lack of creative writing in schools

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Why Kids Can’t Write

By Dana Goldstein

• Aug. 2, 2017

On a bright July morning in a windowless conference room in a Manhattan bookstore, several dozen elementary school teachers were learning how to create worksheets that would help children learn to write.

Judith C. Hochman, founder of an organization called the Writing Revolution, displayed examples of student work. A first grader had produced the following phrase: “Plants need water it need sun to” — that is, plants need water and sun, too. If the student didn’t learn how to correct pronoun disagreement and missing conjunctions, by high school he could be writing phrases like this one: “Well Machines are good but they take people jobs like if they don’t know how to use it they get fired.” That was a real submission on the essay section of the ACT.

“It all starts with a sentence,” Dr. Hochman said.

Focusing on the fundamentals of grammar is one approach to teaching writing. But it’s by no means the dominant one. Many educators are concerned less with sentence-level mechanics than with helping students draw inspiration from their own lives and from literature.

Thirty miles away at Nassau Community College, Meredith Wanzer, a high school teacher and instructor with the Long Island Writing Project, was running a weeklong workshop attended by six teenage girls. The goal was to prepare them to write winning college admissions essays — that delicate genre calling for a student to highlight her strengths (without sounding boastful) and tell a vivid personal story (without coming off as self-involved).

Ms. Wanzer led the students in a freewrite, a popular English class strategy of writing without stopping or judging. First, she read aloud from “Bird by Bird,” Anne Lamott’s 1995 classic on how to write with voice. “You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind,” the memoirist writes. “Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.”

Ms. Wanzer then asked the students to spend a few minutes writing anything they liked in response to the Lamott excerpt. Lyse Armand, a rising senior at Westbury High School, leaned over her notebook. She was planning to apply to New York University, Columbia and Stony Brook University and already had an idea of the story she would tell in her Common Application essay. It would have something to do, she thought, with her family’s emigration from Haiti following the 2010 earthquake that devastated the island. But she was struggling with how to get started and what exactly she wanted to say.

“What voice in my head?” she wrote in her response to the Lamott essay. “I don’t have one.”

Lyse needed a sense of “ownership” over her writing, Ms. Wanzer said. Lyse had solid sentence-level skills. But even when Ms. Wanzer encounters juniors and seniors whose essays are filled with incomplete sentences — not an uncommon occurrence — she limits the time she spends covering dull topics like subject-verb agreement. “You hope that by exposing them to great writing, they’ll start to hear what’s going on.”

Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to complete successfully a college-level English composition class, according to the company’s data.

Poor writing is nothing new, nor is concern about it. More than half of first-year students at Harvard failed an entrance exam in writing — in 1874. But the Common Core State Standards, now in use in more than two-thirds of the states, were supposed to change all this. By requiring students to learn three types of essay writing — argumentative, informational and narrative — the Core staked a claim for writing as central to the American curriculum. It represented a sea change after the era of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law that largely overlooked writing in favor of reading comprehension assessed by standardized multiple-choice tests.

So far, however, six years after its rollout, the Core hasn’t led to much measurable improvement on the page. Students continue to arrive on college campuses needing remediation in basic writing skills.

The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves. According to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a scan of course syllabuses from 2,400 teacher preparation programs turned up little evidence that the teaching of writing was being covered in a widespread or systematic way.

A separate 2016 study of nearly 500 teachers in grades three through eight across the country, conducted by Gary Troia of Michigan State University and Steve Graham of Arizona State University, found that fewer than half had taken a college class that devoted significant time to the teaching of writing, while fewer than a third had taken a class solely devoted to how children learn to write. Unsurprisingly, given their lack of preparation, only 55 percent of respondents said they enjoyed teaching the subject.

“Most teachers are great readers,” Dr. Troia said. “They’ve been successful in college, maybe even graduate school. But when you ask most teachers about their comfort with writing and their writing experiences, they don’t do very much or feel comfortable with it.”

There is virulent debate about what approach is best. So-called process writing, like the lesson Lyse experienced in Long Island, emphasizes activities like brainstorming, freewriting, journaling about one’s personal experiences and peer-to-peer revision. Adherents worry that focusing too much on grammar or citing sources will stifle the writerly voice and prevent children from falling in love with writing as an activity.

