Creative Writing, Draft Two

This summer I'll be teaching a Creative Writing class at Punahou for the second year in a row. Last year's class was a lot of fun, both because it gave me an opportunity to help my students tap into their creativity and because it compelled me to be creative as well. I'm looking forward to that opportunity this summer, especially as a kind of counter-balance to the kind of writing I have to do for my courses here. With a few notable exceptions, I'm rarely pushed to produce synthetically creative work as a PhD student, as analysis is the touchstone of academic discourse. That is not to condemn the academy by any means, but rather to point out that there are forms of writing it does not necessarily value, but which I still enjoy.

Last year I wrote a post about my curriculum writing process. I outlined the early stages of my backwards design process, the effort to determine an "enduring understanding" for my students, and the pitfalls of biting off too small or too big a goal. The results of this process I captured, at least in part, at the beginning of the course. I don't think I ever got around to writing a retrospective, but suffice to say the course was a blast, the students had a great time, and apparently I was well-behaved enough to be asked back this summer.

Which means that it's time to rewrite and revise. Writing a Creative Writing curriculum is a particularly recursive kind of activity, because the very principles you're trying to teach are - at least in part - the kinds of things you have to employ while constructing the course. Among these is the conviction that revision is necessary. For all of the successes in last year's course, there's so much that I want to do better, so many activities that I want to restructure, so many learning experiences that could be improved.

Perhaps the biggest weakness of my curriculum last summer was its overly workshop-y feel. That is, I treated the course more like a summer camp than a class. On some level this was appropriate, especially because I did select individual activities such that they all revolved around a small number of central themes. However, I believe that the summer school affords the opportunity for a more sustained engagement with a particular text or project than I attempted last year. With that in mind, I'm planning on expanding on a small set of activities I used last year concerning Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

In addition to being one of my favorite books, Invisible Cities is a wonderful jumping-off point for creative writing. It stands at the intersection of poetry and prose, traditional storytelling and vignette, abstraction and minute, concrete detail. My students struggled to understand the bits of it we tried to read in class last year. Until I sent them out to campus and had them write their own vignettes about Punahou. Invisible Punahou has been percolating in my mind ever since, and I think this year's class will create it.

So we'll spend more than a day with Calvino. We'll read him carefully, try to understand what he's doing and how he's doing it, and, most importantly, create our own version of the story. The purpose of doing so is to collaboratively create, through sustained engagement with a particular text and with a series of writing tasks and activities, a story that describes the campus that these students have spent the better part of their academic lives wandering.

There will be other revisions to the course as well, though none so significant as this sustained project. I have revamped and reworded my central purposes, making them more forceful and more meaningful. I have cut activities that didn't work last year, expanded those that needed it, and substituted in some new ideas. Above all, I have made space to better walk the tightrope that all teachers must walk between careful design and student freedom. I plan to enforce sustained engagement with Calvino, but the project will proceed very much on my students' terms. They will be the authors of whatever it is we produce. They will wield the creative power.

The First Day of the Rest of the Class

Today was the first day of the creative writing course I have mentioned intermittently in this space over the past few months.  I'm not going to detail what happened in the class, but I will wax philosophical about creative writing, curriculum, teaching, and my plans for where the course is going.

The course is organized around a single goal - per backwards design - of working together to learn how to be better writers.  That is to say, I my goal is not for the students (and myself) to be better writers, but rather to learn to be better writers.  That's a fine distinction, perhaps - especially because becoming better writers is a natural outgrowth of learning how to do so - but it's an important one.  It is, as I told the students, much like the famous saying about catching fish: if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day... If you teach a man to write, he'll be a better writer, but if you teach him to learn to write, he'll be an ever-improving writer.

In order to accomplish this goal, I've posed two questions (of a highly philosophical and basic nature) in the class: what is writing? and what is creativity?  Now that's perhaps a little glib, and I'll acknowledge that those are actually impossible-to-answer questions.  But the point is that a part of learning how to write is asking yourself what the limits of writing even are.  If I think of myself as a writer only when I sit down to compose a blog post, I'm missing out on countless opportunities to learn to write in other ways.  A conversation, a video game, a trip to the beach... in some sense, can't all of those things be writing, or at least a precursor to it?  Perhaps, perhaps not.  Regardless, creativity might find its way into each and every of those things, and so it's worth, to my mind, keeping those two impossibly broad questions in your mind.

I've also organized the activities of the class around three values: metacognition, dialogue, and collaboration.  Metacognition is, simply, thinking about thinking.  So I mean it broadly, in terms of self-awareness, self-critique, learning about learning, and generally taking ones understanding of a situation, text, or whatever to another level of complexity.

Dialogue is, of course, essential to writing, and a wonderful analogue as well.  Good conversations are, to my mind, a kind of writing.  Moreover, dialogue lets writers communicate with each other about their writing, which thus enables them to learn more about both their own writing process, and that of others.  In a class where learning how to learn to write is paramount, dialogue is a natural complement.

