The Natural Learning Model – Experience as it Applies to Language Arts

I glanced around my class one afternoon in mid-October, taking stock of the writers in the room. The eighth graders were brainstorming ideas for their culminating piece, an entry for the prestigious Scholastic Art & Writing competition.

The contest is a long-anticipated rite of passage for Birchwood’s most seasoned writers. The lengthy work could be about anything they wanted, fiction or nonfiction. Yes, the time had finally come to craft their masterpieces! But … where to begin? Within moments, it was apparent some were struggling.

But struggle, they must.

Ask any professional writer, and they will tell you: writing is hard. Even if it is your vocation, you will wrestle with the written word. Thoughts about what to say and how to say it will invade your car rides, your dinners, your walks.

You will spend a good deal of time staring blank-minded at paper, or with fingers hovering over a keyboard. But you’ll stick with it until the ideas come, in trickles and in bursts. These are interspersed with pauses to debate, question, or give a shake of the head. You’ll sigh, scrutinize, and scribble out, then feel a surge of success when you say something just right. You’ll whisper words aloud to hear how they sound. And when you are done, you’ll fret at the flaws, but decide the work will do.

That’s because the truth is that mostly what you feel is a back-straightening sense of accomplishment. You sense value in your work. You wish to share with others, to hear what they think. After all, you have communicated your ideas, and desire to know if you’ve done it well.

This is the life of a writer. And this is the life – the experience – that the upper grade language arts teachers at Birchwood School of Hawken want our students to taste.

Engaging in the writing process is an ideal example of the “experience” arm of the Natural Learning Model, which is deployed in every classroom at Birchwood, from preschool to grade 8. The model has three arms: knowledge, or the accumulation of information in a subject area; agency, or a student’s self-motivation and movement toward self-actualization; and experience, where students engage in hands-on, authentic experiences in a subject. These experiences allow them to think like a writer in language arts, a historian in social studies, a mathematician in math, and so on.

This doesn’t mean throwing students into the sea of a subject and telling them to swim.

In preparation for the Scholastic contest, for example, we frontloaded our writers with models of great storytellers, from giants such as Anton Chekhov to winning pieces by students just like them. We engaged in discussions about the structures of narratives and why stories are effective. We brainstormed and shared ideas, found and filled holes in logic, looked for ways to make stories original, and asked questions to develop plots. Then students were coached individually as they wrote, helping them to grow from where they are. They pre-wrote, drafted, revised, revised, and revised again.

There were 14 students in my language arts classroom that day in October, all but two I’ve known since sixth grade. One was gazing into space. But I’ve learned his writing process. He spends a long time thinking before penning a single word.

Another squirmed in his seat. He’s frustrated, but I gauged he could stick with it a little longer. After he wrote a few things down, I checked in to further stoke his creativity.

A student in front raised her hand. She’s ready for feedback. I obliged.

Then one in the back kept looking my way, but avoided eye contact. His foot was tapping. I smiled. He was ready to bounce an idea, and it turned out to be brilliant. He’d been tossing it around for a while now, and he’s already done some research and outlining. He scripted even more today. 

Just like a writer does.

This article was written by Birchwood School fifth, sixth, and eighth grade language arts subject specialist Jennifer Seward. She is a graduate of Bowling Green State University with a degree in English and spent many years as a newspaper reporter and editor as well as a writing coach for professional writers prior to teaching. As a reporter, she was recognized by the Associated Press as one of the Best News Writers in Ohio. Ms. Seward has helped her students achieve success in Future Problem Solving, Power of the Pen, and the Scholastic Writing Awards.