In this episode, Kelly Boswell focuses on finding the balance between conventions and creativity. In this excerpt from her audiobook, Every Kid a Writer, Kelly helps us understand the importance of flexibility for more enjoyable and productive learning experiences—and gives several practical approaches for implementing this. From engaging students in conversations about quality writing to providing the freedom to write without constraints, you'll get actionable tips to use right away.
A transcript of this episode is available below.
Kelly Boswell:
Have you ever wondered if you struggle with control? Here's a simple and foolproof way to find out. Bake with young children. Since my kids were small, I have invited them into the kitchen, provided a stool so they could reach the countertop and attempted to bake. I did this for lots of reasons. I wanted my boys to be comfortable in the kitchen, to see it not as an off-limits mom-only part of the house, but a gathering place where memories and maybe some almost edible cookies could be made. I also wanted to bake with my kids because there's something special about the shared experience of taking a slew of raw ingredients and turning them into something new and different. But I have to admit, I am a bit of a control freak. So inviting small beings into my fairly organized and relatively clean kitchen proved to be a bit of a challenge. Okay, a massive challenge.
I found myself tensing up when watching my sons crack eggs or measure not so precisely that cup of flour. As an adult who's been baking for a good number of years, I've grown to be fairly precise in my measuring and recipe following. Baking with my kids required me to relax a bit on the rules of baking so that we could enjoy the process. I came to realize that it wasn't as important that they followed the recipe exactly or that they measured correctly. Give or take a little bit would be okay as long as they would discover a love of baking or spending time in the kitchen creating something to be shared with others. Don't get me wrong, there were a few basic and non-negotiable principles that I knew I needed to teach them. "Don't eat raw eggs. Wash your hands before you begin. You can't substitute salt for sugar. There are standard units of measurement that we use when we bake. It's imperative that you add half a teaspoon of salt rather than half a cup of salt."
I wonder if learning to write is a little bit like learning to bake. I think we could all agree that our goal for the kids in our classroom is that they grow and evolve into joyfully literate adults, who use writing to impact and influence the world around them. However, if we develop and foster an unhealthy perspective on conventions, if we take on the role of rule followers who demand that everything our students write be correct, we might unknowingly quench the spark of engagement and joy. Conventions matter. They do. Conventions exist out of respect for the reader. If writing has strong sound conventions, the reader can focus on the content and the piece.
When a piece of writing is riddled with errors in conventions, the reader becomes distracted from the meaning of the piece. Correct use of conventions is important to a piece of writing, but conventions aren't everything. In addition to strong conventions, a strong piece of writing is clear and organized. It sounds fluent rather than choppy or forced when read aloud. The words are precise, rich and powerful, creating a picture in the reader's mind. And strong writing has voice. It connects with a reader on an emotional level. It surprises, emotes or makes someone laugh. When you read a strong piece of writing, the writer's personality comes through on the page.
Yes, conventions are important, but they aren't the only component that's needed to create quality writing. Our challenge as teachers of writing is to strike a healthy balance between teaching conventions and over-emphasizing them and thus quenching the enjoyment of writing. Throughout this chapter, you'll hear me use the term conventions. Let's make sure that we are all thinking about the same thing when I use that term. Conventions in the way that I'm using the term in this chapter are anything that a professional proofreader would attend to. Punctuation, capitalization, spelling and grammar.
Reflect on your own life as a writer. Cast your mind back to the types of writing you have done in the last few days. I'm not talking about the writing you've done in your classroom with your kids, but writing you've done as a regular person and literate adult. I'll go first. I wrote a thank you email to my son's fourth grade teacher to thank her for a smooth start to the school year. I wrote loads and loads and loads of emails. I sent a few dozen texts. And I compiled a massive to-do list to help me remember everything I needed to get done this week. Okay, it's your turn. What types of writing have you done this week? Is your list similar to mine? Now, I'm wondering, were your conventions correct in each and every type of writing you composed? As I think back to the writing that I did this week, the answer would be, it depends.
When I wrote that email to a principal at a school I'm currently supporting, I slowed down as I typed and carefully considered my spelling, grammar and punctuation. Once I wrote the email, I reread it to make sure I hadn't made any gross errors in conventions. But that to-do list? Well, that's another story. As long as I could read it, I wasn't too concerned if it was correct or not. I'm guessing that if every piece of writing I did this week were going to be evaluated, scrutinized and corrected by someone to make sure it was all conventionally precise, I probably wouldn't have wanted to write at all. Conventions count, just not all the time. As regular people outside of school, we understand that the main purpose of writing is to communicate, to help us remember, to inform, to give instructions and to share our opinions.
