Different Kinds of 'Knowing' About Writing

South Downs NWP Convenor and secondary English teacher, Theresa Gooda, discovers more about what happens when teachers write together.

The model of NWP meetings is very simple: you meet somewhere, (mostly online at the moment) and you do some writing, along with other teachers. 

The benefits of NWP meetings are difficult to articulate - and I’m very appreciative of writing teacher colleagues who try to capture quite what is so special about them. There’s camaraderie, of course, and there’s something powerful about the collaborative creation in the writing process, and being part of a writing community seems to translate into classroom confidence.

Many teachers who participate talk about it as being ‘transformative’, and I’m coming to understand that the transformation comes through understanding more about the process of writing through the experience and the reflection. I asked my writers at South Downs NWP what it is that they really know about writing from regular ‘doing’ of writing together. This is what they said.

They understand more about:

• The importance of selecting experiences (in prompts and stimulus material) that students can draw on.

• The value of being able to anchor writing to memory to generate rich response

• The power of sharing words together and using them as building blocks, like Lego

• What a benefit there is from the process of hearing your writing read aloud: how it becomes a form of drafting

• How a greater focus on craft and metacognition in relation to writing leads to a far deeper understanding of how language works and richer writing results
  

We tried to go further and pinpoint ways that classroom practice has changed as a result of this different kind of ‘knowing’ about writing. A selection of the ideas:

• Increased empathy: It’s easy to forget what it feels like to write. Teachers could more readily see and celebrate ‘little wins’ with individual students

• Bringing more, and more diverse texts into the classroom to enrich the curriculum

• Introducing shorter bursts of creative writing more regularly: several times a week for most

• A greater use of freewriting, creating an environment where writing is relaxed and not pressured.

• Encouraging students to begin by writing lists of words (rather than starting with the dreaded ‘plan’)

I’m so grateful, as ever, for the experience of writing with reflective teachers - both for the joy of hearing their words but also for insights like these.

It was also uplifting to hear that NWP Islington managed to meet in person last month. Let’s hope that others can follow suit and meet ‘irl’ very soon.

On Morning Pages

Helen Atkinson reflects on how writing Morning Pages has helped her through changing jobs, studying part-time for her MA and surviving a pandemic.

For the past two years I have written (almost) every day. Mostly in a journal (though sometimes on my laptop), mostly a page long (though it can be as short as a few phrases, or a multi-page scrawl), mostly in the morning (but often in the afternoon or evening too).

I have been following the principle of Morning Pages, though, as you’ll see above – I am no great respecter of rules. The phrase was coined by Dorothea Brandt in 1934 and later reinvented by creativity guru Julia Cameron and technically they are three pages of stream of consciousness writing done first thing in the morning. Like the ‘free writing’ that many of us will have done to stimulate writing with our classes, they are personal, not to be shared, and Cameron claims that they are designed to ‘clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand.’ Morning Pages are not fitted to an audience or purpose, they fit no mark scheme, and no planning grid. They are simply words, spilled out onto a page.

I was first introduced to the practice by writer and lecturer, Peggy Riley. Peggy’s ethos is that Morning Pages can be whatever we need them to be, to support our creativity and our wellbeing. At the beginning of a part time MA in Creative Writing, I needed the commitment to daily writing in order to guard against the inevitable takeover of planning, preparation and marking. I wrote on my short 10-minute train journey to school, documenting the landscape, the weather, the other commuters and my own worries and hopes for the day ahead. Much of the writing was just a release of feelings but some words and phrases were recycled into longer pieces of ‘proper’ writing at a later date. Most importantly, the pages allowed me to process my unhappiness in my job. They gave me the clarity and courage I needed to leave.

Morning Pages then bumped and scrawled their way on the bus to a temporary teaching job. Their soothing repetition helped me to settle in and provided an outlet for my thoughts as I met new students and colleagues, and began to teach new texts. Morning Pages could be about the lashing of rain on the bus windows or unformed reflections on a poem.

Just a few weeks later, the first national UK lockdown began and, like many teachers up and down the country, I made the transition to online teaching. Beginning my days with Morning Pages, helped me to make sense of the chaos in both the wider world and the little room where I was teaching lessons into a laptop screen. Fearful of the days blurring into one another, I began counting them in Morning Pages that untangled news reports and statistics, provided fictional escapes, and charted the development of the seagull chicks on the roof next door. 

Daily writing continues to help me balance my own writing with a rekindled love of teaching English. Sometimes, my Morning Pages are a free-form to do list or statement of intent, sometimes a draft zero of ideas, sometimes a wailed splutter onto the page. At times teaching pushes its way in, at others, it is writing just for myself. I let the pages be what they need to be on any given day. But some things are certain. I am more reflective because of Morning Pages, more secure in my own practice, both as a teacher and a writer, and a lot more resilient too.

