborates on the “unique interpretive challenge” that comics present to students, in that “there can be no prescribed order, as a comics reader may start with words, with images, or with various combinations” (p. 37). I wondered how I could use the illustrations in a more effective manner to develop an approach—a lesson sequence—that could help students improve their writing in general, but most importantly, their “voice.”

I watched the students tell informal stories to each other about their illustrations. Graham et al. (2015) found that strategies for writing can “include generating possible ideas for writing by thinking about the characters, the setting, the main character’s goals, action to achieve those goals, characters’ reactions, and how the story ends” (p. 515). If I could formalize and frame their informal, unstructured discussions in a way that focused them to elaborate on specific elements of their narratives such as description and voice, their written and oral expression might improve. My lessons would have to be targeted and specific (Graham & Perrin, 2007).

In answer to this challenge, I had several realizations in a row. One day, I paused at a colleague’s open doorway as I was walking during lunchtime. Class was in session. The teacher was working with a small group. Almost all of the other students were working with partners. They were excitedly helping each other as they answered a prompt written on the board about the reading selection they’d been studying and discussing in whole group. It was clear that they had a protocol they were following. They were asking each other questions and challenging each other, referring to the actual text to settle a challenge or assist each other. While getting excited at times, they took turns speaking for the most part.

At no time did the teacher look up from the small group to quiet them down. It was a bit noisy, but unlike my class, the noise never rose above a certain, productive level. At some point I noticed that the students were using terms and phrases that could be found on charts on the wall. The class was running itself and the students seemed engaged and happy. And above all, they were using academic vocabulary and clearly using and developing their critical language skills. I asked myself the painful questions: Do I talk too much in class? How much of instructional time is me talking? How much time are students allowed to engage in constructive conversations?

For the next week, I made a great effort to listen to myself and evaluate how much I spoke during lessons. It was not a pleasant reality. My students did not get many chances to speak. When they did, it was usually in response to questions I asked that had specific answers. Discussions in the class were brief. There were brief, infrequent periods throughout the week in which partners worked together, mainly while peer editing or discussing a question I had given them during our daily reading. This reinforced my original question that while their illustrations were useful as a pre-write, why couldn’t they also work as a reference point for a focused, collaborative process? I wanted to see them working together and having productive conversations like I’d seen in my colleague’s classroom.

Another realization transpired later that week that guided me toward an approach. One evening, I was revising a personal writing project. I suddenly became aware that I spoke silently or aloud while rereading the text that needed revision. I would then make the changes—what didn’t sound right—to make the text say what I wanted to say. It occurred to me that speaking to oneself was part of the development of one’s voice in writing. A person finds their way to say something the way it makes sense to them. You choose, or edit, what you wish to say. You hear your voice, which is you speaking to yourself. In editing this way, you are developing and revising and reframing who you are—your identity.

Blinne (2012) examined the use of storytelling in the classroom as a strategy to develop language, voice, and self-confidence in students. In the activity, Blinne observed students working together “to create a whimsical story that deconstructs a mundane, everyday ritual (event, activity, practice) into a mythical or folkloric re-vision,” the process of which fostered conversation, critical problem-solving, and risk-taking (p. 216). Yes, my students would need more opportunities for storytelling. Why would they want to improve their ability to express themselves if they did not have opportunities to express themselves?

There might be a reason to write and to improve their writing, if they heard their own voices telling their stories—and if they received validation from others for their stories. I set about designing storytelling-to-writing instruction that would emphasize and build on the oral language and social discourse of play that had been largely absent from my classroom.

As I worked on creating a sequence of lessons, a final, integral experience with my students cemented my approach. One day, I read a short story to the class to get them in the mood for revising their writing. I was trying anything to get them motivated for this most difficult and dreaded of tasks. During the revision work time, while conferencing with a student about their revision work, they remarked how much they liked it when I acted out the book as I read it, especially when I spoke in the characters’ voices. I told them that I liked the book a lot and explained that the author made me see and feel things. I was then caught off-guard when they asked me what made the writing good.

I replied that I felt like I was “in” the story when I read it. I wanted to know what the main character would do whenever things happened to them. I wondered what would happen to that character in the end. I told the student I wanted that feeling when I read their writing. They replied that they wanted to be a good writer, but that they didn’t know how. On an impulse, I decided to make up and dramatize a story for the student then and there, hoping to find answers while we engaged in more story dramatization. More inspiration moved me to draw illustrations before each part of my story, dramatizing each part as we looked at my illustrations. It was clear that “reading” the flow of images as I told the story helped the student grasp the story. It also helped me to clarify the story for myself, freeing my mind up to focus on my imagination and dramatization.

