Within an academic culture where success equals perfection, students often miss one of the fundamental truths about learning: it’s messy. To learn implies that one lacks a complete understanding of a skill or topic—that there exists room to grow.

This is especially true in writing, a skill that, when completed for a class, does more than assess one’s understanding of a topic. A writer is tasked with delivering their ideas to an intended audience, and there are innumerable rhetorical variables that inform the ways in which writers may best communicate in a given situation. This makes learning even messier, for what may work when articulating one’s discoveries from a formalist analysis of a 20th-century American novel may not work when explaining the tension between Taiwan and China. 

The lack of a single, universal writing strategy may frustrate any high-achieving student, especially one who worries that an “average” grade on one assignment is the difference between going to THE university versus going to A university—an anxiety-inducing myth about how grades work and how success is defined. Yes, cultivating a mentally healthier community stretches well beyond this project’s aim, but there are things we can do to curb these feelings in how we teach writing that may [fingers crossed] transcend English instruction.

For my Curriculum Innovation Project (CIP), my goal has been to reconsider writing instruction across English I, II, and III, Emma Willard’s required English courses for 9th grade, 10th grade, and 11th grade, respectively. How can we teach writing in a way that best positions students to see themselves as capable writers? How can we teach these young writers to embrace the imperfection of the writing process, to be okay with their ideas not being perfect the first, second, or fourteenth time they’ve written and rewritten them? How can we reduce the anxiety and insurmountable pressure young writers shoulder as they approach their essays?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I have drafted writing initiatives for these three required courses that focus mostly on scaffolding a steady progression in a student’s relationship with writing. To ensure that these initiatives are seen as meaningful rather than a burden, initiatives for English I will be rolled out for the 2025–2026 academic year, then English II’s for 2026–2027, and English III’s for 2027–2028. This way, next year’s rising sophomores and juniors aren’t expected to build on something not yet present in their English instruction. This has been an ambitious project, and while I feel I haven’t accomplished everything I set out to, I have learned more than I anticipated and am excited to continue thinking about this work well after the project has “officially” concluded.

Throughout the year, I’ve spoken with students, English Department colleagues, other offices and departments on campus, English Departments at peer institutions, and a composition scholar. I’ve read primary and secondary research on a range of topics—from how to reduce anxiety for high school students through teaching text structures (how text is written to accomplish specific rhetorical goals) to what teaching “the writing process” most effectively looks like, how our current approach reflects a “factory model” in which writing is presented as specific steps completed at specific times to create a specific-looking product—a model that risks giving students a misunderstanding of what “good” writing is. During a meeting with Emma Willard’s History Department, I learned that history teaches parts of the essay differently from how we do in English. From discussions with students, I’ve learned that they’ve been told that a thesis statement needs to be one sentence and must be the final sentence of an intro and, elsewhere, have learned that a thesis statement can be multiple sentences and present in the intro, something that’s made even more anxiety-inducing when they read scholarly essays with multi-paragraphed “introductions.” While part of this project’s aim is to teach students why these differences exist, my hope is that, in the years to come, Emma Willard can aim for more consistency with writing instruction across the curriculum.  

The majority of my work concerns shifting our writing instruction into a truer process-based model. As indicated previously, I may be teaching the process in a problematic way, and our revision policy—which allows students receiving a grade below a certain score to complete revisions and resubmit—may be contributing to student anxieties toward perfectionism when revision is a regular and necessary part of the process itself. This reflection has led to multiple conversations with Dr. Esther Dettmar—English Department chair and, starting in July 2025, the dean of academics—about shifting toward a true process-based model.

I worked hard on a model that attempts to find a compromise between students effectively engaging with a process and minimizing additional work for instructors. Before drafting the actual policy, I shared a proposed unit map that included scaffolding a “messy” writing process with this year’s CIP cohort for a Critical Friends activity, an opportunity to articulate concerns and receive constructive feedback. The group assured me that the work looked strong (I had my reservations; I guess perfection is an expectation not reserved strictly for students.), while offering two awesome additions to this instruction: finding opportunities for student collaboration earlier in the process and using in-class writing assessments (a lower-stakes writing assignment completed during a class period) as an opportunity for teacher-student conferencing. These ideas demonstrate buy-in to the project’s premise: writing an essay doesn’t simply begin once an assignment is handed out; learning about the subject and wrestling with its ideas are necessary parts of the writing process.

I presented a draft of a new policy at a recent English Department retreat. My colleagues loved it and offered some important constructive criticism, which I am currently using to revise the policy, as we have decided to implement this next year. This alone means that my project has been a success, and this is only one component of it. I’m excited to continue this work into the next couple of years, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to explore this topic through the CIP.

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This piece was written by English Instructor and Department Chair Brian Druckenmiller in summation of his year-long Curriculum Innovation Project.