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A teacher and teacher educator explore how risk-taking strategies promote flexibility and confidence in student writers and teachers.
When we met in 2016, we (Morgan and Amber) were both in a state of flux as educators. Morgan, then a master's student in secondary English teaching, looked forward to beginning her career teaching secondary English language arts (ELA). Amber, an instructor of the English teaching methods course Morgan was taking, was transitioning from a decade of teaching high school ELA to becoming a teacher educator.
As we both moved into new teaching roles, we discovered a shared curiosity about teacher and student risk-taking in ELA classrooms. This curiosity emerged through ongoing mentoring conversations as Morgan navigated student teaching at a middle school and, subsequently, full-time teaching at a high school. The vignettes below illustrate how Morgan's early teaching experiences sparked our collaborative inquiry into the intersections of risk-taking, writing, and teaching.
MORGAN
It's due day in sixth-grade ELA where I'm student teaching. I look forward to seeing my students' final "Tell a Story" assignments at the culmination of a unit designed for gathering ideas, composing, and revising while practicing writing narrative fiction. As students collect their laptops to open Google Docs, I watch, bewildered. What about the picture books, graphic novels, short films, podcasts, and audiobooks I had modeled as multimodal narrative genres, still displayed as mentor texts at the front of the classroom? Scanning twenty-seven student laptops with typed paragraphs of narratives, my confusion turns to frustration before simmering to disappointment.
Months later, I'm teaching tenth-grade ELA at a new school. It's due day again. My students scurry to prepare their research presentations. Having again shared models of exemplar projects across a range of multimodal genres-cookbooks, podcasts, plays, comics-I am eager to see my students' creative research presentations. One student, Vince (all student names are pseudonyms), opens his project on electronic dance music: a digital presentation on Google Slides. To my surprise, nearly all his peers do the same. Even after having encouraged Vince to share original music or showcase musical remixing equipment for his presentation, I am puzzled about why he has opted for a typical slide presentation.
AMBER
Morgan and I meet at a public library for an informal catch-up, the first...