Venturing (back) Into the Writing Coach World! (Blog Post 2)

This semester, I am fortunate to venture back into the world of working with writing coaches, exploring how providing feedback to student writing can shape them as writers and deepen their sense of how their writing communicates their ideas. I am even more fortunate to bring my students along, which one of my students phrased as being "guinea pigs for the writing coaches to learn about being teachers." While my sense about giving feedback to student writing has changed immensely from the first time I was a writing coach since I now offer regular feedback to students from the teacher role, as I step back into the role of writing coach I'd like to reflect on my literacy journey that has brought me to where I am today.

I read all of those books!

When I think of all the experiences that have shaped my enjoyment and understanding of literacy, I am transported back to my love of reading as a middle and high schooler. Nearly all of my highest achieving students are reading other books for pleasure outside of my class, and when I think back to the most memorable books I read at that time, none of them were read in school. In the early middle years, I was hooked on The Warriors series and entered into my teenage years alongside the boom in dystopian young adult fiction, including books and later movie adaptations of The Hunger Games and Divergent series. While my parents were never much interested in reading, I was an only child and after my parents' divorce I had lots of time at home to get lost in the imagined worlds of young adult fiction.

So I could teach them!

While reading was always something that grabbed my attention, I have always found writing less approachable. My earliest memories of writing are being assigned extra practice in penmanship and cursive while my friends had computer time. In middle school, I did dabble in creative writing, mostly inspired to write spinoffs of the young adult fiction I was reading. However, as I entered into high school, the focus in writing at school shifted to textual analysis and building claims that could be supported with quotes. Since I was confident in my reading comprehension, I became far more comfortable writing claims that could be supported with quotes from a text and moved farther away from creative writing where the only justification of the writing is the style, composition, and creativity of the author. Recently, I've been working to get back into creative writing and building trust and confidence in writing. I have found writing about childhood memories, like the pond of polliwogs that has long since dried up, can be a helpful path back into writing. Getting outside of my comfort zone and rethinking my own position as a writer has help immensely as I work to give feedback to my own students and I look forward to how it will support me as a writing coach, as well.