Coaching kids in writing and story-telling
/From the Lawrence University Writing Lab to ESL students, from talented teens to my own child with a learning disability, I’ve coached a wide variety of young students in writing. I was also once a child, experimenting in writing with a minimum of instruction and support.
My experience isn’t all-encompassing, but it has given me some tips I would like to share about how to coach children and young people in writing.
An old saying contends that you should not “teach” writing at all: “Teach children to read and they will write because they cannot help themselves.” And there is something to that.
If you assume writing is simply the paper equivalent of speaking, it makes perfect sense. Once a person has the building blocks, they will self express. But writing (and speaking for that matter) are to skilled story-telling, instruction or persuasion as a slouchy walk is to the skills of a professional athlete. Barring disability, everyone will learn to walk just by passively observing others walk. Almost no one will become a highly skilled athlete, if left on their own.
The actual writing mechanics are important, though there have been excellent authors and story-tellers who did not entirely master them. There are also skills beyond that must be developed and honed. A teacher or coach can be a help (or a hindrance) in this development. For some, a teacher may not be necessary at all, but for most some kind of coaching is helpful and development won’t progress as fast or as far without it.
Creative Commons image by odleywonderworks of Flickr.com
Writing can be taught.
Technical forms of writing can be taught in a fairly standard way, in which inner motivation and self-confidence is important but not all-encompassing. However, technical writing without the creative spark is only adequate, even in computer manuals. Skilled and versatile writing, which can be turned at will from concise, clear instruction to gripping, emotive narrative, can only be fostered and developed with practice and dedication.
Today’s media-saturated, hyper-verbal world needs endless numbers of skilled, versatile writers in every field from business to science, cottage industries to Hollywood. The ability to write clearly and with spirit, to direct written (or theoretically spoken) words with deft and precise intention and to employ style, voice and mood as easily as a pro basketball player pivots and shoots is among the most crucial skills for professional success in today’s world. It is also a source of intense personal satisfaction and happiness.
Yet this level of skill is unlikely to mature on its own. There have been cases of amazing, untaught writers, but they are rare and thus all rather famous people. For the most part, writing can and should be coached. But still the most important tips for any writing teacher, coach or parent hoping to foster the skill in a child are the pitfalls to avoid.
The main reason we question whether or not writing should be taught is that it is easy to botch the process and do more harm than good. Here is my list of DON’Ts:
Don’t look over a child’s shoulder while they are writing. Every stage of writing, from the first tracing of letter shapes, through the arduous decoding of plot and tension is a process. Teaching and appropriate materials help, but there is always an experimentation stage. That’s the part where teachers have a tendency to peek and stop the process on the inevitable mistakes. But the process is necessary. Self-correction is much more powerful than external correction. Wait for a result, before commenting and correcting. My most telling example of this comes from my own experience. When I was seventeen, a teacher looked over my shoulder while I was writing a short story in typing class after I had finished the regular assignment. The teacher, who I had a close relationship with, made a comment that was only mildly critical and no doubt was meant as respectful collegial advice. I don’t remember the content of the comment twenty-five years later, but I did not write another word of fiction for five years. I became highly proficient in non-fiction, but I harbored a deep-seated belief that I was not cut out for fiction. I have now published ten fiction books, but retrieving my confidence was a struggle. Silly? Yes. It was a silly teenage reaction. It was also a sadly typical example of the overreaction of young writers,, particularly to unexpected commentary in the midst of the process.
If you must look, don’t comment over their shoulder. I can hear my child’s teacher mutter, “Yes, but we have to watch in order to correct the way the child hold’s the pen. Letting them get away with a sloppy grip is setting them up for a lifetime of pain and frustration.” There may be medical reasons like this to observe. I suggest, either gently forming the child’s fingers on the pen or gently reminding the child from the other side of the room. The fact is that over-the-shoulder commenting is so destructive that it must be avoided at all cost.