Dip your pen in; writing's lovely

Alison Jermak, secondary English teacher, NWP secretary and NWP Wembley convener writes about her NWP journey and and the value of belonging to a writing group.

I have become quite determined to make space for my writing in my life, because it is one thing that I do for me – that was why I started writing independently at home again really, to make some time for myself between teaching and raising my children.

I write for many reasons: to gain clarity and perspective, to calm myself, to challenge an idea, to connect with people, to throw something out there and gauge the reaction.

Our NWP Wembley group grew from the Whodunnit group that I am a member of. I started the group because I was leaving my first teaching job and before leaving, I wanted to introduce my colleagues to NWP. Meeting regularly once a half term has turned out to be a good way of keeping in touch.

I value the support, the attention, the wisdom and the experience of my fellow NWP writers. We all bring so much enthusiasm for writing, the conversations are always rich and the reading recommendations are good. 

I write in a notebook – I normally have two on the go so that I write in one and then redraft in the other. I reread my writing a couple of days later and highlight anything that interests me. Some of it will then make its way into a piece that I type up. On my laptop I have collection of short stories, life writing and poems that I like to think are fermenting. I then revisit pieces that jump out at me and I will redraft and redraft.

Currently I write for at least ten minutes every day. I’m better in the morning, but I will squeeze it in where ever I can. I write in whichever room in the house I can be alone in; noise at home bothers me, family members – they normally want something.

There have been times where I have taken a short break from writing – a couple of weeks when nothing really calls to me or I’m stuck in a piece and I can’t see where to go next. When I come back to it, the muscle memory kicks in and I’m off again. Once you start, I think you can’t help but think like a writer. I have a notebook by my bed and phrases in the notes section of my phone that have floated in when I’m out and about.

I enjoy the process of coming up with ideas, the unpredictability of it. I like researching and coming up with new ideas for prompts to try out with the group. If it excites me when I try it out, then I know it will work. I’m curious to see how the writers will respond. The variety of writers’ responses is also interesting. I’d like to do some research into the benefits of writing as a group in this way.

Students I teach know that I teach writing differently. Some get excited when I introduce free writing, they enjoy the freedom of it and ask, “When are we going to do free writing again?” Some are confronted by the blank page: “Tell me what to say.” Individuals like it when I talk to them about pieces that they have written.

Being part of the NWP has kept me in teaching. It’s the type of learning experience that I had growing up and that made me want to become a teacher. It’s something that I have a genuine interest in, I can practise writing, begin to master it by myself and together with the group. There’s plenty about writing groups to delve into research wise, it’s unexplored territory. 

I would like to encourage more of the teachers in my department to give writing with NWP a try. There’s so much else that’s in the way, but I would say, “Dip your pen in; writing’s lovely.”  

Writing by hand during online teaching

Theresa Gooda, South Downs NWP convener and secondary English teacher, writes about the value of writing slowly with a notebook and pen.

‘I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness.’

This appears on the first page of Barack Obama’s preface to A Promised Land, the recently-published memoir in which he has attempted an ‘honest rendering’ of his time in office as president of the USA.

It resonated with me straight away.

I too am a fan of the humble notebook and pen, and I encourage fellow writers at NWP meetings to join me in ‘physically’ writing, even while we are meeting virtually during lockdown. Some, of course, prefer technology: a laptop, or even tapping into a mobile phone, but I love the sound of writers writing together, the scratchy noise on paper.

I’m also convinced that there is something about the physical act of hand writing, the slowness of it, that makes my writing better. I’ve never been able to articulate quite why, but I think Barack is onto something - the illusion of ‘polish’ that typed words on screen bring can bring is problematic.

Part of that problem comes from the fact that writing, for me, is always exploratory in the first instance. Whatever kind of writing I am undertaking, whether it is poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction, academic or creative (and what, really, does ‘creative’ mean - all writing is surely this), my first marks on paper are a form of ‘working out’. I never know quite what’s in my head when I begin.

What makes writing particularly powerful as a mediator of knowing is, first the possibility it allows for the writer to make an extended, fully worked-out contribution, and second, because of its slower rate of production, its facilitation of a more reflective and self-critical stance (Wells, G. 2001. Action, Talk, and Text: Learning and Teaching through Inquiry. p186)

I came across Gordon Wells’ words while researching something entirely unrelated, but like Obama’s they rang true.

I worry that in our online teaching world we are physically writing less, even if we are typing and tapping away at a keyboard more.

As I plan my ‘synchronous’ and ‘asynchronous’ online lessons, I am forcing myself to find more and more opportunities to invite students to pick up a pen during the course of a session. The chat functions and sticky notes are all great for interaction, but ‘jotting down’ and ‘freewriting’ are important too. I’m also encouraging my students to write in longhand on first drafts and upload photographs of their draft work alongside the final draft to emphasise the sense of process that is easily lost at the moment; to avoid ‘too smooth a gloss’.

After all, if it’s good enough for Obama…