That ideology goes back to the 1930s, when progressive educators began to shift the writing curriculum away from penmanship and spelling and toward diary entries and personal letters as a psychologically liberating activity. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, this movement took on the language of civil rights, with teachers striving to empower nonwhite and poor children by encouraging them to narrate their own lived experiences.

Dr. Hochman’s strategy is radically different: a return to the basics of sentence construction, from combining fragments to fixing punctuation errors to learning how to deploy the powerful conjunctive adverbs that are common in academic writing but uncommon in speech, words like “therefore” and “nevertheless.” After all, the Snapchat generation may produce more writing than any group of teenagers before it, writing copious text messages and social media posts, but when it comes to the formal writing expected at school and work, they struggle with the mechanics of simple sentences.

The Common Core has provided a much-needed “wakeup call” on the importance of rigorous writing, said Lucy M. Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, a leading center for training teachers in process-oriented literacy strategies. But policy makers “blew it in the implementation,” she said. “We need massive teacher education.”

One of the largest efforts is the National Writing Project, whose nearly 200 branches train more than 100,000 teachers each summer. The organization was founded in 1974, at the height of the process-oriented era.

As part of its program at Nassau Community College, in a classroom not far from the one where the teenagers were working on their college essays, a group of teachers — of fifth grade and high school, of English, social studies and science — were honing their own writing skills. They took turns reading out loud the freewriting they had just done in response to “The Lanyard,” a poem by Billy Collins. The poem, which is funny and sad, addresses the futility of trying to repay one’s mother for her love:

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

Most of the teachers’ responses pivoted quickly from praising the poem to memories of their own mothers, working several jobs to make ends meet, or selflessly caring for grandchildren. It wasn’t sophisticated literary criticism, but that wasn’t the point. A major goal of this workshop — the teacher-training component of the Long Island Writing Project — was to get teachers writing and revising their own work over the summer so that in the fall they would be more enthusiastic and comfortable teaching the subject to children.

“I went to Catholic school and we did grammar workbooks and circled the subject and predicate,” said Kathleen Sokolowski, the Long Island program’s co-director and a third-grade teacher. She found it stultifying and believes she developed her writing skill in spite of such lessons, not because of them.

Sometimes, she said, she will reinforce grammar by asking students to copy down a sentence from a favorite book and then discuss how the author uses a tool like commas. But in general, when it comes to assessing student work, she said, “I had to teach myself to look beyond ‘There’s no capital, there’s no period’ to say, ‘By God, you wrote a gorgeous sentence.’ ”

Mrs. Sokolowski is right that formal grammar instruction, like identifying parts of speech, doesn’t work well. In fact, research finds that students exposed to a glut of such instruction perform worse on writing assessments.

A musical notion of writing — the hope that the ear can be trained to “hear” errors and imitate quality prose — has developed as a popular alternative among English teachers. But what about those students, typically low income, with few books at home, who struggle to move from reading a gorgeous sentence to knowing how to write one? Could there be a better, less soul-crushing way to enforce the basics?

In her teacher training sessions, Dr. Hochman of the Writing Revolution shows a slide of a cute little girl, lying contentedly on her stomach as she scrawls on a piece of composition paper. It’s the type of stock photograph that has probably appeared in a hundred educators’ PowerPoint presentations, meant to evoke a warm and relaxed learning environment, perhaps in one of the cozy writing nooks favored by the process-oriented writing gurus.

“This is not good writing posture!” Dr. Hochman exclaimed. Small children should write at desks, she believes. And while she isn’t arguing for a return to the grammar lessons of yesteryear — she knows sentence diagramming leaves most students confused and disengaged — she does believe that children should spend time filling out worksheets with exercises like the one below, which demonstrates how simple conjunctions like “but,” “because” and “so” add complexity to a thought. Students are given the root clause, and must complete the sentence with a new clause following each conjunction:

Fractions are like decimals because they are all parts of wholes .

Fractions are like decimals, but they are written differently .

Fractions are like decimals, so they can be used interchangeably .

Along the way, students are learning to recall meaningful content from math, social studies, science and literature. By middle school, teachers should be crafting essay questions that prompt sophisticated writing; not “What were the events leading up to the Civil War?” — which could result in a list — but “Trace the events leading up to the Civil War,” which requires a historical narrative of cause and effect.