Collaboration is a value I had tapped that, I later discovered, is also prominent in the Punahou mission statement.  In a writing class, however, collaboration can be difficult to achieve.  With that in mind, I've tried to put together a number of activities that encourage - if not force - students to work together.  Workshopping is a kind of collaboration, of course, but I believe critiquing the work of others and communicating about it is too limited.  Rather, I will make the students write in teams, both because collaboration is valuable in itself, and because most creative writing in the modern world (at least the type that people get paid to do) happens in teams.

Having gone through the process of deciding on and shaping these high-level goals, the nitty-gritty details of what we do, why, and how came together in a matter of hours.  The result is a curriculum with five content themes (as opposed to the process or philosophical themes above), one for each week.  This first week we're looking at, talking about, and working on prose.  The second week will center on verse.  The third will cover design and its role in writing.  The fourth will be a broader look at art and creativity, and the fourth will be about refining and polishing writing.

It's not a lot of time, and we've got a lot to do:
- A trip to the art museum
- Comparing scenes from The Princess Bride movie to the book
- Writing observational haikus
- Going to a poetry reading
- Playing Apples to Apples and Balderdash
- Playing and writing about the Oregon Trail
- Watching the special features and commentary of the Lord of the Rings to unearth design decisions
- Critiquing the venerable Elements of Style
- Watching The King's Speech and listening to other wartime speeches to investigate propaganda and persuasion in writing
- For the students: writing two mini-projects (one prose, one verse), giving two presentations, proposing, drafting, and completing a final project, and keeping an exhaustive journal.

And there's more.  Frankly, some may have to be cut as we go, just to make sure there's time to do enough writing in class.  But I'd rather err on the side of too many good learning experiences in my curriculum than too few, and culling is easier than adding in.

Finally, a word on assessment.  I'm going to grade the students on three things: participation, a journal, and a final project.  Each is vital to measuring some part of my goal and values of the course.

Participation will be a measure of dialogue, of course, but also a way of keeping track of how students are feeling about writing, reading, and language in general.  Participation in conversations is important, then, because it's a big part of how I know what a student is thinking.  A major barrier to conversation with high schoolers is, of course, that they're used to being graded based on what they say and how much they understand, whereas I'm only interested in whether they're engaged.  Indeed, I'd rather have them all clamoring to ask for clarification, to say "I don't get it" than I would have them clamoring to give answers to questions.  That's a process, of course, and a challenge to me as a teacher to make our discussion environment support that kind of a dialogue.

The journal is a measure of, well, just about everything.  And that's because it's exhaustive.  As I told the students, everything and anything goes in their journals.  They should put in text messages, tweets, facebook status updates, grocery lists, and anything else they write in the next five weeks.  Part of the point, then, is to demonstrate that they already write a lot.  Wait, that's not the real point...  No, the point is for them to be conscious of the fact that they are writing - to be metacognitive - when they do things they normally don't think of as writing.  Of course, the journal will also contain drafts and ideas and outlines and poem fragments and so on.  And, really, those things should be the bulk of it, at the end of the day.  But I think it's valuable to turn that writer's eye on everything one does for a while, just to see what you see.

Finally, the final project will be a single work (or small portfolio) of the highest quality.  By virtue of amassing a large, unwieldy, messy, nonsensical journal, my hope is that the students will not be able to help coming up with good ideas for a final project.  The challenge I levied at them was this: publishable.  Will they reach that level?  Maybe, maybe not, but we can try, and I can do my best to support the effort.  Regardless, they're not going to get there - or anywhere close to it - without writing a lot in the next five weeks, and writing a lot that's not the final project.  Why?  Because learning about the process, about how to learn to write, about how to collaborate and how to dialogue and how to think about thinking...  All of those things that the course is designed around are, to my mind, the real key to good writing.  And you can't get to writing well without doing a lot of writing poorly along the way.

Beginning the (Writing) Curriculum Writing Process

This summer, before enrolling at either UCSD or Stanford,* I'll be teaching creative writing at Punahou.  While they do have some resources for me to work with - a poetry and short story book that they usually employ in the course - the curriculum is more or less mine to write.  This is both a blessing and a curse.  Pedagogically, it's always easier to teach when the curriculum is laid out in front of you first.  On the other hand - and considering I do have some free time between now and when the course begins in June - the opportunity to actually craft a curriculum according to the principles I learned as an LDT student is exciting to me.

* Yes, my California voyage continues.  But it is coming to an end soon.  I'll be spending the next two days on UCSD's campus before flying home to Honolulu on Friday.

As Director of NALU Studies, I did have a lot of control - in theory, anyway - over curriculum.  In practice, however, three things got in the way of engaging in actual good curriculum design.  First, the turnaround from my arrival on the job and the running of our first session was about a month, hardly enough time to craft an intelligible curriculum that covered almost 100 contact hours.  Second, while I am comfortable with the scientific concepts we were teaching, I am not enough of an expert in marine biology to develop a strong, holistic set of lessons.  Third, and most importantly, rather than building from scratch, we were working from what I would say was a deeply flawed blueprint.  There were plenty of good activities in the curriculum, but no organizing principle (the same could, I suppose, be said about the organization as a whole).  The result was an aimless collection of "fun" things for the kids to do, but the learning that went on was, frankly, minimal.

