Video: When Writing Feels Hard: Science-Based Strategies for Managing Emotions in 2e Students

Struggling with a "reluctant writer"? Join tutor and researcher Lucy Wallace for a science-based deep dive into the emotional hurdles of twice-exceptional (2e) learners.

Discover a practical toolkit to move from "blank page" panic to productive transitions using four key strategies:

• Calm Your Body: Physiological resets for the nervous system.

• Change Your Thoughts: Reframing rigid thinking and anxiety.

• Lighten the Load: Reducing cognitive overload and "decluttering" the process.

• Rethink Rewards: Shifting to immediate, dopamine-friendly payoffs.

Stop the writing wars and start building your student's confidence today! #2e #Neurodiversity #WritingTips

Read the transcript here - REEL Overview

Introduction and REEL Overview

Yael Valek, REEL: Okay, welcome everyone to today's REEL Talk. We're so excited to have Lucy Wallace here talking about When Writing Feels Hard, Science-Based Strategies for Managing Emotion in 2E Writers. And this talk is also offered in Spanish on another channel, so Callie will write that for you in Spanish. In case you're not familiar with REEL, we are a non-profit based in Silicon Valley, and we help twice-exceptional students thrive in school by raising parent and educator awareness and understanding.  

Of practical research-based strategies to address their needs successfully. So, for parents, we have talks like this, online resources and tools, and support groups, and then for educators, I'll show you more about what we do in the classroom. So just in case you're not familiar with what is 2E, REEL uses the definition that comes out of the Bridges 2E Center, which is an intersection of yellow, distinguishing strengths, high abilities in one or more areas. With the blue complex challenges, such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, anxiety, and others that combine. To make a green 2E child, and because you have to address both the strengths and the challenges simultaneously, this becomes a challenging profile to educate in the classroom, which is why REEL's here.  

REEL Resources for Parents and Educators

For parents, we have a lot of free services, such as this expert speaker series. We also offer a bi-monthly Zoom support group, and a private Google group that just hit over a thousand members, with people asking and answering each other's questions about where to go to school, and where to find a writing tutor, all kinds of things like that. We also offer free downloadable parent toolkits, and I know Callie's putting some of these down in the chat. And many online resources and articles. Lucy has written a lot of wonderful articles on our website about writing.  

We have a school list so that you can browse local schools to the Bay Area. And then the only two things that we charge parents for are if you want more one-on-one support or small facilitated group learning. Here's an example of our parent toolkits. You can see you can download, at no cost, what is it like?. What do you do to support your 2E learner? How do you partner with your school?.  

And what if you just got a diagnosis? What are the first steps you should take?. And then for educators, we offer professional development at your school, and we can customize that. Most of our educators like to do our learning difference simulation, where you can feel what it feels like to have learning differences, and then we also do a vignette workshop where we work through specific students and how you might support them. We also have all kinds of online resources for educators and a newsletter.  

The Dear REEL Model and Upcoming Schedule

And for educators, we have our Dear REEL model, which may also be relevant, I like to read it as well, about students developing connection, sorry, teachers developing connection, embracing flexibility, attending to students' strengths, and reframing behaviors, and we give a lot of concrete examples across, all kinds of age ranges of how you might support learners in the classroom. So we are getting close to the end of our winter-spring semester events. May 4th, we have a talk about Curiosity, connection, and confidence, a new path to motivation for 2E-learners, including a brain scientist from Berkeley showing, what's happening in the brain around motivation and activation, and then some experts speaking about it as well. And on May 7th, we have, our last parent support group of this school year, but there will be… they will continue on bi-monthly. So please, come to our website and RSVP for those.  

And again, as I mentioned, you can join our Google group, and you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and see our previous recordings on YouTube, and all of these will let you know when we have events coming up. And then now, I'm so happy to introduce Lucy, and Lucy, what is your dog's name?.  

Lucy Wallace: sticky.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Tiki?

