Inquiry Questions:
How can creative prompts help students to expand on their writing skills and learn to be better writers? How can assignments combine creative aspects with skills necessary to pass the regents? How can assignments that marry creative aspects with regents skills help students to become better writers?
Inspiration:
I chose these for my inquiry questions because I wanted to find a way to help students to become better writers while also equipping them with necessary skills to pass their regents. I wanted to foster their love of writing and inspire them, while also teaching them the skills they need to pass the regents that determines whether they graduate. Unfortunately, the English regents is the regents that holds students back from graduation the most. I want to help my students to get past this hurdle but not sacrifice the creative aspects as writing as a result. I fondly remember the very rare times that I was tasked with writing creatively in my own high school experience and how much I enjoyed those rare moments. I wanted to take those rare moments from my own high school experience and make them much more common and engaging for my students. I wanted them to view writing as not this boring thing they must do but something that can be engaging and exciting if they only give it the chance to be.
Entering the Parlor:
Effects of Creative Writing Activities on Students’ Achievement in Writing, Writing Dispositions and Attitude to English
Şükran Tok, Anıl Kandemir discussed in this article how creative writing exercises had a positive effect on writing achievement and writing disposition. They surveyed 31 7th grade students and used pre and post tests to see how the students’ skills had changed after their intervention. This article helped to solidify my belief that creative writing can help students increase their writing abilities. I believe that students can benefit positively from creative writing in the classroom and engaging in different types of writing helps them to strengthen their skills as writers and become more fluent. Students are typically more engaged in creative writing assignments because they have become so rare in classrooms, when you give them the license to use their imagination and write they are excited to write and share their ideas. I found this in my own classroom and try to bring in as much creative writing assignments as I can to remind students that writing is not always boring and academic, that it can be fun and engaging.
Why you are wrong if you think creative writing is a ‘frivolous waste of time’
Valerie Strauss discussed in this article Justin Parmenter’s views on creative writing and its positive benefits for students in the classroom. Strauss quotes from Parmenter’s article where he outlines the seven compelling reasons that students should engage in creative writing as generated by Gail Tompkins, these reasons are to entertain, to foster artistic expression, to explore the functions and values of writing, to stimulate imagination, to clarify thinking, to search for identity, and to learn to read and write. All seven of those compelling reasons are the things that English teachers all over the country are striving to have our students learn. We all as educators want our students to see writing as something that is fun and entertaining, as a way of thinking, and as a way to find and try out different identities. I believe that by combining creative elements and regents’ skills I can hit upon some of those compelling reasons for my students.
Context for Inquiry:
Many of my students come into English 11 with me and they are reading below grade level. Many of my students did not receive the interventions they needed when they were in elementary and middle school so they are reading below grade level and come into my classroom disenfranchised with reading and writing. Only 50% of our students regularly pass the English 11 regents due to this low reading comprehension. My students also despise writing and do not enjoy doing any kind of it. They have lost their love of writing and view it as a chore that they have to do. I wanted to change how they viewed writing and help them to see that writing can be enjoyable and fun for them.
What I Tried:
When I first started out with my inquiry, I was focused on finding ways to incorporate more creative writing assignments and prompts into my curriculum and my every day classwork. The smallest way that I incorporated this was to have my students free write every day for five minutes. I would give them a prompt and have them try to write for the whole five minutes. After they got used to writing these free writes, I began having them count their words and sentences as a way for them to check their stamina and how it increases over our free writes. I also started to find ways to incorporate creative writing assignments into the curriculum we already have. I had the students write creation myths when we were in our Native American unit and during our Big Read unit on the book, Burning Bright, I had the students write alternative endings to one of the stories that we had read. These assignments enabled the students to interact with the units in their writing and interact with these texts creatively. These assignments enabled the students to practice their creative writing skills and to view writing as not just something that they have to do for the regents or for a grade. I then decided that I wanted to try to find a way to incorporate both the creative aspects and the skills that they need to pass the regents. I did this by assigning them the role of lawyer and they had to argue whether or not a character from the stories we had read was guilty of setting fires. I liked that this assignment was creative in that they were pretending to be lawyers and using the jargon related to the field to express their ideas.
Procedure:
I started out my inquiry by incorporating creative writing into our unit on Native American literature. I did this by offering three creation myths to my students. After students read the creation myth and annotated them for central idea and the type of conflict, they were tasked with writing their own creation myth and they had perimeters that they had to have in the story that was in the form of a check list. These items included a central idea, a type of conflict, a superior creature that created life, the life they created, etc. I found that by offering them a check list and items that needed to be included it helped them to feel like they had boundaries to their writing. A lot of my students struggled initially with this assignment, they were unsure how to begin or even how to write creatively. But once they got their ideas down on the brainstorming sheet, many of the students were able to write their myths.
I continued my inquiry by assigning an assignment where the students had to write an alternative ending to one of the stories that we had read in the anthology, Burning Bright. The students felt much more confident this time as I had used the same structure for both handouts, a checklist of necessary elements, a space for brainstorming and then on the back was the rubric that was being used to assess their writing. Students were much more enthusiastic this time. One student in particular who is hard to get engaged and working on any assignment, excitedly told me about the plot of his alternative ending. When he handed in the sheet at the end of the period, he told me that he had added a note to the top of his story as a reminder to himself of something he wanted to add in his final draft. This moment where this particular student was so excited to not only write a creative story but was also thinking about ways to improve that story showed me that my instinct in incorporating these assignments was right. The student enjoyed writing creatively and were desperate for ways and times to use their imaginations.
The last part of my inquiry was incorporating the creative aspects into our normal regents’ skills assignments. I found that this was the natural evolution of my inquiry as I wanted to show my students that these two types of writing were not mutually exclusive as they thought. To this end, I decided frame their argument essay as a bit of a role-playing assignment. I framed the argument as them being lawyers, either they were the persecution accusing the character from the story of starting the fires or the defense defending the character. The students utilized jargon like alibi and prosecution and defense. This argument essay meant that the students needed to craft their claim but also to acknowledge the counterclaim and refute it effectively. All of those components, claim, counterclaim, and rebuttal, are necessary in a part two argument essay on the regents, but the students were excited to write the essay because they took on the persona of a lawyer. The students were invested in trying to prove their case and it helped to effectively teach them strong counterclaims and rebuttals, something that they frequently struggle with.
Overall, I think that all three assignments were important to help the students see that writing can have many different focuses and purposes and that those different focuses and purposes can be engaging and fun. I noticed that as my students worked on their fictional stories they were able to write more cohesive stories and they were looking at the characters from the story and studying their motivation sand using those to inform the characters’ actions in their stories. The argument essay where they argued as a lawyer also helped the students to practice the skills needed but in a new and refreshing way that helped them to see the essay from a new perspective.
Next Steps:
I am hoping to continue this inquiry throughout the rest of my school year with my students. I want to continue to look for chances to have them write smaller creative writing pieces and find ways to incorporate creative aspects into their regents’ skills practice. One idea that I have not had the time to implement is having the students use their creative pieces that they write based on the texts we read and have them swap their pieces with a peer so that their peer can write a part three text analysis on their partner’s central idea and writing strategy. I believe that this will help my students to understand author’s craft and also empower them as authors who write pieces that are worthy of analysis. I hope to incorporate this idea sometime later in the school year and to continue to track my students progress over the course of the school year.
Resources:
Why you are wrong if you think creative writing is a ‘frivolous waste of time’
ECLInstitute - HVWP 2019-2020 