Writer as Teacher | Professional Development

Writer as Teacher
Teacher Rebecca Erickson dives into the hands-on activity along with her fourth-grade students

Nature writer Shelley Washburn opens her gig in Rebecca Erickson's class with a promise. "The rest of the week, I won't talk as much as I do today," she says. "You'll be doing stuff instead of listening to me."

But these fourth-graders aren't complaining. They're too busy listening, wide-eyed, as Washburn tantalizes them with a mystery she had to solve in order to write a story. Her challenge? "How could I describe an animal most people have never seen?"

As Washburn prowls the classroom, describing her field research to track down an elusive, nocturnal creature known to forestry folks as a "boomer," the students try to catch a glimpse of the photograph she holds tight to her torso. "It's not a nice picture," she warns them. "I'm sorry a dog killed this animal." Now the kids must have a look to gauge the gross-out factor for themselves. Washburn finally tips the photo their way, asking them to compare the boomer corpse with another animal readers might recognize. Using comparisons and analogies was how she solved her own writing challenge. The students suggest prairie dog, mole with a short tail, squirrel, small beaver with no tail — all apt comparisons, it turns out, to the animal more properly known as the mountain beaver. Within minutes of Washburn's arrival in the classroom, she has engaged students in her favorite exercise: capturing the natural world with words.

During her weeklong residency, Washburn uses a variety of teaching methods to help these fourth-graders become more keen at observation and more artful in their use of description. Before she ever asks them to write, she teaches them how to look. "Good writers — not just science writers — observe the world carefully," she explains. "Seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and touching all give us facts that good writers put into their writing."

Washburn hands out jewelers' loupes and asks students to look at, then draw, their magnified fingerprints and assorted objects from the natural world. Once they've looked closely and drawn huge enlargements on paper, they're ready to offer comparisons. Scribbling furiously, Washburn records their descriptions of fingerprints: whirlpool, bullseye, end of a skateboard, maze, swish of wind, monkey swinging through the jungle then dropping from a branch. "Do you have a class of poets?" Washburn asks, turning to the teacher. But Erickson doesn't hear at first. She's too busy studying her own fingerprints, learning to see.

Reflecting on the writer-in-the-classroom experience a few weeks later, Erickson says she came away with some fresh ideas to guide her classroom practice. "Taking time for observation, and describing objects in that much detail, was new for me. I'll keep finding ways to do that," she says. "And I liked how Shelley had kids share little snippets of their work while they were still writing. I've tended to wait until they're finished before asking them to read. She showed me the value of having them share just a beautiful phrase" from a work in progress. The guest residencies give teachers "a shot in the arm," Erickson says. "You pick up a couple new ideas or techniques. It's energizing."

Teachers say they appreciate the variety of genres and personalities on the COW roster. Norman chooses writers "to fill the holes I have. I feel like I'm weak in poetry," he says, so he's invited a poet for one of his classroom visits and a songwriting duo for another. He also likes how the professional writers — who receive training in how to work with students — reinforce what he's been doing in the classroom. One guest writer asked his students if they knew how to use similes and metaphors. Norman was thrilled. "We had just worked with those. I had assigned kids to pull examples of each from a novel we had read. This validated for the kids what I'd been working on with them. They could see, here's a real, live writer who uses metaphors. That's not just Mr. Norman's thing."

Wilcox had been working with her class on character development in the weeks leading up to a residency by writer Jennifer Lauck, whose memoir, Blackbird, will be published later this year. "Her whole approach to creativity was so different from anything I could have imagined," Wilcox says. The author had students start by creating the face of a trucker, then add details to flesh out the whole character. She had them list five things their character might carry in a pocket or purse, for instance, and tell why. If characters carried a cell phone, who did they call with it? By week's end, students had created notebooks, life histories, and even rubber stamps of their fully developed characters.

Wilcox participated right alongside her students: "I shared my writing with them — and I was as eager to share as they were! We were on equal terms, all working to become better writers."

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