“Freewriting, hoping that children will learn or gain a love of writing, hasn’t worked,” Dr. Hochman told the teachers, many of whom work in low-income neighborhoods. She doesn’t believe that children learn to write well through plumbing their own experiences in a journal, and she applauds the fact that the Common Core asks students to do more writing about what they’ve read, and less about their own lives.

“I call it a move away from child-centered writing,” she said approvingly, and away from what she considers facile assignments, like writing a poem “about a particular something they may have observed 10 minutes ago out of the window.”

“I don’t mean to be dismissive,” she continued, “but every instructional minute has its purpose.”

Her training session lacks the fun and interactivity of the Long Island Writing Project, because it is less about prompting teachers to write and chat with colleagues and more about the sometimes dry work of preparing worksheets and writing assignments that reinforce basic concepts. Nevertheless, many teachers who learn Dr. Hochman’s strategies become devotees.

Molly Cudahy, who teaches fifth-grade special education at the Truesdell Education Campus, a public school in Washington, D.C., said she appreciates Dr. Hochman’s explicit and technical approach. She thought it would free her students’ voices, not constrain them. At her school, 100 percent of students come from low-income families. “When we try to do creative and journal writing,” she said, “students don’t have the tools to put their ideas on paper.”

There is a notable shortage of high-quality research on the teaching of writing, but studies that do exist point toward a few concrete strategies that help students perform better on writing tests. First, children need to learn how to transcribe both by hand and through typing on a computer. Teachers report that many students who can produce reams of text on their cellphones are unable to work effectively at a laptop, desktop or even in a paper notebook because they’ve become so anchored to the small mobile screen. Quick communication on a smartphone almost requires writers to eschew rules of grammar and punctuation, exactly the opposite of what is wanted on the page.

Before writing paragraphs — which is often now part of the kindergarten curriculum — children do need to practice writing great sentences. At every level, students benefit from clear feedback on their writing, and from seeing and trying to imitate what successful writing looks like, the so-called text models. Some of the touchy-feel stuff matters, too. Students with higher confidence in their writing ability perform better.

All of this points toward a synthesis of the two approaches. In classrooms where practices like freewriting are used without any focus on transcription or punctuation, “the students who struggled didn’t make any progress,” Dr. Troia, the Michigan State professor, said. But when grammar instruction is divorced from the writing process and from rich ideas in literature or science, it becomes “superficial,” he warned.

Considering the lack of adequate teacher training, Lyse may be among a minority of students exposed to explicit instruction about writing.

In Ms. Wanzer’s workshop, Lyse and her classmates went on to analyze real students’ college essays to determine their strengths and weaknesses. They also read “Where I’m From,” a poem by George Ella Lyon, and used it as a text model for their work. Lyse drafted her own version of “Where I’m From,” which helped her recall details from her childhood in Haiti.

Lyse wrote: “I am from the rusty little tin roof house, from washing by hand and line drying.” It was a gorgeous sentence, and she was well on her way to a moving college application essay.

Dana Goldstein is an education reporter for The Times.

Why Creative Writing Still Has a Place in My Classroom

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The earliest piece of writing I can remember producing was a story, written in phonetic spelling on small pieces of scrap paper stapled together. Mimicking as best I could a “real” picture book, I called it Yuc, Yuc, u Slug , and it was based on an experience I’d had the day before, when my best friend and I turned over a large rock and found beneath it ... a frightful slug! This must have been in late kindergarten or early 1st grade, as my writing development closely mirrored my reading development.

Throughout my childhood, I wrote many stories and poems, and in all of them, I can see the combined influence of the reading I did and my own lived experiences. The same is true for many of my students today. In an activity toward the beginning of the school year, I ask them to tell me about their reading and writing histories and often hear the fond memories they have of the early stories they’ve written. Some even bring those stories into class and reminisce about the fun they had writing them.

As students progress through school, though, it seems that their reading and writing experiences become increasingly lopsided: They continue to read works of fiction and poetry, but they must make a dramatic shift away from the imaginative writing of their childhoods toward analytical paragraphs and essays. The Common Core State Standards have compounded this effect by emphasizing analytical writing at much earlier ages, while not explicitly requiring fiction or poetry writing at any age. I know kindergarten teachers who now prompt students to answer questions about an author’s choices during story time, and creative writing is taking even more of a back seat in many language arts classrooms.

