I have found that developing a growth mindset is essential for teaching instead of merely assessing Creative Writing.  It is deeply empowering to me to believe that my students can become better writers.  Teaching Creative Writing is also helping students improve their skills in close reading, collaboration, critical thinking, editing, rewriting, proofreading, public speaking, and more.  It is more intellectually fulfilling for me to think that I am exploring a diverse set of skills with my students, where we can find room for improvement and work together toward making that im

I learned how to learn, how to write, and how to teach from Paul Grobstein.  During my time in graduate school, I taught Creative Writing classes at a variety of levels from Introductory through Undergraduate Dissertation.  I immediately found that I preferred to teach introductory classes, where I could focus on teaching students how to learn in the very same way that I had learned to learn rather than trying to identify talented individuals.  My pedagogy is designed to help students develop and evolve as writers regardless of their innate talent or potential to become an auth

I learned how to write in a neurobiology lab and it has defined my writing.  During my time at Bryn Mawr College, Eleanor A.

I was very keen on poetry, but my teachers were certain that there was no way to improve my writing, no way of learning to write better, and so need to teach me more about writing.  This is an example of a fixed mindset.  No one told me that reading poetry would make me a better poet.  No one told me that attending poetry readings would make me a better poet.  No one told me to find and participate in writing workshops in order to revise my poetry based on the feedback of other poets.  I needed to learn how to

I set myself against talent, because it represents ableist and exclusionary beliefs about creative writing.  In middle and high school, I discovered that I loved writing, and that I was not talented.   No one teacher explained to me how they came to this conclusion, but it might have been my dyslexia, my middling grades in English Literature, and the poems themselves that I was writing.  However, I would like to suggest that neither these criteria nor the concept of talent itself is helpful for Creative Writing pedagogy.