So, I’ve been putting my students through a “writing boot camp” these past few days.  I’ve been giving them a wide variety of writing tasks and altering variables.  It’s been a kind of experiment.

What’s the point?

1. I want students to think of the “writing process” as fluid, malleable, and something they can alter strategically to suit their audience and purpose.
2. I want them to have a diverse set of experiences where they are conscious of the variables that are affecting their writing so that they can manipulate those variables later.

That sounds a little jargon-y, so let me explain.

One of the things we played with was seating arrangement.  I arranged the desks differently every day last week.  I assigned (or didn’t assign) seats differently each day.  I reminded them to think about the influence that arrangement was having on them.  I asked them to write standing up.  I asked them to write about different situations, in different ways, using different materials, with different backgrounds (lighting, sound, etc.).  And then I had them reflect about it all.

We’re not done – we have a few more days of this.  And I’m going to ask them to write a final reflection about this, where they analyze their own work and their experience and explain the influences that these things had on them.  Hopefully, this will help them think more deliberately and strategically about their writing.  I’m also going to increase the amount of time we spend on writing in the final trimester of the school year.  I’m hoping that this will produce better writing on their final portfolios, where they are asked to revise some of their previous work, produce new texts, and write a reflection about what they have learned about their processes in the course of the year.

It has been surprisingly fun to experiment like this, and I think that some of the resistance that some of them had in the beginning has decreased.  As a group, my students really struggled with “personal” writing, mostly because I think they assumed that I would collect, read, and/or share it.  They also struggled with the day we spent on “writing to learn” – at least, a surprising group of students did.  There is a common misconception among writers at this age that they should know what they plan to write before they write it – that “discovery” is bad.  That frustrates me.

I also didn’t anticipate some of the reactions to music.  I found that they liked some of my old music (Ben Folds Five went well, for example), and that my attempts at recent pop music usually produced more distraction than writing.  But that was the point, right?

I also shared my plan to write a book about this experience and share it free on Amazon.  I asked some of my students to participate, and I was surprised at how positive the response was, overall.  More on that later.