This is a mistake for many reasons, but especially if we want students to read more critically.

Imagine you’re taking a ride in the back seat of someone’s car and you’re asked to offer a critique of their driving. Now imagine you have very limited experience as a driver yourself. You might be able to describe how the ride feels to you—bumps, turns, acceleration, sudden stops—and perhaps formulate some opinion about the driver based on these feelings. But you wouldn’t be able to analyze what the driver is doing (or not doing) to create the effect you feel as a passenger. When the driver shifts into low gear to go up a hill in the rain, for example, you probably wouldn’t notice—and even if you did, you’d find it difficult to understand why this was an effective choice without having experience with the particular problem the driver is addressing.

When we ask students to be critics of literary works without giving them consistent, relevant experience writing literary pieces themselves, we put students at a similarly awkward disadvantage.

Rewriting the Script

Literary analysis is something kids can do in a meaningful way under the right conditions. Authentic reading of whole novels and other texts is one condition I advocate strongly. Increasingly, I’ve come to believe that another essential condition for students to analyze and critique writers’ moves is the chance to be in the driver’s seat as literary artists themselves.

Here is one example of how students’ fiction writing propels critical thinking in my classroom:

It was March, and my 8th grade students had finished reading My Heartbeat , a young-adult novel by Garret Freymann-Weyr. While half the class discussed the book, I had the other half work independently on a creative-writing assignment: They had to put themselves in the role of author and write one scene in which they alter an element of the novel. The choices included adding a character, shifting the point of view, changing the setting, giving a “boring” scene “a makeover,” or—the most popular option—killing a character. The creative but focused nature of the task easily captured everyone’s interest, and students of all levels dug in with excitement.

After several days, we came together as a whole class to share the writing. I asked students to read aloud from their writing without introduction or explanation and I asked listeners to take some notes on each reading. The prompts for ensuing discussion were:

1. Based on what you heard, what did the student choose to do differently from the original author?

2. What literary techniques or elements stand out to you in this piece?

We brainstormed and recorded a menu of techniques as a starting place for discussing the second question, including things like dialogue, descriptive language, interior monologue, and foreshadowing. Some we had practiced in previous fiction-writing assignments; others we only discussed as readers. We added to the menu throughout the readings.

The scenes were a lot of fun to hear. Every student approached the assignment differently, and the concept of the role of the “author” was suddenly very tangible for everyone. It’s often challenging for students to remember there is a real person with a real life behind a novel or any text, using his or her imagination and making decisions. Reading fiction is such a powerful virtual experience that kids tend to interact with it as if it were an extension of their own lives, rather than the creative production of a stranger. For young children, the distinction isn’t very important: A story should simply be enjoyed! But as we help students become critics, that distinction becomes essential. In this case, the authors were simply the classmates sitting right in front of us.

Literary Devices

When students share their writing like this, endless opportunities arise to discuss the choices of each writer and their impact. Jonathon, for example, changed the contemporary setting of the novel to 1894. In the novel, the narrator’s brother, Link, is struggling to come to terms with his sexual orientation. Here is an excerpt from Jonathon’s scene:

“I’m not gay,” Link said. “James is.” My heart dropped. I suddenly began to fear for James’ life. The year was 1894. Any openly gay person could be killed by angry mobs. Being gay was not only a sexuality, but also an open bounty on your head for anyone to take. I now realized why Link wanted to deny it. …

In addition to the obvious change in setting, several students also noticed a shift in the conflict. “The conflict got bigger, because of the time period,” one student observed. This created a perfect opportunity for students to see how different literary elements affect one another. The common-core standards in English/language arts emphasize this concept. In fact, 7th grade reading-standard RL.7.3 asks students to “analyze how particular elements of a story or drama interact (e.g., how setting shapes the characters or plot).” In this case, creative writing created an obvious springboard for students’ understanding of that standard.

As more students shared, we heard a number of carefully foreshadowed tragic deaths of various characters. The chance to share and discuss raises students’ awareness of how these literary concepts work and helps them name their own techniques. Many students didn’t realize they effectively used foreshadowing until their writing was discussed.