I could not find a solution through explanation. I had to do things. I had to try things out. And these things I tried out had to come from student interest. They enjoyed storytelling. I also felt that the student and I bonded during this storytelling. We were getting to know each other better as I told the story and they asked questions. It was the dramatic oral storying that the students enjoyed. The storyteller came alive with voices and body movement, conveying their personality and individuality vividly. As I dramatized, I was making personal choices about how and what to tell. This was how I would get the students to tell better stories that mattered to them.

I suggested to the students that they tell me their story from their illustrations alone—without the printed story they had written. At first, they simply told me what was in the illustration, making objective statements as to what it contained. They read the labels next to what they pointed at as if running off a list. I suggested that the students make voices for the characters. I took a character role and had them tell me what to say as I acted it out with them. This became exciting and fun for both of us.

Many students stopped working and began to watch. I stopped the class immediately and told them that I would like them to tell me their stories from their illustrations as I visited them at their desks. I asked them to make the characters speak in different voices and that I would help them if they needed it. At first, some were a little nervous, but they made a huge improvement over a short period of time.

I was amazed. To me, it was evident after this one day that good writing might begin with the personal connection of oral storytelling and that maybe the next step was to simply get their verbal storytelling down on paper. I reflected on how the use of illustrations as a pre-write improved the quality of students’ narratives. Could this be another way of using their illustrations to improve their writing? I wanted to go beyond the physical act of drawing and actually have the drawings be used in verbal storytelling.

The next day I told the class that I wanted them to try one more writing activity before their first draft—and that I hoped that it would make their writing more interesting. When I added that the activity would be something similar to what the student and I had done the day before, they became very excited as most had stopped to watch us. I told them that they were going to use their illustrations to tell each other their stories and modeled for them how it would be done. This process would not only help to guide their partner through the events of their stories, but also be used to help the listener visualize the events and the characters. I hoped that it also be fun for them to do.

After an explanation, I modeled the activity by narrating a set of story illustrations I had created, stopping to emphasize and explain and model phrasing, intonation, pacing, body language, and character voicing. Students were noticeably excited. When I asked for suggestions for voices and physical actions to improve the story, many contributed ideas. They watched as I acted out the story. At intervals, I stopped to write out the story on a big paper. Students corrected me or added things that I forgot from my oral storytelling.

I also intentionally engaged in poor storytelling—speaking in a voice inappropriate for a character or using inappropriate pacing. I told them that this is what we would be doing with our partners, adding that the two most important things were to help each other and to have fun. They were excited.

Students took turns verbally narrating their illustrations to each other. Some were partnered together, but others were put into groups of three. I found that this particular grouping of students provided a greater feeling of support for the readers, offering more opportunities for validation and that later appeared to ease the transition to performance in front of the whole class. With encouragement, the listeners in each group would increasingly make suggestions to the storyteller using voices and body language. Students got more excited as they made their illustrations come alive by reading them aloud. They created voices and described settings.

The importance of the illustrations as reference points also became clear as students began noticing that readers would often leave out interesting elements of their illustrations or discussed things that were not in their illustrations. During the storytelling sessions, listeners used voices and body language to show the storyteller their suggestions. The storytellers would then retell parts of their stories with changes made from the feedback. Blinne (2012) observed that, “through storytelling, students are experimenting with performance while learning to integrate vocal variation (pitch, pace, power, pauses, and exaggeration) with gestures, movement, and sensory-rich language” (p. 216). I saw this with my students, too.

The students began noticing the differences between the illustrations and the texts they came from, identifying things they had left out of their texts. These led to more revisions. All these changes and additions were spurred by individual student interest and not only included plot events and character action, but also involved stylistic considerations such as tone and expressive description. After this, the students used the listeners’ suggestions to write down their stories the way they told it to their classmates. The results impressed me. Students that did not previously use dialogue or include descriptions of settings or events or characters now did so. Those that had, improved upon these elements.

Many students began to discuss writing with each other, giving and using the feedback to improve their work. This also often led to shier students having more confidence in speaking during whole class discussions (Blinne, 2012). Other studies support the idea that a thoughtfully designed protocol can provide a framework and an environment from which students can collaborate to improve their writing and their oral language at the same time. This includes the paired writing method (Yarrow & Topping, 2001) where students work to keep each other on task.

