I was reminded again this week (as if I needed reminding) of the sheer joy, challenge and exhilaration of writing together, when I joined teaching students from London Met in their on-line Writing Teachers group.
They are already writing regularly, thanks to the inspiration of Rachel Booth, and they arrived, rain-swept and enthusiastic after a full day in school. There are many benefits of writing together, not least the simple fact of carving out space and time to do so within a busy life. Writing for ourselves has, as we know, many benefits which are increasingly well-documented. Writing together adds a significant good, particular for teachers. As we write together, read back, and talk about the demands and satisfactions of a particular task, we are learning, and beginning to articulate, crucial knowledge about writing that fails to find its way onto a formal curriculum. We develop a deep knowledge that stays with us as we work alongside children and which shows itself, even when we don’t articulate it.
We took pleasure in each other’s choice of words, adding some to our own store, wishing we had thought of something like that or simply relishing the sounds of things. We used Mary O’Neill’s ‘Sound of Fire’ – a long thin poem that licks and grumbles, spits and crackles- and some pages from Peter Speir’s Crash Bang Boom which is full of noisy events, things and animals. We tried writing short sound poems ourselves. We drew a map of a place we know well and added its names and the stories that happened there. We tried writing Ten-Word Tiny Tales, inspired by Joseph Coelho’s book and finished up with a response to Peter Carpenter’s poem, ‘Bristol’.
We had time for everyone to share one piece or fragment of writing. As we reflected on the experience of trying each task and listened to each other’s writing, we learned that for the self-confessed splurger, the limitation of ten words was a welcome curb; we found that representing the sounds of everyday objects on the page is quite a challenge -and we thought about young writers and early spelling; we discovered we could break the rules and write something really enjoyable; that a mash-up of the sounds of things, a familiar place, a (not) ten-word tiny tale written within the frame of six folded book pages produced a wonderful evocation of the busy street outside the writer’s house. Just one person chose to read aloud their response to ‘Bristol’. Peter Carpenter begins by enumerating things that Bristol means for some…
“ … the Arnolfini, Wills Building, SS Great Britain, Clifton Suspension Bridge…’
and goes on to say what it means for him -friends and places, an evocation of his life there. The teacher-writer took up the form and rhythm of the original poem, listed things that their home town means to others and then things that focused intimately on the nooks and crannies, the texture of a life growing up there. It was a piece of magic and I hope the writer felt the quiet appreciation that followed their reading.
Everyone read something that we enjoyed and appreciated. We experienced all those different ways at coming at one starting point. We were able to articulate some of the ways in which we take hold of writing for ourselves. We will have made personal discoveries.
That experience and knowledge is worth its weight in gold. We carry it with us to our classrooms, and those with whom we work learn something of that for themselves. And they make their own discoveries, too, because the thing is to be curious and open. Sometimes following a rule is required. Sometimes an imposed pattern or restriction leads to a particular kind of learning, but above all, we need to have a sense of ourselves as writers and the ways in which we can do things.