In her scene, Soraya took the point of view of the unpopular, overbearing father character. In the book, the father makes it clear he wants a heterosexual son, but we only hear his voice through dialogue told by Ellen, the first-person narrator. But Soraya explored his emotions and internal conflict: I see Link asleep on the couch. His eyes have dark circles under them, and I begin to wonder if it’s because of me. I begin to wonder if his stress was always caused by me. ... she wrote.

In the group, students noted the strong interior monologue in Soraya’s scene. Then someone said, “It’s like she made a whole character out of the father.” I added “character development” and “complex character” to the menu of writing techniques, words we had used before but that hadn’t made it onto our earlier brainstorm.

“Why isn’t the father a ‘whole’ or complex character in the book?” I asked. “Because Ellen is the narrator, so you really can’t know what the father is thinking,” a student answered. “So, given that, what could an author do to write a book that has several whole or complex characters?” I asked. “You could switch off narrators,” one student suggested. “Like in Wonder ,” another added, referring to a popular young-adult novel that features multicharacter narration. “Or you could write in third person,” another student offered.

Once again, our experimentation with writing fictional narratives created opportunity for students to see how authors’ choices around narration and point of view affect the story and the reader’s experience.

The Art of Storytelling

Another interesting moment came when Lana allowed a classmate to read her scene. It was quite intense; every word in the piece seemed carefully thought out. It began with Link studying with excruciating focus for a math test. Then she wrote:

“I stood up, ready to go to James’ house, when Link’s head fell loudly onto the table.

“Link!” I yelled, running to him. White bubbles foamed out of his mouth, and tears trickled down his face, mixing with sweat from earlier. His body was shaking aggressively. Link’s eyes began to roll back into the inside of his head, when I hurried to pick up my phone. I dialed 9-1-1, and the ambulance soon arrived.

As we listened, I caught Lana scanning the faces in the room with a look that was difficult to read. The scene continued as we followed characters to the hospital. Then, in the same serious tone, we found out that Link has a tumor in his brain. At that point, James, his best friend, started coughing uncontrollably and admitted he has cancer. There were some gasps from the class. Lana’s face cracked a slight smile. The situation got more and more extreme, and several students let out laughs, but Lana’s narrator never broke character.

When we discussed the scene, students immediately remarked on her descriptive language. “I notice that some people laughed. Did Lana use humor?” I asked. Students were quiet, and I imagine they were unsure as to whether their laughs were appropriate.

“Not exactly, but it was still funny at times,” someone said. I probed. “Lana, did you expect people to find your scene funny?” “Yeah, kind of,” she said, with a mischievous smile. “It was tragic, but …” another student said, trailing off. “There was something not completely serious about it, right?” I offered. We discussed tone, and I ended up introducing the term “satire” to describe the effect of Lana’s scene. In a way, after hearing more than a few tragic death scenes of characters by other students, Lana seemed to be satirizing us!

Students rarely get to experience such an immediate interaction between author and audience through text. From “the driver’s seat,” and as members of a learning community, students can gain awareness of their own intentions as they write stories and become more keen analysts of authors’ intentions. They get to encounter, firsthand, the problems authors encounter in crafting stories and they discover and play with literary techniques to solve these problems. The lessons, both explicit and implicit, are powerful.

Like the driving critic who lacks driving experience, students without genuine experiences creating literary art and reflecting on the process can easily be left to look to the teacher for “answers” as to what the author is up to in his or her use of literary techniques. That causes frustration, as it diminishes students’ ability to activate their own critical thinking in this area.

There are clear arguments for the social-emotional value of empowering students to write creatively. And anecdotally speaking, I’ve found engagement is extremely high and classroom management is a breeze when students get to write stories. But I’m convinced that fiction writing is a much more important component of a rigorous English education than is commonly believed. Imaginative writing contributes not only to the development of many “soft skills” like empathy and community, but also to the hard skill of literary analysis.

Coverage of the implementation of college- and career-ready standards and the use of personalized learning is supported in part by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.

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How Creative Writing Can Increase Students’ Resilience

Many of my seventh-grade students do not arrive at school ready to learn. Their families often face financial hardship and live in cramped quarters, which makes it difficult to focus on homework. The responsibility for cooking and taking care of younger siblings while parents work often falls on these twelve year olds’ small shoulders. Domestic violence and abuse are also not uncommon.

