Cultivating a New Trust
A quest to help students trust themselves as writers
“You told me to…”
It’s the line that makes me cringe during a student writing conference, like some insensitive monster uprooting the flowers in the garden we’ve been carefully tending.
“You told me to take that out,” she said, trampling the gladiolas.
“You told me to add more description,” he declared, thrashing through the daisies.
“You told me to start over,” she lamented, tearing out the fuschias that were about to bloom.
My composure shields them from what I’m feeling inside.
I’m angry at the lie. I NEVER told them that! Are they using me as a scapegoat? Well, you TOLD me to do that….?
I’m wounded by the interpretation. Why do they think–after all we’ve talked about–that I’d be so dictatorial?
I’m irritated with myself. How could I let my words, actions, or reactions allow for the possibility of even one you-told-me-to statement?
I’ve been discussing my student’s writing one-on-one with them for many years. The power of these interactions captivated me during my student teaching, and ever since I’ve endeavored to improve how I conduct those discussions. I’ve learned to ask instead of to tell, to talk less and to listen more, to focus on progress over product, to honor student choices and risks.
My students have indeed grown their writing skills with this model, yet….too often my students still see me as the sole decider of good writing. I give them direction, but they want directions. I prompt them with questions, but they crave answers. Can’t they see how they’ve grown? Don’t they realize the skills they’ve developed? Why don’t they value their own judgment?
As I reflect on this conundrum, I think of Nancie Atwell, the revered teacher and author of In the Middle. In her second edition she reflects on her own evolution as a writing teacher, explaining,
I paved the way…through writing and reading about writing, through uncovering and questioning my assumptions, through observing my kids and myself in action and trying to make sense of my observations, through dumb mistakes, uncertain experiments, and, underneath it all, a desire to do my best by students and a willingness to acknowledge that my definition of best will be — should be — ever changing.
Which means that, a lot of the time, doing my best hurts. It means looking hard at the sense behind what I’m doing and asking kids to do. It means learning — and admitting — when I’m wrong. And, most painful of all, it means letting go of my creations when I see that they get in the way of students acting — and growing — as readers and writers. (4)
How amazing is Nancie Atwell?? I, too, know this hurt, but I am certainly not alone in my quest to be a better teacher.
Like a kaleidoscope of swallowtails, thoughts of this sort fluttered among us during the recent weeklong kick-off to this year’s Greater Madison Writing Project (GMWP) Yearlong Institute. Astute questions winged through our conversations. Promising ideas perched in our minds.
Each of us will eventually identify an aspect of our instruction to study, to develop, and to write about throughout the school year. To invite the hurt.
During one session we discussed a freshly translated excerpt from Principles of Writing for Peace in which Juana Maria Echeverri, Rodrigo Ospina Rojas, and Kate Vieira offer a poetic observation of the power of writing that moved us all. One passage in particular glided through my soul:
This power — to feel, as expressive beings, that we are the subject of our own voice and words — is one of the most important conditions for reawakening the delicate embryo of human communication. In this way, we can recuperate our own sense of our selves, our capacity to wonder at our truth and our beauty, which is too often decimated by our pain and our fear. (2)
Wow. (Those words still take my breath away as I read them again.) I’d felt this power as a writer, and I wanted my students to feel it too. The importance of writing instruction suddenly bolted from the ground like a giant redwood, its reach far and wide.
During another session we spoke candidly about writing instruction failures and successes, frustrations and joys. Story after story yielded head nods of recognition. We had all been there, experienced it. Connections to the Writing for Peace excerpt sprouted everywhere, and suddenly, an epiphany. In my mind’s eye a large continuum rose above our discussions:
Fear — — — — — — — — —— — —— Trust
Not the most shocking observation, and as we continued to talk, the more obvious it became: So many writing struggles were rooted in fear–within our students, within ourselves, of “the system,” of sources unknown–while more trust led to more writing growth and progress.
This fear-trust dynamic also brought to mind our last school year and how surprisingly rough it had been. Certainly after surviving 2020’s daily dose of fear–for my students, for my health, for my family, for my sanity–certainly after all that, 2021 would be a relief. But new fears circled. We feared isolation and socialization. We feared being othered and othering. We feared books and book banning. We feared our words and our silences. And we feared the damage from acting out of those fears. Trust seemed to be in short supply. This year we’d have to work hard to keep fear, the most destructive of pestilence, out of our garden. Hmmm, I thought, fear → trust. In my little blue notebook I wrote this question:
How can we move toward trust?
My thoughts returned to my students’ you-told-me-to statements. Were they the cutworms and aphids of fear? Maybe. But they certainly weren’t the fruits of trust I thought we’d been growing. To be clear, we had cultivated great teacher-student trust, but we needed other cultivars. I grabbed my pen again:
How do I help my students trust themselves as writers?
I had found my focus for this year’s institute.
As much as I might want to, I can’t become some master gardener who’ll present my students with a color-coded plot, all strategies fully researched, selected, and scheduled, saying, “Here are your seeds, follow the instructions, trust yourselves!” That won’t work.
Instead I’ll become a compassionate gardener who’ll still do a lot of research, but who’ll share more decision making with my students, for they are gardeners too. We’ll continually reflect on trust, so we can, as Atwell says, “uncover and question [our] assumptions,” and decide what we should do or change as a result.
I hope our season will yield a bountiful garden where we’ve been able to weed out the you-told-me-tos and make room for more I-decided-tos, I-took-a-risks, and I’m-prouds to bloom.
I hope my students will feel the “power… as expressive beings, that [they] are the subject of [their] own voice[s] and words” (Echeverri, Rojas, Vieira).
I hope they will cultivate trust in themselves.
Sources Cited
Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning. Boynton/Cook, 2000.
Echeverri, Juana Maria , Rodrigo Ospina Rojas, and Kate Vieira. Principles of Writing for Peace. Translated by Kate Vieira. Draft, June 2022.