Don’t insist on reading everything a child writes. Even a small child will do some experiments entirely on their own. I used to find little scraps of paper with notes to dolls and stuffed animals scribbled in atrocious handwriting and bizarre spelling by my bilingual, learning-disabled child scattered around the house. Older kids will write stories and journals that they will sometimes not want to share. Sometimes we do have to reinforce good spelling, but doing it wrong in a bit of private writing is not actually going to set them in bad habits for life. The language center of the brain is mercifully more flexible than most. Experimentation is crucial to the process and some of it must be done unobserved.
Don’t focus too much on mechanics. Writing mechanics are important—crucial even. This is the medium writers work in, but mastering mechanics can take a long time and it varies widely individual to individual. There are other crucial skills that need to be learned at the same time and too great a focus on mechanics can stunt development in other areas. Far too many children lose all interest in writing at a young age because the focus of instruction is exclusively on mechanics until they have been mastered. But I will never forget the day my dyslexic daughter with severe attention problems first sat at a table for 45 minutes writing without even being asked in third grade. I was shocked. She struggles in every aspect of school. But that day she wrote a story with a beginning, middle and end, including conflict and resolution, in some of the worst handwriting, grammar and spelling ever combined into coherent prose. Her classroom teacher agreed that few among her high-achieving classmates could structure a story like that, though they were far better at the mechanics. And I had never coached her on this. Had I stopped her over mechanics, we might never have discovered that she has this hidden strength.
Don’t criticize beyond the level achieved. By the same token, it is important to restrict criticism to the general level achieved by the student. Many of my students have English as a second language. If I were to criticize their descriptions or sentence structure on a professional level, there would never be anything positive to say. And even the most talented children rarely have a good grasp of plot structure or tension flow. Coaches and teachers must keep comments confined roughly to the level the child is at with a light push toward the next level.
Don’t over-praise. It is not just that over-praise is sickly sweet and children can smell it a mile away. Over-praise also cheapens the currency of praise, which is crucial to coaching. It is essential to find whatever is positive in every attempt, even if it is only effort and one well-chosen word. But comparing the writing to others or inflating the child’s expectations is rarely helpful.
Don’t make blanket statements. It should not need to be mentioned, but unfortunately over time some teachers become overconfident and believe they can make predictions about a child’s over all writing ability based on the work at hand and they feel a need to make broad statements of criticism, such as, “You have a poor grasp of story structure.” This is no doubt true of most students at various stages. However, the comment is unhelpful. It is not specific enough to give useful instruction and because of the sensitivity of young writers (and most adult writers), it can too easily be interpreted as an overall condemnation of their innate talent.
Don’t avoid comment altogether. All this warning about how easy it is to completely mess up the teaching of writing might make you shy about saying anything at all. While comments don’t need to be lengthy, some comment and especially highly specific comments are truly necessary. Simply not commenting at all can imply greater criticism than you might think, and even if you can only comment with your own personal reaction, be specific and as precise as possible.
Creative Commons image by Odleywonderworks of Flickr.com
Don’t let all the prohibitions get you down. There are useful things you can do as a writing teacher or coach. Keeping the DON’Ts in mind is simply a good safeguard. Now let’s get down to the DOs.
Do make sure the child is learning writing mechanics and reading, if not with you, than with someone else. While it is not the top priority at all stages of the process, a solid understanding of mechanics (if not necessarily perfect rendition of them) and copious amounts of absorbed verbiage (if not necessarily print to eyeball in reception) are indispensable for the mastery of writing. Reading is important not only because the child will learn by example the structures and possibilities of storytelling, but also because the more you read, the easier writing mechanics will be to learn. Children with text disabilities will struggle here. I was 90 percent blind as a child and have always read at about a tenth the speed of my peers. My dyslectic brother and I shared terrible handwriting and outrageous spelling—him because dyslexia plays havoc with the way the brain recalls and perceives letters in sequence and me because, although i absorbed vast numbers of books, I used an audio format and simply didn’t read enough words visually to drill the correct spellings into my memory. We both did learn mechanics eventually, but only after becoming pretty solid writers with the help of computer spellchecks.
Ensure quality and quantity of input. Do make sure the child has a lot of stories, non-fiction texts and other useful reading material in whatever format is appropriate. Regardless of the child’s ability to physically read, writing does share this with spoken language. The more a young child is exposed to diverse and skillful language, the more they will be able to express language flexibly and effectively. Read to the child, make sure there are audio books if the child is not physically reading with ease, and tell stories on the fly. Read letters, encyclopedia entries and anything else available. Not all of it needs to be high-quality and none of it needs to be in archaic, formal language, but a wide variety is desirable.
