Bringing Self-Awareness into Writing
“I don’t think I am a good writer because I don’t like my handwriting!”
October 2023 I walked into my classroom and sat down at my desk. I am a 3rd grade teacher in Oakland and like most teachers, always overwhelmed. Besides the math, science, phonics, and art lessons that I had to teach that day, I also was trying to figure out a way to help my students with their writing. No matter what I tried to do, I always felt like writing was incredibly challenging for my students. We would have our lesson, I usually modeled what I wanted them to do, and would send them to work. About ⅓ of my students would sit there and look at their papers. I was struggling to get them inspired to write. My first inquiry question became: how can I inspire my student to write a meaningful paragraph?
This year I was in Lead by Learning’s District-Wide Inquiry groups with both the English Language Learner Multilingual Achievement office and the Social Emotional Learning department. These two groups were a space for me to go to get advice, problem solve, hear from other teachers and talk to the wonderful instructors. On that particular day, we were focusing on student interviews. The next day I went to class and decided to ask my focal students, “How do you feel about writing?”
Two out of my three students said that they were not good writers because of their handwriting. To my students how good or “bad” your handwriting was represented by how good or “bad” your writing was.
This was not an answer I was expecting to hear and it really made me reflect on the way that I have been teaching writing this year. My students were so focused on how their writing looked that they were not able to focus on the content. My first step was to incorporate Socio-Emotional Learning (SEL). I needed to change their perception of the writing I wanted them to do in class and build their self-awareness of what a writer is.
I started adding what I called “quick writes” a few times a week. I would provide the prompt and give the students 10 minutes to write. The rules were that they had to try to write the whole time and I wasn’t going to read it/grade it/check for handwriting or spelling. This provided my students with the freedom to write without having to feel like I was grading them.
The students started writing more and coming up with their own ideas and I started to ask myself, how do I elevate their writing and self-awareness? I took the students’ work and went back to my inquiry group meeting and asked for help! Through the help of my wonderful colleagues during Public Learning, I came back with the idea of writing conferences for my students who need extra support. Even just checking in 5 minutes with my students and either giving individual sentence starters or talking about their ideas and how to help them increase their confidence and skills. This was a great way to check in with students about their writing and hear their ideas. The students who needed a little bit more support, I could provide extra scaffolds and sentence starters. This was a great way to support the students because I could check in with the students about their self-awareness and to see what extra support they needed to be successful with their writing.
What I found was so much improvement in my students’ writing! When asked again about writing at the end of the year, I noticed that my students’ thoughts have changed. This time when I asked, “How do you feel about writing?” One student said, “It’s okay, I wrote a whole paragraph on Tree Frogs!” Through self-awareness, differentiation and conferencing my students went from thinking writing was only about handwriting to writing paragraphs that not only had structure but represented their ideas and interests!
Looking ahead, there are a few things I would like to bring into the 2024-2025 school year.
- Student interviews: this gave me so much insight into the students thinking and changed the trajectory of my teaching
- Incorporating SEL into Writing: by bringing in SEL I was able to make my students more self-aware and confident about their writing
Marta Sato has been teaching for 10 years (9 of those years in Oakland)! After being a swim coach for many years, Marta decided to take her love of teaching into the classroom. She got her BA from UC Santa Cruz (go Banana Slugs!) and her teaching credential from Sonoma State. Marta believes that all students should see themselves in the books they read, in the curriculum and in the classroom when learning. She strives to make her classroom welcoming and a safe place for students to be themselves and learn. When Marta is not in the classroom she likes to read, hike, do photography, cook and is currently trying to teach herself how to crochet!
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