No One’s Drowned Yet!
A mid-term status check on developing writerly confidence
As I stand on the wet sand eager to touch the ocean, to play among the waves like I’ve envisioned for months, I hesitate. I’m not a great swimmer, and I fear the water. I edge in, letting the cool but quickly warming ocean wash past my feet. It feels so good. Two more small steps. Another wave. Another two steps. I’m doing this, I think, as I see others much further out, one with the ocean’s undulations. That is my goal. But a stronger wave surprises me, pushing me back, and as it ebbs, it pulls sand from under my feet. I almost fall. I step back in hopes to find safer ground, but it happens again, and I wonder if I’d be better off back in my beach chair.
My students often feel the same about writing: hesitant, fearful of the depths, ready to retreat. Each year I do my best to help students become better writers, and most show growth, but something different is going on with our students today. If you’ve interacted with adolescents over the past five or so years, you’ve seen it too: the anxiety.
“Why are these kids struggling so hard when they seem to have so much?” — Dr. Michele Borba
Dr. Michele Borba expounds on this phenomenon in her book, Thrivers, observing that this group of young adults “is smart and dearly loved. They are more inclusive and open-minded. They’re well educated with high aspirations for college and their future. But they’re also less happy and more stressed, lonely, depressed, and suicidal when compared to any previous generation–and those descriptions were identified prior to COVID-19…Why are these kids struggling so hard when they seem to have so much?” (2–3).
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, to see them stranded on the shore, reluctant to dip in a toe.
While I am still convinced writing will save them, I’m nervous to venture further into this idea of writerly confidence than I normally would. I love that our Creative Writing classes are already designed to be responsive to students needs. Our daily write-ins, for example, allow for routine, low-risk writing experiences. A chance to get their feet wet. We also conference one-on-one, tailoring our writing feedback and venturing into deeper waters when they’re ready.
I don’t want to ruin that. I also don’t want to open some psychological Pandora’s Box of writing fears and insecurities that could tsunami us all.
I’m on that wet sand, contemplating: to the beach chair or to the ocean? The school year starts, and my students are with me. The choice is obvious. We’re here to swim, damn it, and we take our first steps into the water.
At the start of their journey, I asked my Creative Writing students to reflect on their experiences as writers and what it means to be a writer. Some smiled as they wrote (fond writing memories, I hoped) while others twisted in their seats (not-so-fond memories, I worried). I intended these first steps to be private, written in their own notebooks, to help them be honest and write without the worry of an audience.
During the next class, I gave them a survey that yielded a writing confidence percentage, hoping to give this survey a couple more times during the semester to compare results. I’m not a fan of “scoring” something like this, but I thought I’d give it a try and view it within the context of my qualitative data.
Even though it took a lot of tinkering to engineer this via our classroom management system, Schoology, I appreciated the ability to see the results immediately. These were the notable highlights:
- 63.5% is the average writing confidence score of my Creative Writing students. I’m not exactly sure what this number really means, but I want it to go up.
- 37% of my students are in the lowest confidence category. That’s over a third! This number needs to go down.
- Students identified “I become anxious about writing when I know it’s being evaluated” as the strongest confidence deflator.
- The next in line? “I’m never sure if my revisions actually improve my writing.”
The natural next step seemed for us to discuss the survey results. I wanted a bit more context for their answers. But as we ventured down that path, their little panic sonar waves prickled my skin. Turns out it’s tough for students to be vulnerable enough to share their vulnerabilities. A few brave students voiced their thoughts, the quieter ones often nodding their heads. I found an activity from The Confidence to Write by Liz Prather that helped students open up a bit more. I hung statements around the room like the ones pictured below, and students put sticky notes on the ones they agreed with.
After pausing and looking at all the abundantly flagged statements, it was clear to them they were not alone in their writing insecurities, an important recognition I often take for granted. Writing is hard. It’s the most complex task we ask students to do in school. I, myself, was a little overwhelmed at the volume of sticky notes. But they began to talk more openly. I had given them the permission I didn’t realize they needed. It was a communal relief.
But we were only shin deep, and if we stood too long in our collective pains, we’d be thrown off balance by those shifting sands.
Reality Check: This metaphor I’ve been playing with is somewhat of a lie. In a semester-long writing class, we can’t develop our skill and confidence in the shallows before writing. We develop our skill and confidence while writing. So as we took moments here and there to deliberately address writerly confidence, my students were already writing short stories, a genre so natural to human existence, yet so uncommon to the high school setting. It allowed them to process their writing experiences in real time.
Back to those shifting sands. They needed ways to nudge themselves into deeper waters. In a later class, I identified what seemed to be three familiar writing obstacles: writer’s block, perfectionism, and procrastination. I asked students to brainstorm strategies to overcome these obstacles and to write them on sticky notes, which a student volunteer compiled into a list I displayed in the classroom:
- Write what you know
- Don’t worry about being judged by others
- Take breaks
- Write like no one’s reading it
- Set deadlines/goals for yourself
- Write forward; don’t delete
- Get your ideas down, then revise
- Tap into real-life experiences
- Get rid of the distractions you control (put your phone in a drawer)
- Set a timer and write for 20 minutes at a time
- Make lists, cluster ideas
- Record yourself talking through ideas
- Read it out loud to yourself to get more ideas
- Drink some water!
- Move–walk, run, stretch–and come back to it
- Reward yourself after you make progress
Did they know they already had these answers inside them? One astute student chimed in, “The trick is to actually try the things on the list.” I pictured panicking swimmers unwilling to grab onto the multitude of life preservers floating around them. Nevertheless, I’ve often found myself referring to this list during class, and some students have mentioned its impact during our writing conferences.
As we approach the beginning of November, most students are at least in the water and hanging in there despite the shifting sands. Many have realized taking a few more steps in makes swimming easier. In general, I’m noticing more willingness to engage in all stages of the writing process than previous years, and they’re indicating a high level of pride in their writing:
Of course I do have a handful that seem content to remain in their beach chairs, albeit pointed toward the ocean, a small victory perhaps.
I can’t yet say if our focus on building writerly confidence accounts for the difference I’m seeing this semester: Maybe I have more teacher-pleasers mixed into the bunch, adept at saying what they think I want to hear. Or maybe the impact of the pandemic is lingering less. OR maybe taking time to scaffold this type of reflection does help. No matter, the sun is out, and I’m enjoying their writing.
As I think about our remaining months together, I could panic about the more practical applications of writerly confidence I’d still like to see–students giving better feedback to each other, revising faster, taking more ownership of their writing conferences with me–and direct them to some restricted inlet so we could focus on just those skills. But we aren’t drawn to the ocean for its inlets; we’re drawn to the beauty of its colors, the mystery of life below its surface, the fun its volumes of water provide. We’re drawn to wonder, to explore, and to play.
Of course we’ll still have eyes on that inlet of practicality, but we are starting poetry next week, the best waters for frolicking in our words. No worries: we’ll have the water wings ready. Just in case.
