“As a profession, we are gripped by fear.” Those are the opening words from Lucy Calkins in her forward to The Unstoppable Writing teacher by Colleen Cruz. As Lucy prepares the reader for Colleen’s words, she goes on to write:

“(Fear) is a cage that traps us, alone, into our worst selves. Into a space with demons only we can see. We become the person we dread being.”



In The Unstoppable Writing Teacher, Colleen Cruz tells us to name that fear. As a self-declared positive pessimist, Colleen guides us through building a better toolbox and helps us identify what stops us in writing instruction. Colleen’s honesty is on full display throughout The Unstoppable Writing Teacher. We began our conversation on those anxieties and why it was important to include them in the book. 

See below for a full transcript:

Colleen:    One of the things I learned pretty early on in life, I think probably from my mother, was that when you make things public, when you bring things into the light, they're less scary. The proverbial pile of laundry in the corner of your bedroom that you think is a monster, when you turn on the lights, you say, oh, that's really a pile of laundry, or it is, in fact, a monster. Either way, it's easier to fight that monster when you can actually see it. I think a lot of times we get ourselves into deeper trouble when we try to pretend something doesn't really exist, when we try to look the other way, even things like in our own personal lives, like feeling doubts about a relationship with somebody or concerns about a parenting decision. 
    I think when we keep those a secret and we try to put just our best face, I think we set ourselves up for actual failure. I think you're, or at least I know I am, less likely to feel like a failure when I put my problems out there. I feel like communities step up when you put those things out there. I'm more likely to get help and assistance for problems when I say them, and I also think there's a stigma around having struggles and challenges that I feel we should get rid of. I do strongly believe that challenges and struggles are what make life interesting, it's why we read stories. When we look at the end of a day, it's the fact that we overcame a struggle or a challenge that makes us feel like our lives are worth living. That's why I think it's really important to keep talking about those things.

Brett:    One of the things that you talk about in the book is we confuse the writing and the writer. Why do we do that?

Colleen:    The first time I heard that was Lucy Calkins, gosh, it was like 1995, I think, the first time I heard her do a keynote. She said something about teaching the writer, not the writing. It felt like I'd gotten hit by a lightning bolt because I had realized that's exactly what I do as a teacher. I think often what we do is we focus on what we see in front of us and when we look at student writing, we literally look at the concrete evidence in front of us and we want to make that concrete piece of evidence in front of us better or stronger. It's a lot harder to look at a child and see what he or she could do, his or her potential, what's not there, and try to make it happen.
    It is challenging for us to teach almost into a void, into possibility, into absence of something, often. Sometimes there's some signs that the child could go this way.