A Letter to a New Writing Teacher

Why It Matters

As summer ends and the 2023-2024 school year begins, I am welcoming many new teachers to our district. After meeting with them for a short time today, there are three major messages that I hope the new teachers in my district heard and internalized.

I wish I had thought to write this letter before meeting them, but I will be making copies and sending them out during our first week of school.

Who This Post is For

If you’re a new teacher reading this post, this letter is for you! Experienced teachers, you might find something that resonates with you. And literacy coaches, feel free to tweak and personalize it however you’d like. I’m providing a pdf that you’re welcome to use.

The Letter

Dear New Teacher, 

Welcome to the community of writing teachers. You are teaching young people one of the most important skills; expressing opinions, providing information, and telling stories are critical for the rest of their academic and personal lives. 

Here are a few key practices and ideas that may help your journey as a writing teacher. 

1. Your own writing will help you be a better teacher of writing. Therefore, write. Try to keep your writing relatable to the age group you’ll be teaching. Study yourself as you write. Where do you get stuck? What helps you? What tools, resources, and environments work for you? How do those translate for students? 

Your own writing will have many benefits. It will serve as a teaching tool for you, and you will probably find yourself using it as a demonstration text time and time again. Additionally, students will recognize you as an authentic writer, and they will be more willing to take risks with their own writing and learning. 

2. Focus on the writer’s growth, and not the growth of the writing. You are a scaffold. And scaffolds, by definition, should include a plan for removal. If students are listening and learning to you, then they should be needing you less and less unless you are introducing new skills. 

One way to assess how effective your writing instruction is to compare students’ daily writing with how they write at the end of a unit when you ask them to write an on-demand assessment, a piece that they should complete independently with little to no assistance. If there is a big difference between what students write as process pieces during the unit and on-demand pieces at the end of the unit, that’s a red flag. Effective instruction and learning means that students are able to internalize and transfer skills. Over-scaffolding can lead to under-learning. 

3. Celebrate all that students CAN do whenever possible, and remember that not all skills have to be in place and mastered for students to write pieces. Students need to practice writing in order to get better at writing. While their practice does not need to lead to perfect products, they should understand what they are practicing. You might assess this by incorporating the question, “What are you working on?” into your conferring repertoire. 

For me, sports-related analogies help me think about this concept. My daughter could play in a tennis match without mastering a specific shots. Maybe she ran around her backhand whenever possible. Maybe she avoided heading to net. Maybe she hit all of her forehands crosscourt. Those matches provided purpose and authenticity to the training she was doing, and, if she had to wait to master all those shots, she’d probably quit or enjoy the game much less. Writers can produce content and compositions without perfect spelling, and it’s important to cheer them on. Young writers should know that spelling and conventions and writing rules matter, but they should feel like they can join the playing field without every skill being mastered

Good luck, welcome, and thank you. I can’t wait to watch you grow as a writer and as a teacher. 

All good things, 

Melanie

Go Deeper

If you are interested in additional resources for new teachers, here are a couple of posts, you might want to pass along.

• How to Support New Teachers on Your Team: Strengthening Professional Learning
• A Dozen Book Recommendations for New Writing Teachers