As adults, we understand that conventions support the content. If the conventions are too far off the mark, the reader won't understand our message. But not every piece of writing we do needs to go through the sieve of correctness when it comes to conventions. And I'm guessing that if someone were looking over our shoulder each time we wrote to make sure that everything was correct, we probably would find something else, anything else, to do except write.
What does this look like in the classroom? I'm not suggesting that we take all of the conventions of language and throw them in the trash. I'm not suggesting we stand on our desk and announce in a loud voice, "Conventions don't matter, kids, simply write from your heart." What I am suggesting is that we put conventions in their proper place and make sure that being correct isn't the only goal our students have as writers. In the following sections, I've listed a few examples of what maintaining a healthy perspective on conventions might look like in the classroom.
Kids and teachers engage in conversations about the qualities of good writing. In some classrooms, teachers have a conversation with their students about the characteristics of quality writing. To get the conversation going, the teacher asks, "What makes good writing?" Kids often respond to this question by saying the following, "It's long. It has neat handwriting. Everything is spelled correctly." Responses like this show that somewhere along the way, kids learn to equate good writing with factors that have nothing to do with the quality of the writing. These kinds of responses give us an opening into a conversation about what really matters in writing. Once kids have had a chance to share their thinking, the teacher shares a few short but strong pieces of writing. The pieces are funny, poignant, moving or thought-provoking. After the teacher shares the pieces, she asks her students, "What did you like about these pieces? What did you notice?"
Students share their thinking with a partner while she listens in, and then she records their observations. The kids say things like, "It's funny. The words are interesting. You can picture the whole thing in your head while you read it. It makes you feel something." At the end of this experience, the teacher asks students to look carefully at the list of the characteristics they've created. She explains that strong writing is made up of a variety of features. It's not just the conventions that matter, it's the content. This helps kids who see themselves as lacking in one dimension of writing, like spelling or grammar, realize that writing has more than one dimension.
Kids have freedom with paper and format. Lisa Miller, a first grade teacher at Lincoln Elementary, told me about Jesamie, a student who typically produced little writing. Lisa noticed that when she was asked to write, Jesamie would become hesitant to put her words down on paper. After learning more about a balanced approach to conventions, Lisa had a hunch about what was holding Jesamie back. Lisa explained, "This sweet writer was being held back by my focus on conventions and wanting her paper to be perfect or to fit the template of the writing paper I had given her. If the writing paper had two lines, she would fill them with two perfect sentences and then announce that she was done. I decided to try giving her blank paper instead. It was just what this writer needed, permission from me to not focus so much on the perfect sentence or two, but to put down her thoughts in any format she wanted to. Now, Jesamie is a student who truly loves to write. This small change was a game changer for her."
When I had an opportunity to see Jesamie's more recent writing, what struck me first was the sheer volume of it. This is a writer who, before Lisa gave her a blank piece of paper, was doing the bare minimum of writing required. In one instructional piece where she wrote instructions on how to draw Mickey Mouse, it was clear that Jesamie had not focused so much on getting the perfect sentence down. Instead, she focused on making sure her directions were clear to the reader. She also added numbered steps and a picture to go along with each step. And she used brave spelling to get down the sounds she's heard in the words she was writing.
Edie:
That's it for our commute today. I hope maybe you've been inspired to help your students to find their voice by balancing the art of writing with the freedom to create. To hear more from Kelly, you can stream or download her audiobook, Every Kid a Writer: Strategies That Get Everyone Writing, wherever you get your audiobooks. Thanks for listening and let us know what you'd like to learn about in our time together. You can learn more about Heinemann's audiobooks at heinemann.com/audiobooks.
Kelly Boswell has many years of experience as a classroom teacher, staff developer, literacy coach, and district literacy specialist.
Her latest book is Every Kid A Writer. She is the coauthor of Crafting Nonfiction and Solutions for Reading Comprehension, and the author of Write This Way and Write This Way From the Start. She is also the author of several nonfiction children’s books.
Kelly works with schools and districts around the country to support educational leaders, coaches and teachers. Her emphasis is on developing literacy practices that help students become joyful and passionate readers and writers.