To help traumatized students overcome their personal and academic challenges, one of our first jobs as teachers is to build a sense of community. We need to communicate that we care and that we welcome them into the classroom just as they are. One of the best ways I’ve found to connect with my students, while also nurturing their reading and writing skills, is through creative writing.

For the past three years, I’ve invited students in my English Language Development (ELD) classes to observe their thoughts, sit with their emotions, and offer themselves and each other compassion through writing and sharing about their struggles. Creating a safe, respectful environment in which students’ stories matter invites the disengaged, the hopeless, and the numb to open up. Students realize that nobody is perfect and nobody’s life is perfect. In this kind of classroom community, they can take the necessary risks in order to learn, and they become more resilient when they stumble.

Fostering a growth mindset

One of the ways students can boost their academic performance and develop resilience is by building a growth mindset. Carol Dweck, Stanford University professor of psychology and author of the book Mindset , explains that people with a growth mindset focus on learning from mistakes and welcoming challenges rather than thinking they’re doomed to be dumb or unskillful. A growth mindset goes hand in hand with self-compassion: recognizing that everyone struggles and treating ourselves with kindness when we trip up.

One exercise I find very useful is to have students write a story about a time when they persevered when faced with a challenge—in class, sports, or a relationship. Some of the themes students explore include finally solving math problems, learning how to defend themselves, or having difficult conversations with parents.

I primed the pump by telling my students about something I struggled with—feeling left behind in staff meetings as my colleagues clicked their way through various computer applications. I confided that PowerPoint and Google Slides—tools (one might assume) that any teacher worth a paperweight has mastered—still eluded me. By admitting my deficiency to my students, asking for their help, and choosing to see the opportunity to remedy it every day in the classroom, I aimed to level the playing field with them. They may have been reading three or four grade levels behind, but they could slap a PowerPoint presentation together in their sleep.

For students, sharing their own stories of bravery, resilience, and determination brings these qualities to the forefront of their minds and helps solidify the belief that underlies a growth mindset: I can improve and grow . We know from research in neuroplasticity that when students take baby steps to achieve a goal and take pride in their accomplishments, they change their brains, growing new neural networks and fortifying existing ones. Neurons in the brain release the feel-good chemical dopamine, which plays a major role in motivating behavior toward rewards.

After writing about a few different personal topics, students choose one they want to publish on the bulletin boards at the back of the classroom. They learn to include the juicy details of their stories (who, what, when, where, why, and how), and they get help from their peers, who ask follow-up questions to prompt them to include more information. This peer editing builds their resilience in more ways than one—they make connections with each other by learning about each other’s lives, and they feel empowered by lending a hand.

In my experience, students are motivated to do this assignment because it helps them feel that their personal stories and emotions truly matter, despite how their other academics are going. One student named Alejandro chose to reflect on basketball and the persistence and time it took him to learn:

Hoops By Alejandro Gonzalez Being good takes time. One time my sister took me to a park and I saw people playing basketball. I noticed how good they were and decided I wanted to be like them. Still I told my sister that basketball looked hard and that I thought I couldn’t do it. She said,“You could do it if you tried. You’ll get the hang of it.” My dad bought me a backboard and hoop to play with. I was really happy, but the ball wasn’t making it in. Every time I got home from school, I would go straight to the backyard to play. I did that almost every day until little by little I was getting the hang of it. I also played with my friends. Every day after lunch we would meet at the basketball court to have a game. … I learned that you need to be patient and to practice a lot to get the hang of things. With a little bit of practice, patience, and hard work, anything is possible.

Originally, Alejandro wasn’t sure why he was in school and often lacked the motivation to learn. But writing about something he was passionate about and recalling the steps that led to his success reminded him of the determination and perseverance he had demonstrated in the past, nurturing a positive view of himself. It gave him a renewed sense of investment in learning English and eventually helped him succeed in his ELD class, as well.

Maintaining a hopeful outlook

Another way to build resilience in the face of external challenges is to shore up our inner reserves of hope —and I’ve found that poetry can serve as inspiration for this.

For the writing portion of the lesson, I invite students to “get inside” poems by replicating the underlying structure and trying their hand at writing their own verses. I create poem templates, where students fill in relevant blanks with their own ideas. 

