I was playing with these cool blocks with my 8-year-old. He was making a horse stall and needed to expand it because the horse was crowded. But he got frustrated. These blocks only have one notch each, which is a very tangible design constraint. J could see what he wanted to do to expand the horse stall, but he couldn’t get the blocks to cooperate. If only they had all kinds of these… things [as he wiggles his fingers around a block, hoping the gesture communicates what lacks a word]. He persisted, talking the while, ked through it and, unsurprisingly, came up with a plan.

In reflecting on J’s experience with the constraints of these blocks, I was taken back to a Facebook conversation about this article. The author proposes a set of constraints that he would place on his students in a writing course. Basically, shrink whatever you write down into a sentence. He argues that these design constraints (my term, not his) would get to what’s most important and train students to be editors. The group of smart writing people I was talking with had varying takes on the idea, but seemed to coalesce around the notion that it would only be a useful exercise if the students chose it.

I won’t argue with either point. When I write, I’m often constrained by proposal or manuscript word limits. Occasionally I assign myself other constraints like time, form, or words. Self-imposed design constraints can be a very useful way to learn various skills that will serve a writer, designer, artist, musician, whatever, well.

Another way to think about these design constraints is through the lens of rules and grammar.  When I talk to teachers or preservice teachers about teaching writing, I hear variations on: “Students need to learn the rules before they break them.” I completely understand where this instinct comes from because the rules–what I’d call conventions or design/genre constrains–do matter, a lot.  Though they are far more dependent on audience, genre, and purpose than young writers are often taught in school.  This limitation is, in part, because standards often frame conventions as singular, not multifaceted.

For all these reasons, I resist the idea that the way to teach young people how to write is by teaching them isolated rules, and then thinking they’ll magically churn out perfect sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Pushing, pulling, experimenting with different design constraints, and testing them all out in the world on real audiences, that’s how the conventions begin to make sense and work.  Think of J playing with blocks, trying to make a horse stall, and talking his way into success.  Words or blocks– it’s all about the playing and experimenting.

[Cross-posted on Literacy & NCTE.]

If you listen closely, you can hear it. That big, deep breath before we plunge into the cold lake of back-to-school. I present back-to-school workshops for teachers, and these workshops are often when teachers are dipping their toe in, testing the waters on a new school year. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get it right.   And I start well by using the same strategies I use as a college professor and used as a high school English  teacher, and these strategies are grounded in my beliefs about what it means to teach writing well.

• Write, as soon as possible, if not first. If we start by writing, then that’s what our time together is about. I get it, there’s a great temptation (sometimes a mandate) to start with the schedule or norms or rules or assessments or forms or…or …or … But I want my time with teachers to be about writing, so we start there. Usually quick and sometimes short, we write–without a prompt–whatever words need to be on the paper.
• From the start, I write with the teachers. The teachers can see my pen tapping and me staring off into space and know that all writers get stuck sometimes. I can show them my writing on a document camera and struggle to not apologize because it is too short and I crossed stuff out, so they can see that all writers start with drafty-drafts.  And they can see when I get lost in writing and forget to stop us or when I’m proud of a sentence or turn of phrase.
• We talk about our writing from the beginning. We talk around our still unformed creations—these texts we build out of words and experience and memory and other texts and paper and pens and notebooks. By talking, we build our relationships with one another and our own and others’ words.  These relationships are the way we get through the moments when the writing gets hard or the revision is not working. Or when we figure it out and just have to share how good it sounds.

Admittedly, these strategies are not original, but good things never go out of style.  Whether I’m working with teachers or students, the pressure to cover content or standards often pushes aside these habits of mind that are, after all, at the heart of our discipline.  So, whenever I want to start well with a new group of teachers or students, we write and talk together first, building a community of writers who can explore the world together through words.

 And thoughtful, engaged teachers. What a great way to start the week.