Lucy Wallace: Tiki.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Tiki, that's so cute. Okay, so Lucy, I found out, has loved writing since before she could hold a pen. As a teenager, she discovered her passion for teaching, and in college, she started her first tutoring business. After graduating in 2024, Lucy moved to Boston to launch Lucy's Learning Lab.  

Lucy Wallace's Presentation: Meeting the Writers

She works one-on-one with students of all ages, helping them strengthen their writing and thinking skills. She has extensive experience supporting neurodivergent and twice-exceptional learners. Outside of work, Lucy loves reading, rollerblading, and studying Russian, usually not all at once. And we will put a link to Lucy's Learning Lab in the chat, and I will let Lucy now share her slides. So welcome, we're so excited to have you.  

Lucy Wallace: Thank you for the introduction. Am I talking loud enough? Is this good? Okay, great. I'm told I have a quiet voice. Let me share my screen. Alright, is that working? Awesome. Let's meet some young writers.  

This is Henry. Henry is a walking encyclopedia. He's a third grader, absolutely loves history, particularly enjoys evaluating historical fiction based on the historical accuracy. He could go on for hours with that. Henry is autistic and easily overwhelmed. He struggles with flexibility, and writing can be really hit or miss.  

Case Studies: Henry, Ava, and Eli

When he likes what he's writing about, it's easy, and the words flow, but when he doesn't like the topic, it's like pulling teeth. So right now, he has an assignment that seems simple to his parents. He has to write a paragraph about a book that he understood really well. But Henry is screaming and crying and refusing to write, and his parents don't know what to do. This is Ava. She's in 8th grade. She's especially strong in math and art.  

She has great visual skills and spatial reasoning, and she's outdoorsy and really appreciates natural beauty and small details that many people might overlook. She was recently diagnosed with dyslexia and slow processing speed. And although in the past Ava enjoyed writing, she has really been struggling this year. Her assignments are more challenging and complex. They're taking up a lot of her time, she really struggles to get started, she gets stuck and feels like she doesn't know what to write, and sometimes it takes her hours or days to begin.  

She's recently started calling herself stupid and saying she's terrible at writing. And right now, she has to write an essay about Frankenstein, and has been at her computer for hours, just writing and deleting. And her parents don't know what to do. This is Eli. He's a junior in high school, very bright, hyper-verbal, super outgoing, star of the debate team, loves it.  

And he has ADHD, so his mind moves really quickly, he gets bored easily, he's always jumping on to the next thing. He's currently taking a challenging history class that he really likes in general, but he's developed this pattern of procrastinating on writing assignments. He usually starts the assignment the night before it's due, and often gets it done late, but because of his IEP, he is able to turn the assignments in late and not get penalized for it. Now it's close to the end of the year. And he has a big essay that his parents know can't be started the night before, like, this is something you really do need to begin in advance.  

The Toolkit: Understanding Emotion and Writing

And they're trying to tell him he's gotta get started, but he really doesn't want to. They don't know what to do. If any of these struggles sound familiar, you are in the right place. My name is Lucy, I'm a writing tutor. This is now repetitive because y'all already established this, but I've been working with kids like Ava and Henry and Eli for years.  

And through this work, I've learned and developed lots of strategies, to work with these writing challenges and the tricky emotions that come with writing. So today, I want to share those with you. I'm going to provide a comprehensive toolkit to help 2E kids overcome writing difficulties. And I'll show you how to implement these strategies, so we're going to revisit these three writers and think about how to help them. But before I get into that, let me just say a little bit more about myself.  

So… Who are you again? It's… I get this question a lot, it's a good one. As established, I am Lucy. I'm 2E, so at age 7 or so, I was fascinated by Shakespeare and performed, Juliet's Balcony speech for my confused classmates, but I didn't really understand the concept of taking turns in conversations. So that kind of sums up my childhood. Here I am, having won some small writing prize at the library. I don't know why I'm wearing a beanie.  

