A teaching journal

When I was a young teacher, I worked in two unusual and challenging schools. We were often working without a map and it was both terrifying and brilliant. Early on, Michael Armstrong, who was a colleague then, encouraged me to keep a journal. Every day, at four o’clock, I sat down with a cup of tea and recorded stories from my day. I wrote down things that bothered me, or puzzled me, or that I considered a success. Very often, I just wrote down things that had happened without really knowing more than that. Only later did patterns appear. I have been writing journals about school life ever since.

It is what I like to write and it is where writing, for me, is a record, a research tool, a means of thinking and a means of discovery. I find writing in this way utterly absorbing and it is this kind of writing that makes me feel most like a writer.

When I look back at the early journals, I am dismayed by their prim schoolmarmy flavour despite the wildness of the context Very often I was simply catching the moments, hoping enlightenment would come later. I was coy about my part in the procedure. My notes were often cryptic, missing out the detail which I have learned bring things alive and help me to make sense of what I am seeing. Slowly, I loosened up. Threads emerged. I felt able to speculate. And I was lucky to have colleagues who wanted to talk, endlessly, about what we were doing; what students were teaching us. The talk remains essential. The writing catches the moment and allows thinking to unfold.

So I encourage you to keep a teaching journal. So very often it is assumed that writing means ‘being creative’; and ‘being creative’ means writing novels and poetry. For a teacher, writing about the life of the classroom is creative, is intellectually satisfying and is emotionally worthwhile. It is a way of making sense of what we and those whom we teach are doing. In making sense we create meanings and consolidate and develop our practice.

If that sounds too worthy, then shake yourself free of that idea. Just capture a story or two each day and see what happens.

This is the thing. Make a cup of tea and sit down. Open your notebook. Write the date and time and let the day come back to you. Write down what immediately comes to you. Sometimes, there will be one overwhelming event. Sometimes, a brief moment will have stayed with you -the way a child smiled, the hush as you read the last chapter of a novel, the surprising solution a child found to a maths problem, the emotions that surged when, yet again, Galahad the Restless could not settle to the task. .

Start by recording the story. Write down what happened. What words were spoken. Maybe what you felt and thought at the time. Then let the pen go. You may find yourself exploring one idea. You may find yourself writing down a list of small incidents. Be patient. Start with the aim of simply getting some details down. Let the events of the classroom and the writing itself lead the way.

One year my journal began in despair. Daily I reported a sense of failure, of making no headway, of students’ unfinished work and abandoned projects. I constantly questioned myself. Six months later, when re- reading the entries, I saw that much more had been happening than I thought. Although I felt at sea, the students were making headway. In every single abandoned attempt lay the seeds of what became major pieces of work during the next twelve months. I learned how some things come slowly and how important trust can be.

Start today. Use a school exercise book. See what happens.

Michael was an inspirational teacher and thinker. A collection of his papers and essays is available in this free e-book, Another Way of Looking.

What You Need To Keep Warm

I have been thinking about the place that writing can have in people’s lives.

I have said before that writing is a human activity. In fact, people are at the core of any writing, whether as writer or reader or subject. That seems to be overlooked by most recent directives about teaching writing. The emphasis on technical accuracy and grammatical knowledge, on textual features and such, has overshadowed what it means to write.

In our writing groups we experience directly the ways that writing transforms us, both individually and as a community.

We reflect on our own lives and those of others. We shape and re-shape thoughts and feelings. We travel into our hearts. We travel across the globe.

During our last Norwich Writing Teachers meeting we wrote in response to a poem written by Neil Gaiman for the UN Refugee Agency UK: What you need to keep warm. The Agency invited people across the world to send in drawings and paintings in response to the words and then created this video.

When we wrote, we thought of both physical and abstract things that warm us. Emily Rowe shared the video with her Year 5/ 6 class who are isolated at the moment and learning at a distance. One wrote about how hearing ‘Well done, that’s great,’ makes you feel warm. And here are more:

The warmth of a smile
Hugs and fire
A snuggle with grandad
Hot chocolate
Cups of tea
My hot water bottle
Friendship and family

Sometimes, even the warmth of a smile is hidden behind a face mask. That is why I would add the unexpected gift of words to my list of things that warm us.