Even revisions became easier for the struggling students. Their writing had become much more important to the students in my class. They persevered more. While typical revisions had often been worked out during the oral storytelling phase, students spent more time in making further revisions.

I realized that my role as a teacher of writing was changing before my eyes. I needed to foster collaborative discussions and activities, especially the use of oral storytelling, that would allow students to motivate each other, articulate their interests, and develop the voice they needed in their writing. It had become clear that I needed to be systematic and observant whenever there was a problem, a challenge. I had to be prepared for the solution to happen at any given time and to be able to utilize the information from my observations of students. I should watch and listen to students, create experiences and opportunities for play and engagement, and carefully piece together the experiences to form appropriate and responsive instructional approaches.

The Jump to Middle School

Several years later, I transferred to another school, jumping from the elementary grades to a position teaching English Language Arts to seventh and eighth graders. With no experience teaching middle school, I was extremely anxious. You can attend trainings, read books, and get advice, but nothing replaces experience in the classroom, and I had heard middle school students were very different than the younger kids.

That very first semester, I had planned entirely new writing lessons based upon the literacy program mandated by the district. The students did not write very much. After having success teaching in elementary school, I was at a loss. I felt like I had returned to my first or second year of teaching. I experimented by implementing illustrated pre-writes with one of my classes, but the students took too long with the illustrations. I soon found that focus was easily lost with this age group.

One central challenge was that, in secondary, there is a lot more emphasis on writing to nonfiction sources. Another challenge was that I needed to completely reimagine instructional time and how reading and writing assignments could blend together. I reflected. I knew that I had to teach the narrative writing. The biggest problem these students had was starting stories. Most could not figure out what to write about. The flood of student interest I thought I could count on to inspire my lesson planning never came.

The writing component of the Common Core also now requires the writer to reference nonfiction texts as they develop narratives, reports, and argumentative papers. I had been teaching reading and writing as separate curricular areas. I knew I needed to combine them in some way. I needed to stick to a topic, but I also wanted to give them some choice, something to give them a direction and, hopefully, writing ideas. I decided to have the students in one of my classes read and analyze two articles related to a unit topic—and write a narrative that was connected to that unit.

Things moved slowly, but students were finally starting to come up with ideas. I met with students in small groups to help them think of ideas related to the topic and the articles. Then, as in the past, a student propelled the instruction forward with a personal request. She asked if she could find extra articles on the topic or related topics to develop other parts of her story. I almost missed another opportunity for inspiration from my students, but I had apparently and unconsciously developed a secondary nature and jumped on the chance to reframe her request into a solution. Schon (1983) believed that a practitioner must reflect “on the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behavior” (p. 68). To my relief, I found that I was becoming more aware of what students revealed, and quicker about reacting to these interactions.

From then on, I allowed students to add extra articles from the Newsela site to develop their stories, with the rule being that they had to include ideas and vocabulary terms from all the articles—the assigned articles and the ones they chose.

After this, writing instruction took off. Students became more engaged in the reading discussions because their narratives were based on the readings. They became more interested in writing their narratives because, while they were partly based on the required readings, they were also partly based on articles on their own interests.

The writing conferences were more productive because every student had a story that was related to the topic but was also different from everyone else’s story. They developed research skills because they had to find articles with ideas that could support the story they were already writing. The articles became reference points for discussions during conferences and peer-revision. They gave students ideas for plot events, characters, and settings. To support conversations around their writing, students color-coded sections of their narratives to correspond to articles their ideas may have come from or been inspired by (see Fig. 11.3). This not only made it easier to discuss the parts of their story, but it also made it clear which parts of their stories did not come from the articles.

Fig. 11.3

Peer conversations on digital narrative color-coded for sources

Students were paired up with each other to give peer revisions. Student conversations kindled from the sharing of their own narratives and the nonfiction sources the narratives drew from.

The comments on one narrative show how the author responds to a peer’s question about character motivation. The comments section was a safe space for students to discuss their stories. This tool eliminated the affective filter that would typically discourage verbal communication in whole class discussions. Since the author shared the document with only trusted peers, the participants felt freer to respond without judgment.

All this allowed the authors to get the necessary feedback to improve their written communication. Safe environments have become a necessary consideration in today’s classroom. That students with different backgrounds and experiences need to feel safe and accepted is now a reality understood and accepted by many. Safe spaces are necessary for students to take risks and express their most personal ideas and feelings without fear of judgment or harm. Storytelling is personal, and the peer feedback to these stories is an element that many students have clearly enjoyed as a means of giving and receiving validation and encouragement.

