why teachers should write

In November 2015, I made the commitment to Teach for India. At the time, it was a hard and fraught decision, until mom called me and told me that I was either the daughter she raised me to be, or not. I signed my contract and never looked back.

One of the many things that helped me in my frazzled TFI decision-making time was a blog called ‘Torn Umbrella,’ by Kamna Kathuria (site no longer online). Kamna wrote about her fellowship experience in a way that struck me as both honest and determined, and helped me make the decision to say yes. Over the next two years, when I faced innumerable challenges in my classroom, having read Kamna’s words beforehand kept me from being shocked or surprised or unprepared. I knew that I had signed up for a hard thing; I knew that I would be unable to predict the myriad challenges I would face; and I knew that I would not know, at all times, whether I was doing a good job.

Reading Kamna didn’t provide any solutions, but it did make it easier to move towards solutions with less time spent on shock, self-pity, and any sense of ‘betrayal’ that I saw some of my colleagues experience harder. I knew my first years in the classroom would be unimaginably hard, and I did it anyway.

As a Fellow, I decided that one of the ways I would ‘pay it forward’ would be to write myself. My friend and then-manager, Angie, also recommended that I write as a way of reflecting on the work, documenting my thoughts, and sharing that work with fellow educators. So I wrote about discipline in my classrooms and about the ways I might need to reevaluate my philosophy of education. My writing was basically a stream-of-consciousness as I began to observe and process the challenges I faced in my attempts to empower my students with knowledge, critical thinking, increased access to higher education, and interpersonal skills.

Writing…

• Helped me reflect.
• Helped me feel less alone.
• Felt like a way to scale that was personal and introspective.
• Felt more careful than careless.
• Felt like it was tentative rather than arrogant.

This past year, I had the unbelievable privilege of leading a writing workshop with five teachers from Loknete D.B. Patil school. The goal was to support early-career teachers practice writing about their work. We read mentor texts by other education writers, reflected on what worked, picked topics that we thought might be worth sharing with a broader audience, drafted, edited, and revised until finally, at the end of the year, we hit ‘publish.’

The idea of leading teacher/educator writing workshops has stayed with me for a while – I have long believed that more of us should write about and share our work. Reading their final pieces, I saw that writing helped them articulate both their values and the work they’ve done to embody those values in their classrooms. I saw that it helped teachers find voice, treat their work as challenging and professional, and helped teachers connect their ideas with a broader community of global education writers. Hopefully, it will also allow folks to learn from them and see intentionality modeled.

For school leaders considering writing workshop as teacher professional development, I think that there are a few reasons to do it:

1. I think that it is agnostic (kind of) to where teachers are in terms of their own pedagogical knowledge and skill.
2. I think that it builds voice. I have long believed that coaching and professional development for teachers should be empowering, and I truly believe that helping teachers articulate their values and approach for a public audience is at its core, empowering.

For teachers considering writing, I think that there are a few reasons to do it:

1. Writing is a tool of reflection.
2. Publishing is an act of humility and vulnerability.
3. Sharing is building dialogue and community.
4. Too much of the conversation around teaching and learning is led by people and voices who are not currently in the classroom. They are now in administrative roles or never taught or are professors of education without classroom experience or something else. To write is to join a high-stakes conversation and assert that you, as a current K-12 educator, have the right to a seat at the table and a right to be part of these conversations.
5. So much of what we do is a synthesis of evidence-based strategies, intuition, and adaptation based on context – figuring out how to do mastery-based instruction while moving forward on syllabus completion; how to add in purpose and engagement to the sometimes-dry textbook material; how to integrate socio-emotional learning into a classroom with bullying. The nuances and context behind these decisions are hard and making our work visible to others, at the very least can be validating and affirming even to a teacher or reader who already does the exact same thing in their classroom.

To write is to acknowledge that this work is hard and that the journey towards effective and loving classrooms is filled with nuance and judgment and is not simple. And to write is to acknowledge this reality and to model it for other educators and teachers – to pay it forward in service of saying “here is how I am making decisions and navigating the muck, in case it’s helpful.”