Five Principles for Teaching
What guides my work when teaching writing and reading to young children
As I begin to share various elements from my curricular work over the years, I thought it would make sense to contextualize a few principles of my teaching that shape both the content and the mode of teaching it.
Critical Thinking and Careful Listening
Most of what I try to do as teacher is to promote my students’ sense of critical thinking. This means that along with teaching skills that enhance their access to the logical and critical aspects of thinking, my teaching needs to remain open and skeptical. I must commit to hearing their ideas, empathizing with their ways of thinking about the world, and supporting them in making their own sense of the world as legible to us as they want. This doesn’t mean that I have to treat everything children say as “right.” My job, as I see it, is to make sure they know that what they have to say is something I need to hear, I need to think about, and I need to respond to.
Systems
When teaching this material, one is teaching about systems of communication. The key when teaching systems (like grammar or punctuation or metrical verse) is to put time into exploring not only how these systems work and what they can accomplish, but also how these systems break down and fail. What is valued by a system? What is devalued by a system? What is made explicit and what is made invisible? There are many more questions to ask through this work of evaluating systems of organizing and communicating information. The key is that we must engage with these questions rather than present these systems as something to be received. Remember, the key is that children must always sense that they have something to add to the making of meaning.
Legibility
So much of this work, especially with my youngest students (5-9) centers on the idea of legibility. Writing and Reading are just skills where a person is on the opposite end of an exchange. The contract of the exchange is that we believe in some kind of legibility. As writers, we work at imagining how another person might receive what we put down. As readers, we figure out what we have to attend to in order to make sense from a text: syntax, diction, tone, structure, form, image, allusion, metaphor, mood, punctuation, space, etc.
When you help a child feel responsible for legibility—for the importance of the transmission of ideas—they become more open to the work of revision in the case of writing and to the work of annotation as readers.
Inquiry vs. Curiosity
Cultivating inquiry is vital in good teaching. Inquiry can be playful; inquiry can be dogged. It has value in both these modes and more. Often people talk about valuing children’s curiosity. I highlight the word inquiry rather than curiosity because inquiry manifests not only as wondering but also as questing: reaching across the threshold from the known into the unknown. Curiosity can be passive where inquiry is active.
It is true that building skills is essential at a young age. In order to produce a rich and nuanced understanding, however, inquiry must accompany the acquisition of skills. Learning skills without being moved to inquiry or without being given space for inquiry is a hollow imitation of education and may be a marker that a child is not self-motivated in pursuit of a subject.
Inquiry leads a young person to discover patterns and systems, just as it helps them discover where patterns break and systems fail. Reveling in rather than resolving the paradoxes revealed by inquiry is essential for growth. To paraphrase James Baldwin, inquiry must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
De-centering English and Treating Language as Living
Although I am an English teacher and have devoted my life to helping students cultivate a nuanced appreciation for the language, it’s equally important that English not function as an oppressive monolith that dominates a child’s ability to think creatively. Whether or not a child in your home or classroom speaks or learns to speak/read/write other languages, it is essential that they encounter ideas about other languages as they learn about English. It is vital that students see how English has evolved over time and understand that its systems are changing all the time. While there are useful rules to learn (and I love to teach them), they should never be taught in an elitist way. Words like “proper” have long-standing histories in bigotry and discrimination. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want students to learn conventions. I do. But they must understand that they are conventions and nothing greater than that. The way students open up when I invite conversations about all modes of communication into the classroom is remarkable to see. The more one learns about the history of grammar, the more one sees how adaptable and richly unconventional it really is. In my experience, this spirit enlivens the subject for children.