The digital process also made it clear which articles were chosen by the students, which articles were chosen by myself, and which parts of their narratives were derived from their own imaginations. This made them aware of their own ability to create and opened a door into their writing process. During the conversations over the stories, an awareness grew among many students that other students shared their interests, as well as their concerns and fears. Students also discovered that, while others may write about the same topic or concern, their understanding may be different. An appreciation for differences as well as similarities blossomed.

General student writing performance also improved. Length of narratives improved. Use of content vocabulary improved. Use of writing strategies improved. Student engagement and constructive conversations flowered and transformed what would most likely have been a dry, academic exercise (see Fig. 11.4).

Fig. 11.4

Peer conversations on digital narrative

Raj (2019) explains that “storying is the concept of making stories your own through telling it from your own unique perspective, positionality and cultural historical being” (p. 7). Not only were my students telling stories and discussing them with their colleagues, but they were invested in their stories, tying together research founded from their own interests to strengthen and illuminate storying based on their own need to express ideas and feelings.

These experiences built a vehicle from which meaningful conversations and interpersonal social development could flourish. The engagement that was generated from students telling their stories to each other fostered a communal building of personal identities. While it is a “quest that an authentic storyteller must go on to build connections with who they are, how they came to be, and why they came to be” (Raj, 2019, p. 6), it is the storying together with others that validates this crucial process of personal growth.

Conclusion

The development I experienced during these years would not have happened had I not learned to build a strong awareness of student need and interest during classroom interactions. Recognizing and capitalizing on these led to my most important instructional breakthroughs as a teacher.

I learned that students themselves are the source of effective strategies and approaches and that teachers must develop a natural and reflexive ability to integrate their observations of students into appropriate planning. Accordingly, teachers should become experts in writing their own pedagogy. This will prepare them to modify instruction as needed to better teach their students. Improvements and advances in my praxis all came from interaction from the students. The solutions come from reflection upon theses interactions, from inside the classroom, not from without.

The solutions derived from the students always involved the need to tell stories. Storying, verbal or written, is the ability to reason, to connect to ourselves and others, to hear our voices and the voices of others, and to understand how we connect to our world. Storytelling can reveal a lot about us as human beings and can also be a foundational purpose for students to discover a love for writing.

In my first years of teaching, I had no respect for, or awareness of, the importance of storytelling. I saw it as an artifact of the primary grades with no real use past a certain age. I planned instruction without considering the students’ preferred modes of communication, social interaction, or interests. But my personal journey showed me that storying is a part of being human at all stages of our lives; an instinctive, intuitive, and natural form of communicating, recording, and narrating who we are and how we came to be. Storytelling is at once cultural, social, innate, unconscious, collaborative, and subjective.

Along with these realizations, I also saw that the typical literacy programs usually fall far short of addressing the challenges of teaching writing. Nor do they engage by themselves. A teacher needs to adapt and create. There must be a balance between the requirement of institutions and the agency of an experienced teacher with their students’ well-being foremost in mind.

My experiences led me to believe that teachers should make far more use of narrative in their instruction throughout the curriculum. Especially for secondary school students, the Common Core and recent nationalized assessments (and the corresponding literacy programs that are ostensibly designed to prepare students for these tests) put a high value on writing applications such as informational reports and argumentative writing that respond to mostly nonfiction texts. While important, these applications do not easily invite personal expression about topics of interest. Rather, they deemphasize the study and development of personal narrative—storying. From studies of standards and their related curricular programs, Shanahan (2015) explains that “the emphasis of these standards is definitely on public writing—the writing of the academy and the work-place—rather than on the more personal or private forms that have dominated writing lessons in recent times” (p. 471).

It is teacher’s role to grow into a reflexive practitioner, transforming their instructional praxis. When a teacher becomes reflexive, they respond to the data students provide by using it routinely in their planning to frame instructional approaches. Over time, this will result in a transformation of perspective that Mezirow (1991) described as “the process of becoming critically aware of how and why our assumptions have come to constrain the way we perceive, understand, and feel about our world” (p. 167). Teachers should focuse on this perspective with respect to what students reveal about themselves.

Through the recounting of these episodes and reflections, I hope to share the development of an approach to the teaching of writing that can be learned from a respect for the social and emotional needs of students, careful observation of how and what students express, and what can be built from reflection on these observations, if one is willing to do the work.