The curriculum is purchased, the tutor hired. There are lined paper, pencils, and erasers that await—but wait, what about my student!? Are these the tools my student needs to succeed in writing? Imagine for a moment a little wooden desk shoved into the corner of the room. Carefully color-coordinated sticky notes decorate the walls, black pen marks litter the sticky notes. Some are taped to each other, some piled on top of each other, while some lay crumpled on the floor. On the desk, waiting, is a blank Microsoft™ Word® document. Cross-legged on the bed is a student taking in the meticulous chaos. You have just pictured my junior year of college and the writing process I adopted while juggling four different writing courses in one semester. To some, like my roommate, the scene is pandemonium; to others it is the precise orchestration of space, resources, and tools to guide the writing process! A well-researched curriculum might not be the only thing that your student needs for their writing process.
The Writing Space
We are designed to curate and care for our environment. This extends to our home and classroom settings. Our students need an environment that best suits their learning needs. It could be at the kitchen counter; lying upside down off the edge of the couch; in a carefully designed school room; or in the treehouse out back. Each student will have an ideal location that is productive for them. For me, it was the school bus ride to and from school. My dad understood this. His only request was no homework that included the use of a pen or pencil. I could get all my reading done on the bus ride, study for assessments, and go over presentations. If it involved writing anything down, save that for a stable writing surface! For my learning space, I did not necessarily need to be in a quiet room sitting at a table to focus and get my assignments done. Honestly, that is torture for me, and I struggle to accomplish tasks in that type of environment. I do, however, need an organized environment. When a large project or paper is on the horizon, my home and workspace, surprisingly, get organized and cleaned. The environment we create around our students matters for their learning—especially if our student is struggling with a subject. They may not have control over the learning of a dreaded subject, but they can have a say over their learning environment. This can go a long way in their ability to learn and understand—improving what they feel inept at doing.
Curating a writing space for your student is a matter of trial and error. But it can be fun finding that happy balance of an educational, beneficial, and enjoyable space! You might discover that the act of setting up, then packing up, the writing space is too distracting for your students and interrupts their writing flow. Finding a location in your home where your student can set up their writing area and return to it each time (like my sticky notes all over my dorm room walls) may be the missing link in your writing curriculum.
The Writing Tools
When building an environment, you need tools to build with. I think you have deducted by now that my preferred tools are sticky notes and black ink! You might be working with a student who will respond better to special rainbow glitter gel pens, or a student who prefers the smooth click of a keyboard and the crisp white page of a word processor. No two students will have the same preference. When it comes to writing tools, the possibilities seem endless. An easy way to start is tapping into your students’ interests. What is their favorite color? Get some pens and highlighters (and sticky notes) in that color. How about a notebook with their favorite sports team or animal on the cover? Stickers to decorate and personalize with? All these little tools provide ownership and add personality to a writing course. Ownership can go a long way when struggling with a subject. Ownership is a little buy-in from the student that can satisfy the feeling of being out-of-control when presented with an area of difficulty. Knowing that there is a routine, a designated notebook, one’s own space for a particular subject can calm those anxious thoughts of failure.
Tools can also be corrective measures, and there are non-traditional options as well. The mechanics of writing could be a presenting reason to why your student despises writing. They may benefit from thicker or triangular pencils for a wider grip or a fine motor pincher correction grip with a five finger pencil grip. Non-traditional learning tools could be a bouncy band or swivel seat to help those wiggly students or a weighted stuffed animal to calm anxious bodies. Fidget items make wonderful focus tools for students who have busy minds and need that tactile output during a focused task.
The Writing Process
Curious minds want to know things. Are you a wet-the-toothbrush-then-toothpaste user or a toothpaste-then-wet-the-toothbrush user? Our processes of doing things will be different, but it is our process. Different writing programs will implement or introduce different techniques for approaching the writing process. For one assignment, a student may be introduced to the bullet journal method or the mind map approach. One student might gravitate to free-writing assignments, and one might love a prompt book. One might like the structure a template provides, while another finds a template stifling and prefers sticky notes strewn upon the wall to guide the thought process. The process can be a chance for your student to discover what works best for them as they engage through different activities, styles, and mediums.
Writing is not a one-size-fits-all kind of subject. It is a flexible topic to have fun, experiment, and learn about your learner with. Join your student in the process, modeling use of good tools and techniques, and set up the space and environment to suit their needs. You might just find you are equipping the next Ernest Hemingway or Jane Austen!
