Writing With, Beside, and In Front of My Students by Deb Day

The hardest thing about being a teacher of writers was writing and sharing with my students.
I created wonderful lessons. I conferenced daily with groups. I read and commented on drafts each night. I had them share their work. But I remained “the sage on the stage” and never interacted with them as a writer.

Then I read Write Beside Them by Penny Kittle and Write Like This by Kelly Gallagher and changed how I taught Creative Writing.  While there were many great ideas in these books, the single most “teacher-changing” takeaway was how important it was for me to write beside, with, and in front of my students.

How could I ask them to write and share with the class if I wasn’t willing to write and share also?

And so I started.

When I asked them to create writer’s notebooks, I showed them mine under the document camera and on video.

When I asked them to write six-word memoirs and Twitter memoirs, I wrote mine on the whiteboard.

Poetry? I shared things I had written on my blog.


I love using mentor texts in class so students could see a published product. The trouble with professional pieces is students felt they could never achieve that “perfection”. When I used my own writing for an assignment, even if it was something published on my blog, I could talk about how I would change it now.

I felt like a writer fraud at times. Some of my writing was so horrible I was embarrassed to share it. But the benefit was that kids could see me struggle. I crossed out words and tried new ones. I scribbled things out and went back to originals. Sometimes, I erased the whole thing and started over. They learned that those minutes we spent writing every day in our notebooks could become publishable pieces of writing with a little work.

And I hope they learned that writing was fluid and never really finished or perfect.

So this year, as you start the year, I hope you write with your students, right up there, in front of the everyone. It will be the hardest thing you’ve done, but it will be worth it.

Afternoon in Creative Writing

Must write my life

In front of an audience

No place to hide

Be vulnerable

Just Write

Deb Day taught many different English classes during her twenty-eight-year teaching career. Creative Writing was her favorite class to teach in the last years of her career because she could write and share with her students. She is married, the mother of two sons and grandmother to six. She is owned by Chloe, an eight-year-old Goldendoodle. All this provides plenty of material for her blog, Coffee With Chloe.