In the beginning, get the child forming sentences… any sentences. If you’re starting at the very beginning with a child or have an ESL student, the first major hurdle is forming sentences. This is NOT dependent on mastery of mechanics, although learning letters, handwriting, spelling and grammar is usually going on roughly in the same period. If forming sentences is a struggle, the surefire way to get it rolling is to provide a list of subjects (either as words—pronouns, names, etc.—or as pictures—a boy, a girl, a fairy, a cat, etc.), a list of verbs (again either as words or pictures), and a list of predicates (either objects in pictures or more complex sentence endings in words, depending on the student’s level). Then play with them together with your student. Mix them around on cards. Try different combinations. Point out how they have to go in a certain order and how that order changes if there is a question. Let the child draw lines connecting their choice of a subject to a verb and then to a predicate. Then gradually take away one list and then another to allow the child to choose freely. Emphasize that there are no wrong choices, as long as the correct type of word is used. Encourage silliness at this stage, e.g. “The elephant skates on the roof.”
Write out answers in other subjects only during the correct stage. When I was a kid in sixth grade science class I was irritated that my teachers always insisted that we write out answers in complete sentences, when a one- or two-word answer directly below the question would have sufficed for clarity. And at the same time, I could feel something very much like a muscle bulging and growing every time I was forced to write those sentences. Don’t give students useless busy work and if they are beyond the stage where good solid sentences are an issue, don’t require this, but for the vast majority of students through about 9th grade, this is good practice.
Write what is necessary. Get students writing letters to friends or family, shopping lists, notes to fellow students, calendars, logs of their hobbies, everything and anything. These things are not narrative writing and the mechanics don’t have to be perfect, but practice is still practice and the risks and emotional costs are lower in these tasks than if every time the child writes, it has to be laden with the significance of a creative writing project.
Do encourage independent attempts at writing. Some parents completely over- or under-react to their children’s writing experiments. Writing is much like drawing at this stage and the same reactions that encourage drawing will encourage writing. Comment warmly, make eye contact, smile and point out some well-executed detail. Praise effort and ask if you can display the child’s finished attempt without correcting it. Bad spelling here is the same as a drawing of a stick figure with only three fingers. Most of us know better than to criticize the drawing at this stage and the same goes for the writing. Instead say something like, “You put a lot of work into that. I see that robot really likes playing soccer. Is that right? Can we put it up on the refrigerator with your brother’s drawing?” Then you can lightly encourage other attempts when there is time and space. “I wonder if that robot from your story is having any other adventures that you could write about.”
Do encourage kids to keep journals, blogs and multi-media scrapbooks. I hesitate to make this a hard-and-fast requirement. Some students are reluctant writers and being forced to keep a journal may only demotivate them further. Others are already moving on to specific writing projects. There may also be structural reasons why journals don’t work in your coaching, such as irregular or infrequent meetings with your student. But if it is at all possible, journaling is a tried-and-true practice for the development of writing skills. Journals can be kept that simply record events, thoughts and feelings, or they can contain a series of writing prompts and reactions. Younger children may write one sentence per entry accompanied by a drawing. Even older children may use drawings, comic strips and artifacts pertaining to the text. These are all useful avenues. The world needs a wide variety of writers and writers of comics and ultra-short ad copy often make more money than long-form writers. If it is regular practice, it is almost guaranteed to be useful and skill-building.
Break stories down into basic parts. When you do get to the point of attempting a short story with a child, often in third or fourth grade, start by asking the child to identify the beginning, middle and end elements of a few short stories read aloud. Then introduce the idea that stories always involve a problem and someone who solves the problem. That “someone” is the main character. The problem and its solution form the “plot.” Whether or not you want to introduce those kinds of specialized terminology depends somewhat on the scope of your writing relationship.