So how to avoid those pitfalls in this situation?  Well, for one thing it helps to be starting from (ironically) a much stronger position.  Of my three main problems at NALU, the first is not an issue because I'll have much more time (and no directorial duties to get in the way), the second is not an issue because I'm much more comfortable teaching writing than science, and the third is not an issue because I'm largely building from scratch, with the aid and input of teachers who do know how to write good curriculum.  Which is all to say the situation is, if not ideal, pretty darn close.

In the ideal case, then, how does one go about writing a (writing) curriculum?

To begin with - and this is the most important bit, actually - it's essential to define a core purpose for the class.  As in many aspects of life, a clear and succinct and specific goal at the outset of the curriculum design process will make the rest of the work go better.  While this may seem obvious, it's harder to do than it sounds.  The temptation is very much to jump in and start thinking about all of the cool activities that fit into a creative writing curriculum, all of the interesting ways of using technology, and all of the good assignments the students can complete.

The problem is, if you start with any of those things, you lose sight of the bigger picture, and while the student might come away with any number of particular skills, you've done a poor job shaping the overall experience.  Better to pick a focal point for the course as a whole, and to ensure that every activity, technology, and assignment fits into that paradigm.  That way, students can still take away particular skills as they suit student interests and the vagaries of the high school attention span, but even the least engaged student should come away with that central lesson, an "enduring understanding" that lasts far beyond the final day of the course.

A good enduring understanding, then, is like a mission statement.  It is a concept or question sufficiently broad and deep to serve as an organizing principle for, in this case, five straight weeks of four-hour-a-day lessons.  Too much breadth and depth, however, will lead to the same disorganization that occurs without that focal point.  "What is good writing?" for example, is probably too broad a question to organize this class around, whereas "readable grammar" is too narrow and extremely boring.  Somewhere in between, there's a good enduring understanding waiting to be uncovered.

Actually, the biggest challenge, at this stage, is not finding an appropriate enduring understanding, but finding one and sticking with it.  It's all too easy to come up with concepts and ideas that are "enough but not too much."  The problem is that it becomes extremely tempting to try to tackle too many central themes in a single class.  The result is, predictably, a return to the "this lesson looks good" model of curriculum, wherein every day of the course is compelling (to the teacher, anyway), but for so many different reasons that the student's experience starts to lose cohesion.  Incidentally, this is what is wrong with most current standards: there are too many core ideas.

Once I do boil the course to its core, the next layer to apply is assessment.  How will I know that the students know what I want them to know?  This is a sticky question, and while in creative writing there are particular accepted norms for assessment, it's important to make sure that what I do fits well with what I'm trying to teach.  It's really easy to teach one thing and to test for another.  The current manifestation of the standards movement, again, often makes this mistake by asking students to learn certain material, and then testing them on how well they take multiple choice tests.  As a result, more and more schools are doing more "test taking training," which is a waste of instructional time that could be used to teach students to think.

Which is to say, the pitfalls here are not inconsequential.  Assessment is, in reality, perhaps the most important part of the curriculum design process.  Without assessment, it is impossible to know whether or not all of your cool lessons are really working, whether your students are really engaged, and whether the enduring understanding of your course is really being understood.  Good assessment design and alignment, then, will be a big part of my own work in shaping my creative writing course.

Once you've answered these two questions - 1) what do I want the students to learn? 2) how will I know that they've learned it? - the rest of the curriculum building process becomes, if not easy, at least a lot more enjoyable.  Instead of wracking your brain, trying to figure out how to fill the time, or trying to decide which awesome lessons to employ and which to cull, the process is much more, for lack of a better word, mechanical.  Look at your daily lesson.  Does it fit with the overall goal of the course?  Will you be able to tell if it sticks?  If the answers are "no" and "no," there's probably no reason to do it, regardless of how cool it is or how fun it sounds.  Basically, the process comes down to a truism: it's easier to meet your design needs when you know what those needs are.

Now, that's all well and good in the ideal case, but what about reality?  No plan survives contact with the enemy, and that is equally true in curriculum design.  In my own rather limited experience, even well-laid plans require good execution pedagogically, and require vast restructuring (to say the least) sometimes when the actual students in the class have interests and learning needs that diverge wildly from those you anticipated while writing the curriculum.  Which is not to say that writing the curriculum in the first place is a waste of time, but rather that, like any writing, it's a mistake to get too attached to what you write.  The other lesson, here, is that the enduring understanding - the core of the curriculum - is doubly important when reality sets in, because it gives shape to those on-the-fly adaptations that must be made.

I'm sure that, as this project evolves, I'll have more to say in this space, since this blog is a kind of long-term creative writing project of my own.  While I may not be able to share student work, I can assure you that - given my pedagogical biases - it's very likely I'll be completing the assignments I give, and that those assignments will end up here.  Stay tuned.