Empowering Student Voice
We all know every student's voice is unique. But how do we help them see this in their writing?
Welcome to From the Teacher’s Desk, where we take turns further reflecting on our episodes and applications to the classroom.
I have a toddler at home right now. So believe me, I know all about the power of one person’s voice, no matter how small. It’s easy to understand opinion and perspective when talking directly to any person. Personal experience and even dialectic language shifts mean we all are going to respond to the same problem just a little differently.
And thanks to the internet, there are so many ways we can talk to each other right now. I can share my thoughts on TikTok or share pictures of my latest hike on Instagram. I can direct message an old friend from high school or connect with a favorite author through their Substack. The options seem endless.
Despite all of this, somehow our students too often hide behind outside resources, instead of trusting their own voices in the classroom. Through AI writing or traditional plagiarism, our students have decided their voices just don’t work in academic spaces. Or worse - that their perspective isn’t actually worth hearing.
Here’s the thing - I believe helping anyone find their written voice is one of the best gifts we can offer another person. It’s really not that far from our spoken voice. We just need to practice a little to find it.
An Author’s Voice
One of the best things about written voice is that we don’t need a sea witch to bottle it up for us to be able to see it.
Instead, maybe we need to sit and think for a minute about why students are so quick to dismiss their own written voices in academic settings. Some of it has to do with work ethic - but I think more often it’s because don’t even know how to harness their own voice on the page to help deliver their ideas.
As we discussed during our latest episode on Wonka, there are two main elements to any author’s voice: style and tone. Once we train our eye to notice these in other people’s writing, we can learn how to more readily do this ourselves.
Looking for a Voice
So then how do we do this? You can start by asking students to circle all the verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in a text (yes, even in an academic essay). The action and description of a piece of writing hold a lot of a piece’s tone.
But an author’s voice can also show up in sentence length and punctuation usage. That means we need to pay attention to all the parts of language in the author’s writing and how they’re used.
Ask students to read two articles on the same topic but by two authors. Or encourage them to pick a favorite sentence from something you’ve read in class, then rewrite it to say the same thing in a different way. Honestly, the more we invite students to play with language, the more they’re going to understand exactly what their role is in the literary playground.
Some Resources
Here are some of my favorite books Sarah and I have used to discuss voice in the past:
Get students to talk about writing with these activities:
Essay writing review stations (I love this resource from Building Book Love)
A worst essay diagnostic activity
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I love to have students talk before they write, and I transcribe the conversation. Sometimes that helps them find their voice