Lead the child to story structure. Once the concepts are introduced, ask the child to try making up a story with you. Some will leap at the chance and want very little direction or involvement from you. That is your cue to withdraw and wait for a result the child is ready to show you. Many other children will be unsure and reticent at first. You can help by asking questions. “Who should solve the problem in the story?” Get a main character identified. Suggest a few ways to start by introducing the main character, such as “There once was a …. named …” Then ask, “Where is this character in the beginning?” Get another sentence worked out that introduces the setting. Then ask “What kind of problem does the character run into?” With some luck, your student will be able to form a few sentences more independently at this point. After one to three sentences about the problem have been recorded, ask the child. “How does the characters solve the problem?” And encourage him/her to wrap it up. This is a somewhat artificial starting point but after a few repetitions the child will be able to think of very short narratives. If the formation of sentences is still a problem, it may be necessary to continue with sentence-forming exercises of various types.
Decode non-fiction. The process for learning to write non-fiction differs mainly in the questions we ask. Ask the child to identify the main idea sentence in the beginning of short non-fiction texts for children, to list some details from the text and to identify a conclusion sentence. Then when a topic for non-fiction arises (a book report, a description of a nature scene, a log of a science project or similar), follow the same structure. Ask the child to start with a main idea sentence, list several details and conclude with a general statement again. These are building blocks a step beyond mechanics. They are also a frame on which the child will hang a variety. of other structures in the future.
Foster writing practice and discipline. Once the basics of mechanics and structure have been covered, if not perfectly mastered, you will find yourself in the tumultuous middle territory between beginnings and a basic skill level. Here the most important factor is practice, practice, practice. Make writing fun. Use creative writing prompts. Go interesting places to write. Set goals and make the sheer volume of words or pages a matter of pride and even competition.
Reward volume, rather than skill. This may seem counter intuitive but it is based on scientific evidence. You can set rewards but they should be focused on the completion of anything, rather than based on the merits of the writing. Studies have shown that rewards do not work well to motivate creativity or highly complex cognitive tasks. Praise primarily effort and the discipline of getting words onto paper. De-emphasize any sort of merit-based competition during this intermediate stage. Writing competitions are only helpful once older students start to demand them, and even then their usefulness can be questionable.
(Note: This point is not supporting a soft-headed approach to writing that insists that all attempts are equal and students shouldn’t be steered toward excellence. It is simply strategic. While at very high levels of mastery, there may be subjective arguments about which author is better, there are also clear—even harsh—standards in writing as a craft. The goal is to teach kids real, versatile, skilled writing, and introducing creative competition to young writers too soon tends to stunt development, cause psychological stress and thus curtail the massive productivity that is crucial to practice.)
Discuss books, movies and stories in other forms that are important to their generation and culture. Dissect their plot, structure, characters, tension, mood, voice and style. Introducing these elements as something that can be discussed and decoded takes away a lot of the intimidating mystique they often carry. Even something as elusive as narrative voice can be discussed and understood.
Become a writing colleague. Once you have reached a level in which students are writing stories and/or non-fiction beyond a few pages, the teaching process resembles athletic coaching much more than academic instruction. Your role is that of mentor and role model as well as motivator. You provide direction, help to set goals and provide technical advice (i.e. correction and critique). However, there is a shift in the relationship to a less hierarchical teacher-student dynamic.
Present self doubt as normal and a long learning process as necessary to mastery. Some students may be impatient with their own progress at the intermediate and/or advanced stages and they are likely among the most promising writers for their age. They are self-critical and they absorb the false myth within the popular culture that writing, as well as acting and music, is mostly a matter of innate talent. Talent is helpful, but it is likely that students who are motivated enough to question it, have the prerequisites. The fact is, however, that writing, like any skilled craft requires huge amounts of practice, about ten thousand hours of practice in fact. This is a useful gauge that holds true for most creative and professional skills. Ten thousand hours roughly translates as ten years of working a full-time job. Below that limit of practice, even history’s most famous artists, writers and musicians were not skilled, even if they showed promise. Children and teenagers are pretty much guaranteed to be lacking in this area. Knowing that it is normal to need that level of practice can be both comforting and motivating to those who are committed to the craft.
