Teaching Delight

This is the sweet spot of the semester where I know my students as people and I have trained them to my ways. I am wrapping up reviewing student reflections about our second unit and witnessing so many students echo or reframe the lessons I have taught is so rewarding. It is also the sweet spot because our current work is more like play. Recently, every class there is delicious writing shared with our community of writers.

I wanted to make this post about these teaching delights, but also how I build an infrastructure that makes them possible. Often I write about the struggles of teaching in this moment or the less delightful parts of teaching that have always been true, but these past few weeks have been good ones in my classroom and I want to share the joy.

Names, Faces, and Stories

One of my favorite things is the fact that I can move around the classroom (leaving my roster on the teaching station) and invite a student by name to share their writing. I know enough about my students to tell a student in the hallway that I created the day’s lesson just for them or ask another student if they watched a recent episode of a show we both enjoy or commiserate with another student about our flu shots. I intentionally work to build a community of writers by opening every class with a check in and every class is built around multiple rounds of writing and sharing. We write about our lives and experiences because I care about authentic writing and I want my students to understand in their guts, hearts, and hands that good writing requires all three elements.

Logbooks and Feedback Loops

Another teaching strategy that brings me so much joy is when students realize that writing within a community and giving peer feedback can be fun and interesting and beneficial both as a reader and writer. I share many mentor texts with my student writers. I write and share with my students when they write and share and many of our writing invitations include specifically chosen mentor texts, but I also love how our logbooks help us watch the writing journey of the entire community. That writing journey always includes an inquiry process where students share an early draft of their unit deliverable along with an inquiry question for their readers. These reflective feedback loops are such an important part of my pedagogy as students learn to set goals for their own writing but also help their peers work on their individual goals. My students always have an audience beyond me and when those writers discover the joy of delighting that audience they are transformed as writers. That is a transformation that never fails to delight me.

Themes and Invitations

One of the biggest challenges is helping my first year college writers move past the idea that writing for school is disposable and boring. One of the ways that I do that is to build my first year writing class around themes. Themes and choice are the most effective engagement strategies I have found and then when I center rhetoric in this fun and engaging work I can slip all sorts of important lessons that transform writing students into writers. I always take deep satisfaction when student reflections note a developing awareness of audience, purpose, and context in the texts they write and read.

Another important tool for helping my students transform into writers is low-stakes writing practice with carefully crafted writing invitations. Most of our class time together is spent writing and sharing as we think and experiment with the ideas and questions each unit offers. Much of that work is inspired by poetry carefully selected for both inspiration and craft. I’ve written before but it remains true so I will repeat it again – my students delight me on the regular with their writing.

Reflection and Self Assessment

As a writing teacher one of the worst parts of the job is grading. This has always been true for me and a semester does not pass without multiple conversations with my colleagues about grading so it feels pretty universal. However, shifting from grading the deliverable to supporting the process then rewarding good faith engagement with that process and reflection has completely transformed my relationship with the end of unit grading process. Focusing on reflection allows me to view my students’ writing in context with their goals and their thoughts on their struggles, weaknesses, and, most important to me, what they learned about writing, rhetoric, and themselves along the way. So many of the comments I am able to leave on their reflections focus on celebration and recognition of true accomplishment and growth – not the creation of a disposable piece of writing that we will both forget tomorrow.

The truth is that I love the double meaning of my title. I am writing about the things that bring me delight as a teacher, but these are also the elements of my teaching practice that I hope teach my students to delight in their writing and the writing of others. How do you find the sweet spot in your teaching? What brings you delight as a teacher? How do you teach delight?

Image by Angelica Vaihel from Pixabay