Generative Writing… Isn’t that like “Inventive Spelling?”…

Generative writing. It has the same ring to it as ‘inventive spelling’, which has its own merits, but woe is the student who never gets past it. You may have heard it before - “His teachers were really into inventive spelling at his elementary school, and now he just spells words however he likes.”

I have to admit, some of the prompts I use to get my students to write are pretty ‘inventive’. “What’s bugging you?” “What’s on your bucket list?” “What Words of Wisdom do you carry with you?” “What’s a burning question you’ve had?”

I’m a social studies teacher - American history. These trite and fluffy questions are not on the New York State Grade 8 Social Studies Assessment. Sooner or later, my students are going to have to learn the facts.

For our students, writing started out as a wondrous way of allowing them to share what they were thinking. What first grade child didn’t bounce back to his seat with his very own words written for him under a stick picture? The child thought and shared, the teacher listened, and the words came out on paper to be kept there, saved, enshrined for the child, the parent, the classmate, the world - to look at and listen to any time later.

By the time they get to middle school, most of what our students are expected to do in terms of writing is what other people want from them – ‘Write an essay on the comparison of characters in book ‘X’’. ‘Write a paragraph explaining how historical event ‘Y’ caused effect ‘Z’’.

Teachers, whose performance is judged in no small part by student scores on standardized tests, learn to ask the same kinds of standardized questions, assign the same kinds of standardized work, and begin to expect the same kind of standardized writing. They light up when a sprinkling of style emerges in a student’s work, but are mandated and conditioned to penalize students for clear streams of original thought in responses that stray from prescribed assessment rubrics.

It’s no wonder students shut down when it’s time to write. Our educational system has fooled itself into believing that writing truly is simply a mechanism for the conveyance of information, which when operated correctly, provides an adequate measure of skills and knowledge generated by others.

Our students aren’t being asked to think. No one is listening to what they have to say.

To recover that enthusiasm for writing students had early on, some ‘unlearning’ needs to occur. Those seemingly fluffy and trite questions are just one small and early step in that unlearning process. It's true, students will not learn the order of the Presidents by responding to “What Words of Wisdom do you carry with you?”, but they will, in time, learn that they can dig something out of their past to have it shared and valued. “What’s on your Bucket List?” won’t help them learn how to construct a five paragraph essay, but it will help them to dream again, and realize that they can share their thoughts for the moment without fear of being edited, boxed, redirected or forced to revise. “What’s a Burning Question you’ve had?” won’t teach them how to take notes for a research paper, but it will allow them to ask their own questions, to be original, and to realize, perhaps, that they have many of the answers themselves.

Most of all, these kinds of, yes, 'generative' questions, allow students the experience of being listened to once again. Whatever they come up with, they know they can share, that they can talk about it, that others can chime in and expand and offer clues, cues, knowledge and experience to the pool. They begin to unlearn the adult imposed expectations of mechanical writing, and begin to relearn the pleasure of writing as a means of thinking, sharing, and listening.

So what about that list of presidents, that essay they need to write, and that research paper they need to complete? That is writing, after all. There are rules.

Students will write to fulfill those tasks, willingly and well, when they know their thoughts are safe. They will edit, revise, and suffer over individual words, when they know they will be listened to. They will jump through hoops generated by adults, when they trust that those hoops are valuable not only for what they show of adult-generated skills and knowledge, but for what they also can learn and tell of themselves.