Share struggles and frustrations. It may be helpful to share some of your own struggles along the path of writing. Students at this level find the fact that you had or may still have doubts or struggled with the discipline of writing to be encouraging and motivating. It is fine to admit that you don’t know everything and to show that there are things in writing, such as mechanics which are hard, cold laws, and there are things that are subjective matters of opinion. Eventually, you will even get to a point where you discuss the proposition that even those hard, cold laws should be broken by professionals at times, for specific reasons, such as using idiomatic grammar to portray dialect or general narrative voice.
Treat “writer’s block” as most likely rooted in anxiety. “Writer’s block” is a much discussed topic, but it is also largely perpetuated by myth. Many young writers may think they suffer from writer’s block. Certainly, a person’s mind can go blank from exhaustion, stress, anxiety or other problems, but it is not specific to writing. The most common issue behind complaints of “writer’s block” is anxiety and fear of failure. Part of a coach’s job is to instill an understanding that doubts and anxieties are normal, first drafts are easily edited and putting anything down is the first step on the road to writing success. If you have not had the teaching of this child from the beginning, there may be significant barriers of anxiety to work through. Creating sentences and even paragraphs according to prompts can be made into a game that results in a written narrative before the child realizes they have actually written something that works. This and other techniques can be used to crack open particularly hard cases of “writer’s block.”
Consider the possibility of exhaustion. With more advanced students who develop difficulties after a lot of writing, consider the possibility. of creative burn-out. Learning the discipline of taking breaks and returning to writing, incorporating exercise, food, water and proper breathing into the writing routine is every bit as important to developing writing skills as it is to a budding athlete. Writing saps a particular type of mental energy and either in the short-term—or worse over the long-term-this energy can be depleted. If a student was successful and highly motivated in the past, but is now flagging, this is a serious issue requiring significant breaks, physical activity and the development of healthy long-term habits.
Form a critique circle. Advanced coaching for teens can be done one-on-one and also in groups. A small group of two or three students at a roughly similar level may actually be preferable to individual coaching. Critiquing the work of others is excellent training and learning discernment while absorbing the criticisms of peers is crucial. That said, rules of critique need to be strictly enforced and shared by the coach or teacher. Criticism must be focused on a specific issue in a specific piece of writing. As mentioned earlier, it is not the place of a critique to make blanket statements about the abilities of the writer. At maximum, you may mention that a similar issue has come up before.
Question your own knowledge and assumptions. Coaches and teachers must also keep in mind that even on specific issues, we don’t always know better than our students, even if we have vastly more writing experience. For example, one of the best writing instructors I ever had was a professor at Lawrence University. I was consistently the student who produced the highest word count and other students were nervous about critiquing my work, so the professor was rightly a bit hard on me. My most advanced work at the university was a short story about Ukrainian border guards, using an experience I had while studying abroad in the former Soviet Union as research for the setting. The professor, who had never been in this strange and surreal locale, delivered harsh criticism of my use of setting and social norms. Fortunately for my shaky self-confidence as a writer, there was an Eastern European student in the class with the guts to tell the professor that he was wrong. I too have been wrong on topics my advanced students know more about than I do.
Require eventual sharing of some work. You may encounter students who appear to be writing, even writing large amounts of material, but never feel ready to share it. As you can see from other points, this is a tricky situation. Some solitary process is necessary and yet clearly there comes a point where not sharing one’s work becomes counterproductive to development. It is hard to know exactly where this line is with each individual student. But most of the time, a student who won’t share anything is suffering from extensive performance anxiety. Some students with significant ability will go so far as to fail writing courses that base the grade solely on pages filled, rather than turn in writing assignments. Try a variety of different methods to help students through this. Group critique sessions may be too intimidating at first, but a student may be open to sharing only with a teacher or only with a single peer. There are also peer, sharing websites today on the internet, where a student can choose an anonymous user name and share a sample of work to be critiqued by others. While this approach has it’s risks because some online critiques are intentionally harsh for sport, it can also alleviate anxiety as the student sees how reactions to his/her work compare to that of other beginning writers.
I hope these tips are helpful to teachers, coaches and interested parents. Writing, in the end, is a creative craft like all others. Practice is key and talent may manifest in unexpected ways.
