Reflections on Coaching Writing

 Pro Blog Post #5

As I am an English teacher, stepping back into the role of JUST the writing coach is a welcome one! I love the process and coaxing out ideas from students. In my own classroom, significant time is given to writing in the classroom, with me floating from student to student.  Those days I often call them my baby birds, because they are all squawking for my attention the minute I get up from one student conference, haha. On these days, time flies by! There is a fun, productive energy in the room. The dreaded day is when I have to assign a grade to papers I have already seen multiple times in the process, feeling torn about what grade it SHOULD receive even though I know how much IMPROVEMENT has already been made. The guilt is real!  The students often find it hard to accept as they remember (and rightly so!) my praise of their progress, ideas, and outcomes. And while I keep my commentary and rubrics clearly aligned to their progress through skills, the gradebook still has to have that number.  It can ruin a relationship I have developed with a student for the past several weeks. *Cue sigh*

Cap'n Kirk and I are on the same page.

So stepping back into a coaches role isn’t new to me, rather a welcome relief from being the adjudicator. I was really excited to see what students were reading and writing in other English classes, hoping that things would compare to my own students…if only to boost my self-confidence that I’ve been doing an okay job :)  But so far, I have had very few interactions with the students assigned to me, even simply the welcome letter sent to three students this past week. No response from the kids. After the first round of writing samples which came to me sporadically, the students never responded. While I depend on using google docs and the internet to conference with my students, I think this experiment makes clear, a relationship needs to be there for the coaching to work, and without some face to face, students are reluctant to reach across the digital divide. They often need to verbalize their confusions and if they are struggling writers and possibly readers, being given more text to decipher may be a roadblock for these kids.

In their book on being a writing tutor, McAndrew and Reigstad(2001) advocate for student centered or collaborative tutoring styles. One key to this is the open ended question and as it was written in 2001, they didn’t imagine for this to come across on google documents! Open ended questions are meant for mental meandering and often that means verbal meandering. I wonder if we set up some sort of zoom conference with our student writers to meet face to face, even just once, if that would matter to how much they engage. I really like sharing my literacy mash up and creating a hello letter, but there is still something about hearing and seeing the person behind the email. Another idea might be to use flip grid or simply record something to send to them. 

I guess the lack of connections with students is disappointing more so because the shared responsibility of cheering on these young writers is lost.  If they aren’t reaching out for fear of the comments they will get back, I hope that they give it a try so that they can get the boost they might need!

After the COVID era of lockdowns and exclusive online learning, I do know that a lot of students learned to find resources online or work at their own pace. One of my go to resources for writing academically is the Online Writing Center at Purdue (OWL). It is so up to date all the time with things that are changing, specifically with multimodal writing and citing! I am also going to offer this slide show that I created that walks a student through a step by step process to writing a persuasive research paper. I developed this as a go to resource for my students who needed time to work through the steps at their own pace. Enjoy!