Correctness is a Cage

It’s not as though I completely disagree here.

In fact, hand to heart, one of you who may be reading this post this morning remembers quite well the summer that book was released. You messaged me the moment you had it in your hands to say, “Uh, this looks a lot like what you helped us do in our district quite a long time ago.” And it did. Because I did.

Kinda.

The fact is that those approaches are important, but in schools where we’ve really moved the needle on performance as well as engagement, they’re only one piece of a far more sophisticated process.

Here’s the thing: If you want performance to improve across your system, challenge kids to write every single day in every single course and classroom. Performance will typically improve, even when teachers feel uncertain about how to invite or support writing well. I can share a few of my own system-wide case studies here if you’d like to chat more.

But if you want to better understand why this happens, you’ll likely want to do something different and a bit more. You’ll want to chase a question or a concept or an opportunity connected to the young writers you serve, and you’ll want to document what you see and hear along the way. You’ll want to invite them to do the same. You’ll want to study patterns and trends in those qualitative data.

And you’ll want to invite multimodal expression and assessment.

Until you do that, print will continue to serve as a screen, obscuring your “data” and worse: perpetuating single stories about complex learners, including many who are incredibly gifted but perhaps not in the way school recognizes.

The more those stories are perpetuated, the less likely children will want to come to school and teachers will want to show up there.

And those that do will continue to suffer erasure.

Friends, we have the tools to teach and assess writing in far more sophisticated ways now. And when we do, kids compose higher-quality print, perform far better on our tests, and find their place in the actual world beyond our school doors.

Don’t you think we need to do this?

Science isn’t dogma. It’s a practice, and it demands our sustained commitment to messy, uncertain, and humble learning and work.

When we engage with it this way, we learn things about writers and writing and teaching that we wouldn’t otherwise. And isn’t discovery the entire point of practicing science?

Here’s something practicing science helped me notice in recent years: It seems that writing instruction is consistently aimed at the wrong end of a process that should be recursive but continues to be treated as linear.

We spend enormous energy on the moment words hit the page and almost none on everything that has to happen in a writer before that occurs. Many colleagues agree that multimodal expression and what I call “making” writing is worthy work, but when I talk about it with them, most still situate the build or the doodle, the talk, the gesture, the multimodal and embodied facets of writing as warm-ups for the real event.

They are the event.

The page is just where writing might be transcribed.

If it needs to be.

Are we even teaching young writers about when their messages are best carried by written words and when other modes and combinations of them are far better options?

Listen, I understand why we prioritize print. I want the kids that I serve to be able to compose written texts, too. Structured literacy skills matter. But when we define writing as the production of written words alone, we diminish it. We diminish writers, too.

Writing is far bigger than print, and teachers who understand how to leverage multimodal expression strategically and with intention often witness how that choice elevates the quality of written words as well.

I’m often hired to improve standardized test performance in ELA and English. Those who work with me appreciate that bump, but by the time they leave, they universally agree that improved performance is the byproduct of multiliteracy instruction.

We keep privileging print to the detriment of design. It’s design that makes human beings, in every single context, powerful.

This week, I met with another former student who is very eager to publish. She asked me to offer her some good questions and a bit of advice. And I tried.

First, I asked: What’s your real purpose as a writer?

And then: Who do you hope to move with your work?

And then: How might you best connect those people to your work?

And then: How might you call them to action in a way that’s accessible for them?

I offered: If you want to influence other researchers, academics, and scholars, then you might consider publishing your words in peer-reviewed journals and the like. But if you want to influence a wider audience, you’ll need to learn who your ideal audience is, message your work to them multimodally, and offer it inside of the spaces and platforms where those people hang out. You’ll have to write stuff that those people want to read.

I asked: Do you want to preach to a very well-informed and specialized choir, or do you want to serve a much wider and perhaps diverse audience?

I understand that contributing to scholarship means you’re likely shaping scholarship, and this matters. It also impresses certain people, establishes authority, and enables reach into and then across the field.

But there are fine lines between contributing to scholarship and practicing science and gatekeeping within a very privileged community that continues to schoolify writing in ways that prevent true access, undermine progress, compromise performance, and limit each learner’s ability to recognize and realize their full potential.

I know that sounds over-the-top.

It’s been my experience though.

You?

I’d love to know.

Meantime, if you’re interested in tending to your own writerly self this summer and doing it in a way that’s richly multimodal, dig into my Friday Tiny Lines archives or drop in this week. The community is growing, I’m not asking anyone to out themselves as participants, and invitations have been extended to gather online and at my home this summer, if you’d like. I’m offering but not expecting. That seems to suit those in my circle well.

I’ll see at least a few of you soon.