My Experience With Young Writers Thus Far!

I have been having a great time the past couple of weeks with my writing coach process. This semester, I have gotten the privilege to engage with multiple students at different levels of writing! Not just through this class, but through my job as a literacy coach through SPARK at Clarke Street School! An attitude that I have been carrying throughout my work with students this semester is keeping things light! I feel like writing can get very discouraging at times - critiquing in formats such as "PQP" has been a great way to make sure that it is not overwhelming for the students. I feel that some coaches might assume that when a student is older, they can handle more feedback at once. I think that it could be still pretty easy for a student to get overwhelmed and turn their back on writing. 

In my experience working with high schoolers, there have been various levels of work within the same classroom! Something that I have been trying to learn is how to provide grammatical/formatting insights while simultaneously keeping things light. A question that I keep running into is how to address formatting mistakes. I feel as though these corrections could possibly get difficult while critiquing them online. I try my best to refer to Purdue Owl and even link them to my answers. I think that doing this might feel like too much and they will just give up. My writers could really benefit from some insights on how to format their papers (especially when they are thinking about submitting it to a writing contest). This is also something that could heavily prepare them for higher education!

On a level where I am taking these experiences with me into the future, it has been so cool to see concepts and skills start to form in their writing. It is so exciting to give insights on how to word sentences, provide evidence, give analysis, etc. I think these concepts are so important to build on and it is so exciting getting to see these processes in action.

Within my work in the SPARK room through The Boys and Girls Club, is with K5-2nd grade students mostly! It is an interesting experience getting to start to build literacy skills. I have been thinking a lot about how these skills eventually develop into higher analysis. 

A big overarching theme that I see within both of these experiences is genuinely just the attention that students need to excel. The difference between one session of sitting down with feedback could just be the difference between knowing a skill and not knowing a skill!

Overall, I am excited to start to get to foster connections with students with literacy. I have already had experiences where I genuinely get to see growth. Whether it is through corrections in drafts formed through this class, or a student moving up a reading level!

The reading from this week entitled "With TikTok and Lawsuits, Gen Z Takes on Climate Change" from the New York Times (2023), speaks about how youth have started to take to social media to use different modes of writing to dip their toes in activism (specifically about climate change). We have just started to see a bit of this in the policy statements from our young writers. It is so interesting to see what ideas these young writers were able to express through their research and writing. I felt an overwhelming sense of passion and competence while these students were speaking about their chosen topics.