I have been in curriculum facilitation for 11 years. It is vital to have a strategic curriculum. It is the WHAT of teaching. 

But, we are limiting our students if that is all we think about. The art of teaching learning comes in how we develop mindsets in our students. One of these mindsets is having a learner identity, or more specifically for writing, a writing identity.

What is Writing Identity?

Writing identity is mutli-faceted. It includes the following:

• You see yourself as a learner of writing.
• You believe in your ability to learn how to write.
• You engage in writing experiences that facilitate learning.
• You know you can evolve in your writing identity – how you think about yourself now as a writer could be different next year. It is not fixed.
• You know your writing identity impacts the way you interact with others.
• You trust and lean on your experiences with writing.
• Immediate success is not always the end goal; instead you focus on becoming a writer over time.
• You have the ability to evaluate your performance, mindsets and writing process.

What Classroom Practices Facilitate Writing Identity?

1. Consistent reflection opportunities – These reflective conversations should happen throughout your writing time.  
   • When you sit down with a writer, start the conversation off with “What are you working on as a writer?”  This communicates that you believe they are the type of writer who is intentional with their writing.  But, what if they don’t know what to say YET?  YOU STILL ASK THE QUESTION. And, you wait. Give them think time. They may actually be able to answer if you give them space to think, something we don’t always do with our rushed teaching lives. Good thinking can’t be rushed. If they can’t answer it, continue the conversation with something like this: “One thing you might be thinking about is our teaching point from the mini-lesson, which was how to begin with dialogue.  Or, you might be thinking about how you are going to structure your writing.  You might be thinking about setting a goal for your writing today. Are you thinking about any of these things? Or maybe something different?”   If they still struggle to answer, you continue to try to teach them this thinking process of “What are they working on as a writer?”  Look at their writing and see what they might be thinking about and name that. For example, “I see that you’ve erased this sentence several times.  I wonder if you’re thinking about how to structure this sentence. Is that what you’re thinking about?” The goal is to get them to be reflective on their INTENTIONAL work as a writer. Don’t expect them to be good at answering this question right away. The ability to be a reflective writer is developed over time. They will get there with your support and guidance.
   • Mid-workshop interruption – You can use this time to ask several different reflective questions: What’s going well for you right now?  What’s your goal for the rest of writing time? What are you intentionally working on as a writer? What are you stuck on and how can you get help with that? 
   • Share/Reflection time – I would venture to say this is the most often skipped part of writing time and one of the MOST valuable. This 5-7 minutes at the end of writing time is an opportunity to learn from each other, which builds writing identity and writing community. You can have a student share what they’re most proud of from their writing today and maybe other students can try out what they did tomorrow.  It’s an opportunity to problem-solve any situations that came about in writing today. It’s an opportunity to reiterate what should be a common message: writing is a process and we get better over time. You can ask questions like this: What move from another author did you try out today? What mini-lesson did you pull from and use today?  What was hard for you today? 
   • Have students reflect on their learning ACROSS units. There are many skills and processes that apply no matter the unit.  Have they grown in their belief that they ARE a writer? Are they better at revising? Are their illustrations more detailed in unit 6 than they were in unit 1? Are they using dialogue more effectively in their second semester fiction unit versus the first semester fiction writing? And, I would challenge you to have them reflect on their writing across grades. This is harder for teachers as we sometimes become hyper focused on the one year they are with us and we don’t have the knowledge of what they did the previous year, but give it a shot and see what they come up with.
2. Make the phrase “You’re the type of writer who…” a consistent part of your writing time. 
   • From the first week of school, you should be modeling how your students can be metacognitive about what type of writer they are. You can put a large focus on this in your first unit, during share/reflection time, during conferences and even during mini-lessons. The goal, again, is to use this language and use it consistently every day and throughout the year. For more information on this see Emily Callahan and Debbie Miller’s book “I’m the Type of Kid Who…” they the type of writer who…
     • Likes to write narrative, fantasy, feature articles or poetry
     • Likes to sketch pictures first, then go back and add detail later
     • Likes to slow down and process ideas a lot before they write
     • Develops their ideas AS they write, not just in pre-writing
     • Really likes to learn from Marla Frazee books 
     • Loves to use motions lines
     • Loves to use interesting language such as descriptive verbs and figurative language
3. Let students lead their writing decisions.
   • This one might be hard for many of us. This is where we may need to see writing instruction differently. It’s not always “I taught you this today. Go implement it today.”  But rather, “I’ve taught you to have a toolkit of lots of strategies to pull from. Which one of those are you going to implement today?” This is absolutely vital if we want kids to stop relying on us as teachers for their every move. We want THEM to know we believe they are capable of making decisions about their writing.  We also want the student to know this for themselves.  This IS A LEARNER MINDSET that GOES BEYOND the one year they are with us.  How can you facilitate this? One way is to have an anchor chart in your classroom where you list all the strategies you’ve learned in the unit. Have another anchor chart of strategies that go across units. Another strategy is to use a conferring toolkit that has mini-anchor charts of strategies and refer to that during conferring.  Kids won’t become metacognitive, life-long learners if they never have decision making put in their hands.
4. Reflect on your writing identity.
   • This starts with you writing. To be the best teacher of writing, you have to write yourself. How can you teach writing identity if you haven’t yet developed it in yourself? As I think about myself as a writer, I used to be the type of writer who processed and worked out my ideas in pre-writing. I loved to write non-ficiton (and still do).  I would typically start with an outline and spend a good amount of time in the pre-writing. I didn’t want to draft until my ideas were well thought out. However, now, I like to process and bring clarity to my ideas by drafting. I often start a draft not knowing exactly where my writing is going to go. I discover my message as I draft. That used to be uncomfortable for me, but now I find joy in this process of writing.

Developing writing identity is vital. If we’re being real, what’s hard about this?  It’s the many pressures that are on a teacher: teaching standards, teaching SEL, establishing routines, filling out paperwork, grading papers, etc.  It is easy to let something like writing identity slide.  

Our encouragement to you is to prioritize this for yourself and your students from the beginning of the year and maintain that focus no matter what. Because  a focus on this WILL ABSOLUTELY make a difference in your writers, not just now, but for years to come.