There is a saying that firewood warms twice -once when you saw the logs, and again as it burns in the hearth. Perhaps words can warm three times, once as you write, twice as you give them, a third time as they are read.

Writing Inside Out

I am sorry that I have not published anything here for so long. I have known I should. In April I experienced a life-changing event and have just not been able to find public words. I have written. Writing has remained my lifeline, but, until the last few days, I have not found the energy to write beyond myself. I think that kind of ebb and flow of writing and what we choose to write -or not - may be familiar to most of us. I hope that you have been able to find time to write for yourself. Perhaps you have used and enjoyed the regular writing prompts posted on the site . Have you had time to read Katie Kibbler’s wonderful account of her encounters and commitment to NWP teacher writing groups? If you haven’t already, read what she has to say.  Feel inspired by her!

More than ever, our groups of teacher writers, and those who are not yet part of a group, need the time and space to write, and we need each other. Writing together brings a kind of affirmation, inspiration and comfort that infuses our lives and our teaching. It would be good to hear news of what you have been writing, how you have been meeting. Most of our established groups are writing together by Zoom. Unexpectedly, the Zoom meeting for writers is remarkably different from the many other on-line meetings that you may have to deal with. Essentially, the on-line meeting for writing teachers has become, what one teacher described as ‘a sacred space’. It works so powerfully for our well-being and is, at the same time, ‘the best kind of CPD’. 

During the spring and summer, when teachers were teaching remotely to blank screens, dipping in and out of school, caring for the children of key workers, trying to home school our own children, we, in Norwich, found that our meetings were a space that was ours. I was able, home alone, to run a meeting every week, rather than monthly. And that has proved to be wonderful. People come and go according to commitments and timetables, but we are always there on a Thursday. Sometimes children join us -and that is a pleasure and a privilege. And I have found that we are learning even more about ourselves as writers and teachers of writing.

My usual approach to running a writing group is to combine adult focused activities alongside approaches and ideas that can be transferred to the classroom. I have always included in our meetings some focus on pedagogy or process. But during lockdown, I began choosing ideas and prompts that were designed with the group and our situation in mind. I felt that we just needed the space to write -and to hear other people’s writing, about our days, about what we have lost, and what we have found, pleasures and sadnesses. And there is always laughter. At some point I worried about the teaching part of this venture. Had we lost that element of our meetings? And that is when someone said that this was the best kind of CPD. The weekly commitment has allowed people to stay in the writing moment, and not feel they have to pick it up again after a month or more. A weekly commitment is not necessary, though people reported how they had more frequently gone back to their writing, revised it, developed it. Most importantly, they said that what they were learning for themselves, through writing themselves, was richer and more deeply embedded in their teaching than in other forms of professional development. It is what I have always known at some level. It is hard to capture. It encourages me to encourage you to write with others!

We learn to write from the inside out…

In Our Hands

With Toni Morrison’s words on the home page of the website, it was good to be reminded of our responsibility ‘to do language’; and to be reminded of so much that Toni Morrison wrote that faced up to self-pity and fear.  Since her death last year, I have had cause to read and re-read her Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in 1993 in which she speaks, again, about our responsibilities towards language. The speech is rich and complex. Each time I read it, I take something slightly different from it. The speech is framed by a parable, a frequently told story that Morrison shapes to her own ends. It tells of an old woman, blind, wise, and in this version, the daughter of slaves. A group of children visit the woman and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” The old woman does not answer immediately. She cannot see them, or whether or not there is a bird in the child’s hand. Have they come to mock her? What is their intention? Eventually, she answers,  “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

‘It is in your hands’.

It is their responsibility. Toni Morrison goes on to say that she reads the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She thinks of language as a living thing, over which we can have control, and ‘mostly as agency – as an act with consequences.’ Language, she says,  is susceptible to death and in  the hands of those who would control and suppress, it is already dead but not without effect. ‘it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.’

Morrison imagines the woman thinking about language. She recognises that language can never live up to life once and for all. She sees its force in its reach for the ineffable. 

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

And then she gives the story another twist. She proposes that the children did not come to the woman in mockery but in genuine search for wisdom. They speak up:

 “You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”

We are not Toni Morrison. We are teachers. We write. Children are asking us about the world and about their future. We do have stories to tell. And we can make it possible for children to tell their stories. Together we can keep language alive;  do the word work.

It is in our hands.