One poem I like to share is “So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye. Its lines “Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house / and now live over a quarry of noise and dust / cannot make you unhappy” remind us that, despite the unpleasant events that occur in our lives, it’s our choice whether to allow them to interfere with our happiness. The speaker, who “love[s] even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens, and scratched records,” has a persistently sunny outlook.

It’s unrealistic for students who hear gunshots at night to be bubbling over with happiness the next morning. Still, the routine of the school day and the sense of community—jokes with friends, a shared bag of hot chips for breakfast, and a creative outlet—do bolster these kids. They have an unmistakable drive to keep going, a life force that may even burn brighter because they take nothing for granted—not even the breath in their bodies, life itself. 

Itzayana was one of those students who, due to the adversity in her life, seemed too old for her years. She rarely smiled and started the school year with a defiant approach to me and school in general, cursing frequently in the classroom. Itzayana’s version of “So Much Happiness” hinted at some of the challenges I had suspected she had in her home life:

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. Even the fact that you once heard your family laughing and now hear them yelling at each other cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of tamales and horchata and love even scrubbing the floor, washing dishes, and cleaning your room. Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, help people in need, help your family, and take care of yourself.   —Itzayana C.

Her ending lines, “Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, / help people in need, help your family, and take care of yourself,” showed her growing awareness of the need for self-care as she continued to support her family and others around her. This is a clear sign of her developing resilience.

Poetry is packed with emotion, and writing their own poems allows students to grapple with their own often-turbulent inner lives. One student commented on the process, saying, “By writing poems, I’ve learned to be calm and patient, especially when I get mad about something dumb.” Another student showed pride in having her writing published; she reflected, “I feel good because other kids can use it for calming down when they’re angry.”

To ease students into the creative process, sometimes we also write poems together as a class. We brainstorm lines to include, inviting the silly as well as the poignant and creating something that represents our community.

Practicing kindness

Besides offering my students new ways of thinking about themselves, I also invite them to take kind actions toward themselves and others.

In the music video for “Give a Little Love” by Noah and the Whale, one young African American boy—who witnesses bullying at school and neglect in his neighborhood —decides to take positive action and whitewash a wall of graffiti. Throughout the video, people witness others’ random acts of kindness, and then go on to do their own bit.

“My love is my whole being / And I’ve shared what I could,” the lyrics say—a reminder that our actions speak louder than our words and do have an incredible impact. The final refrain in the song—“Well if you are (what you love) / And you do (what you love) /...What you share with the world is what it keeps of you”—urges the students to contribute in a positive way to the classroom, the school campus, and their larger community.

After watching the video, I ask students to reflect upon what kind of community they would like to be part of and what makes them feel safe at school. They write their answers—for example, not being laughed at by their peers and being listened to—on Post-it notes. These notes are used to create classroom rules. This activity sends a message early on that we are co-creating our communal experience together. Students also write their own versions of the lyrics, reflecting on different things you can give and receive—like kindness, peace, love, and ice cream.

Reaping the benefits

To see how creative writing impacts students, I invite them to rate their resilience through a self-compassion survey at the start of the school year and again in the spring. Last year, two-thirds of students surveyed increased in self-compassion; Alejandro grew his self-compassion by 20 percent. The program seems to work at developing their reading and writing skills, as well: At the middle of the school year, 40 percent of my students moved up to the next level of ELD, compared to 20 percent the previous year. 

As a teacher, my goal is to meet students where they’re at and learn about their whole lives. Through creative writing activities, we create a community of compassionate and expressive learners who bear witness to the impact of trauma in each others’ experiences and together build resilience.

As a symbol of community and strength, I had a poster in my classroom of a boat at sea with hundreds of refugees standing shoulder to shoulder looking skyward. It’s a hauntingly beautiful image of our ability to risk it all for a better life, as many of my ELD students do. Recognizing our common humanity and being able to share about our struggles not only leads to some beautiful writing, but also some brave hearts.

About the Author

Laura Bean, M.F.A. , executive director of Mindful Literacy, consults with school communities to implement mindfulness and creative writing programs. She has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and presented a mindful writing workshop at Bridging the Hearts and Minds of Youth Conference in San Diego in 2016.

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