Kena Culver will be presenting at the ASCD Virtual Symposium: The New Era of Education on October 20, 2021. Her session “Write Away!” will explore how three familiar types of writing can be used as coping strategies and outline the steps to engage adults and children in writing that leads to healing. Below she provides a preview.
Educators rarely have the opportunity to reflect on their professional effectiveness and relieve stress in meaningful ways. They often find themselves juxtaposing the lives they impact (mainly their students') with the collateral damage the job can wreak on their own mental health.
In my experience, writing can help: Expressive, reflective, and creative writing can offer educators a modicum of emotional relief, allowing them to shed their burdens and quell anxieties. The art of writing gives teachers and leaders the ability to navigate situations they may not have had the capacity to process in-the-moment.
During the pandemic, many burned-out educators made the difficult decision to leave the profession; yet others endured, learned lessons, gained new insights, and experienced loss. But too often, the words to express these experiences have stayed trapped in educators’ minds; these same words should be set free in writing. This liberating process can offer educators some much-needed relief.
Yet often these experiences are not written down because they are bound with “I don’t have time,” silenced with “but they are asking for this,” and imprisoned by “maybe I’ll get to it tomorrow.” If a teacher is just given the slightest opportunity—perhaps by an administrator decreasing the number of sections that a teacher has to teach, planning shorter faculty meetings, or freeing time in any way—those mental barriers could be overcome. Sometimes all it takes is the stroke of a pen.
It is time for educators to benefit from the social-emotional strategies and techniques they so expertly use with students. One of those techniques is therapeutic writing.
It is time for educators to benefit from the social-emotional strategies and techniques they so expertly use with students. One of those techniques is therapeutic writing. Educators should write consistently, whether daily or weekly. Writing can be a paragraph or a page, but it should be done frequently. Take time to respond to questions or prompts like, “How do my words make other people feel based on the reactions I see in them?”, “If I had the opportunity to change one thing about this (day/week) it would be _____ , or “Write the story of your most frustrating moment this week. Were you the protagonist or antagonist?”
Don’t let more time pass without reflection, as all those experiences continue to build up inside; take steps to unveil those hidden treasures and help yourself (and perhaps someone else)—write away!
