Hi all,
This is my first post in a while, which actually connects to the topic I’m going to be discussing today. At the start of last summer, I found myself fortunate enough to attend an educational conference in Minneapolis for a few days, alongside another ELA teacher, my school’s Math Coach, and our Vice Principal. It’s one of the points that came up in conversation with my Vice Principal (likely in the time after our flights had been canceled for the second or third time) that I’ve found myself marinating on recently. Namely, we were discussing how, throughout one’s teaching career, just like throughout one’s life, there will be ups and downs, days, weeks, even years where you feel like you’ve really got it and days when you…don’t. Personal lives, adjusting to different personalities, and so many other small things really have a striking bearing on the equilibrium of day-to-day life.
At the time, I didn’t realize just how much this conversation would stick with me. Mostly, I was just wondering when United would have a plane ready to head back to New Jersey so I could properly start my summer break. But, as this year started and has turned from 2023 to 2024, I find myself reflecting more and more on that conversation. I think what my Vice Principal said rings true, even in realms beyond education, but I especially agree that normalizing that there will be peaks and valleys along the way, that our careers, like our lives, are not just one steady climb upward, I think that this way of thinking could go a long way in combating burnout in educational professions. In my time teaching (I’m about halfway through my 9th year), I have met so many truly stellar individuals, most of whom are excellent at giving grace to others when things aren’t going exactly as planned. However, I’ve also noticed, it’s a lot harder to give that grace to yourself when it’s you who needs it.
Which is understandable. By and large, most of the teachers I’ve met are a combination of planners and problem solvers. We don’t always like to admit when something has us stumped even for a minute. However, I really think that making a conscious effort to give ourselves both grace and some space from whatever it is we’re still figuring out goes a lot farther than some of us realize.
For instance, I was recently working with my school’s ELA Coach to design a writing seminar mini-unit to help students practice with the concept of timed (or single sitting) essay writing. This is not the first time this year that we’ve been working to tackle this particular topic, so, initially, I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it. We have been implementing mini lessons since the start of the year targeting the individual writing skills that go into crafting a solid essay: we’ve also written multiple essays and Quick Writes at this point in the year. I know that the writing I see students produce in the classroom doesn’t always line up with what I see when they produce an essay in essentially one sitting (or over a couple of class periods). So, for a bit, I wasn’t sure where to go next with this.
I talked it over with my ELA Coach for a few days. I sat with it. And then I started just letting myself play around with different ideas, with just creating a few activities and seeing where that led me. I’ve always found that writing helps me clarify my thoughts and I truly love getting the opportunity to be creative every day as a teacher (it’s one of the reasons I love my job). These ideas and activities, although they started off a bit aimless, eventually led me to flip my thinking when it came to how, in my class, I’m going to approach preparing my students for single-sitting essays. The first flip came when I realized that the writing they were producing in class and the scores they were earning on these single-sitting assignments weren’t lining up. I already know that my students are capable of producing the kind of writing that would get them higher scores on these assessments: the key switch in my focus came when I decided to examine what assignment-specific factors were keeping their writing from shining in the way I knew it could.
It didn’t take long for me to make a list: when we write an essay in class, we do it over the course of several days to sometimes even a week. Students have the opportunity to receive feedback from their peers and teachers; they have the option to step away from it for a little while and think over what points they’re making. Students are also, generally, writing an essay in class about a source that they’ve spent a substantial amount of time with by the time it comes to write the essay. Our A Long Walk to Water essay from earlier this year only happened after we’d finished the entire book, taken multiple assessments on it, read a number of supporting texts about it, and had countless classroom discussions about it.
Just those two factors alone are quite different from reading multiple sources for the first time and being asked to write an essay about them that day. I’m not writing any of this to disparage one way or praise another: both methods of essay writing exist in education and in the real world. In college, I wrote papers that I knew about and researched for weeks and I took comprehensive exams that asked me to problem-solve and essay-write in real time. Both exist, and, while there is definite overlap between the skills needed to be successful in both, there are also skills that are strictly unique to each type of essay writing.
I apologize if this seems obvious to anyone reading out there: looking back on it now, it seems incredibly obvious to me as well. If I want my students to be successful in a timed or single-session essay setting, I need to isolate the individual skills that make this type of assignment unique and I need to help my students gain mastery with those skills. For instance, pacing yourself and stamina are unique concerns when you’re asked to write an essay in a few hours vs. a few days. Even if you receive extra time as an accommodation, no one has limitless stamina when it comes to facing an assignment. We all hit a wall at some point when it comes to thinking critically for an extended period of time, so working on strategies to maximize how much writing stamina we have while also prioritizing what needs to be done first are crucial. A very, very simple strategy a wonderful co-teacher of mine has said repeatedly to our students before they take a timed assessment is to read the questions first, before you read the sources. This way, you can take notes and gather evidence while you’re doing your first read. Because, as much as every ELA teacher out there would love for their students to be able to do an in-depth second read on every source for their essay, when you’re working against a ticking clock, getting your ideas down on the paper in a thoughtful way takes top priority. This also applies to those students with extended time. Consider which scenario would require more energy: reading all of the sources, reading the questions, then going back and rereading all of the sources, or reading the questions and then reading the sources. It might seem like a simple thing (and I certainly don’t want to suggest that students shouldn’t reread!), but, if you’ve only got so much energy to expend on this essay before you become academically tired, wouldn’t you want to get to the writing portion of the essay while you’re still fresh?
As I continued to work on developing this writing seminar, I realized more and more that the way I plan to present it to my students isn’t necessarily that this will make your writing better, but that these strategies will better help you show off the amazing writing you’re already capable of. I think- and hope- this subtle shift will also help re-energize my students’ creativity when approaching these lessons, just like how I was re-energized when I was rethinking how to approach this topic in class.
That is the last thought I want to leave off on: creativity, having fun, and getting outside of your usual perspective can be a great way to re-energize yourself when you hit one of those moments where everything isn’t going the way you want it to. I’ve found this to be true for me, just like I’ve also always found there to be a direct correlation between how excited, interested, and engaged I am when I design a lesson and how excited, interested, and engaged the students are when they participate in that lesson. For me, I’ll continue to work to keep my Vice Principal’s words in mind: I’ll work to give myself grace when it feels like I’m running into a wall. And, after giving myself some space, I’ll do what works for me: I’ll think of how I can turn the problem on its head and have some fun with it. One of my favorite feelings being a teacher is when I feel like I have a cool idea for a lesson or an assignment and I just want to get to work on it right away. I love being encouraged to try new things in my line of work. And, even if it’s not the same as what re-energizes me, I hope that all educational staff out there find the part of their job that re-energizes them. Knowing how to tap into that source seems like a powerful way to help keep putting our best out into the world.
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