How Becoming a Children’s Book Author Changed the Way I Teach Writing
When I first started teaching, I didn’t really know how to teach writing. I knew it was important. I had some textbooks. I had a stack of construction paper and glitter. And I had a lot of hope. So we made pop-up books and paper-plate characters. We turned in Tall Tales written on scrolls of receipt paper. We displayed stories with cotton balls and googly eyes. It was creative. It was fun. But it wasn’t teaching writing. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and no one had really shown me how. Why Was Writing So Hard to Teach? Part of the problem was that writing is invisible. You can’t point to it the way you can point to a math formula. There’s no clear-cut path. There’s no single right answer. I tried rubrics. I tried sentence starters. I tried grading checklists. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was guessing. And that my students were guessing, too. The bright ones thrived. The quiet ones hid. And the reluctant writers? They copied from the board or wrote ...