To Be the Caitlin Clark of Writing...

...resit early specialization.

If you want to turn your child into the next Caitlin Clark - a transformative figure in her sport of basketball - have them engage in softball, volleyball, track and field, and tennis. Also, piano lessons.

I learned about Clark’s varied childhood via

David Epstein

’s Range Widely newsletter in which he uses Clark as an example of a finding that he originally reported in his must-read book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and has since been further confirmed by additional studies: When it comes to success at sports, athletes who engaging in a wide-array of activities in their youth days have better results as adults than athletes who specialize early.

Epstein explains the two factors at work. One is that choosing children for sports specialization backfires:

Unsurprisingly, when selection happens really early, there’s a pronounced “relative age effect.” That is, coaches select kids born early in their birth cohort, mistaking biological maturation for long-term potential. When one kid is selected for specialization at an early age, they are essentially deselected from other opportunities that might turn out to be a better fit.

The other factor is that early specialization leads to both burnout and a greater likelihood of overuse injuries. Successful adult athletes benefit from developing “general physical skills” (“physical literacy”), which provide the foundation for successful later specialization.

The athletes who specialize early do better as youths, but that advantage is erased and overcome over time.

Even though I read and reviewed Epstein’s book at the time of its release, I hadn’t connected the findings about early youth sports specialization with one of my longstanding concerns about the writing many students do in school, namely that they spend lots of time being taught prescriptive, templated approaches that are primarily designed to help them pass standardized assessments, rather than learn to write.

At far too young an age we attempt to turn students into writing specialists, rather than allowing them to build their general reading and writing literacies. The result is something very much like repetitive stress injuries and burnout in sports, as students become disengaged and demoralized at the mere thought of writing at all because writing to the test is rather boring.

I experienced this firsthand in working with some rising 8th graders in the Chicago Public School system in a week-long summer enrichment program in which we used some exercises from my book, The Writer’s Practice. At the start of the week we asked students “Who are you as a writer?” and most of their answers focused on what others, almost always teachers, had fold them about their writing. A

At the end of the week we asked them, “Who are you now as a writer?” in order to see what, if any, of their perceptions changed.

These are some examples of what students said:

I honestly didn’t think I would have as much fun writing this week, but the truth is, I loved it. [This week] brought out a writer inside me I didn’t know was there in the first place. I have written for myself before, but when I was writing this week, I just didn’t want to stop. I was an untamable beast. This past week truly showed me how fun and enjoyable writing can be.

My attitudes toward writing have changed. I used to view writing as something stressful, but now I have learned steps to make it easier. My writing process has also altered. I use (sic) to just start writing, but now I have learned that prewriting plays a crucial role.

My attitude towards writing has always been that I love it. I haven’t enjoyed all of the writing I’ve been doing in my life, though. I did the same analytical essay for two years, seventh and eighth grade. After a while, it got repetitive. However, this week I feel like the prompts have given me the chance to put my opinion in my writing, which in turn made my experience more enjoyable.

The biggest shift was not in students’ skills, but their attitudes towards writing. Writing was “stressful” or “repetitive,” before, but now it was “fun” and “enjoyable.”

These sorts of attitudes can make room for increased engagement with writing, which also results in much greater rigor, rigor which is driven by student interest and passion, rather than a teacher riding herd over their students.

The literacy skills that students are exposed to in a standardized test-driven world are far too narrow, far too specialized to provide the kind of broad base of general literacy that will pay off in the long run. Our goal is not to help students pass tests in school, but to turn them into writers and thinkers capable of dynamic and independent expression for a lifetime.

To achieve this goal, I think we need to pay much more attention to the kinds of attitudes that we inculcate with students when it comes to writing by giving them a huge variety of experiences.

So how do we achieve these goals? Maybe we should turn to more research on sports, in this case, research on what makes sports “fun.”

I’m particularly interested in the points under #6 Practice as they seem most relevant to school activities:

• Having well-organized practice

• Taking water breaks during practice

• Having the freedom to play creatively

• Doing lots of different activities

• Scrimmaging/small-sided games during practice

• Doing partner and small group activities

• Practicing with specialty trainers/coaches

• Getting to choose practice activities.

All of these have analogs to writing in school. Good assignments are both well-structured, while also allowing for some student agency and choice. I’ve already discussed the importance of doing different types of writing experiences. Peer exchange is a partnered activity.

Doing short, ungraded writing activities can be viewed as the equivalent of scrimmaging. Taking breaks is also recommended when it comes to practicing writing.

Rather than worrying so much about outcomes, a greater focus on the experiences students have in school is likely to pay off, the same way a variety of experiences pays off for athletes.

Last newsletter I talked about how giving students something interesting to write about is a good route to stoking engagement. The variety of the things we ask them to do matters as well, and we could do worse than making at least some aspects of the work of writing look a lot more like play-based practice. (This is one of the things that attracted me to Frankenstories. It’s all practice for writing without having to worry about what specific thing is being practiced.)

Learning is a long game (pun intended). When we make that game more drudgery than fun, of course students are going to burnout and disengage from school.

It’s not like everyone is going to grow up and be Caitlin Clark or Juju Watkins or Angel Reese, but it seems like a reasonable goal to establish a foundation of attitudes and experiences in writing that make it so anyone can head down to the (metaphorical) playground and have fun shooting hoops.