Connecting Science and Strategy

California's not that cold. And then here I am at this big football game, and all I want to do is read Harry Potter. In high school, I discovered that I love teaching writing, and teaching in general. So I volunteered with various nonprofits, ran an academic program at my school, and started a tutoring business. In college, I majored in psychology, I did undergrad at Stanford, and I was really fortunate to join a lab focused on emotion research.  

So I've gotten to work with and be mentored by amazing scientists who are spending their careers trying to understand emotion and how people manage emotions. And I've gotten to learn in depth about this whole scientific field that provides really valuable insights. I started drawing on those insights in my tutoring work, as I encountered more and more students who struggled with writing. And the observations from tutoring have informed my research. I graduated from college a couple of years ago, moved to Boston, where I currently live, so I tutor full-time now, and this fall, I'll apply to PhD programs, so I'm still hoping to study these writing interventions formally.  

In today's talk, I'll be drawing on these two experiences as a tutor and as a budding researcher to give you some really practical tools to help 2E writers. And this is the new site for Lucy's Learning Lab. There'll be a link at some point, or maybe already, so feel free to check that out. Before, actually, before we get into those strategies, let's talk for a minute about emotion. When I started in the lab, I think my first day, I asked, what are emotions, and I expected, if people are studying this for their whole careers, surely they have a simple, straightforward definition that everyone agrees on.  

The Four Core Strategies

Nope. Scientists debate the definition of emotion endlessly, but for our purposes, emotions consist of thoughts. Physical sensations in the body, and behaviors. And if we can change those components, then we can change the emotion. So each of these strategies aims to shift emotions from a different perspective, a different understanding of emotion.  

We've got Calm Your Body, which focuses on the physiology. Change your thoughts, so those are the cognitive aspects. Lighten the load, this has to do with cognitive load. And finally, rethink rewards, and that's with more of a behaviorist understanding of writing behavior. We'll go through each of these in more detail, and then apply them to the writers.  

Strategy 1: Calm Your Body

Strategy 1, calm your body. So you may have heard of the sympathetic nervous system. This is the division of the autonomic nervous system that controls involuntary functions, and specifically the fight-or-flight response. So this is what helped our ancestors fight woolly mammoths or other big scary creatures. It increases the heart rate, makes us breathe faster, tenses our muscles, releases adrenaline, and slows down non-essential functions in the body.  

Its counterpart is the parasympathetic nervous system. Which is responsible for rest and digest. It promotes relaxation and recovery, helps us feel calm and safe, slows down our heart rate and breathing, all of that good stuff. In general, when a kid is freaking out about writing, or really anything, the sympathetic nervous system is more active, and we want to calm that down so that they can get into writing mode and tackle the task at hand. The first strategy to do this, I think of this as tip the scales.  

TIP is an acronym, represents four effective ways to calm intense emotions. And this comes from dialectical behavior therapy, which was originally developed for borderline personality disorder, but I think is really applicable to a wide range of experiences. So T is for temperature. This is an example of putting your face in ice water that triggers what's called the dive reflex, so it lowers the heart rate and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Intense exercise matches intense emotions, so you could do jumping japs, run up and down the stairs, sprint, even push-ups.  

Physiological and Cognitive Shifts

Paced breathing. I think this is very fast-paced breathing. I think you're supposed to do it a little slower than in this image. But in general, breathing slowly activates the parasympathetic nervous system. And finally, progressive muscle relaxation involves tensing and relaxing one muscle group at a time. I really like this one, and have been doing it regularly for quite a while, actually.  

It helps in the moment, and it also helps me be more aware of when I'm physically stressed, so I'm a huge fan of PMR. So that's Tip the Scales. A couple of others. I know we just talked about breathing, so maybe it's cheating to list this as a different strategy, but Tip is specifically for really intense emotions, and taking a breath is good pretty much all the time. I have a little GIF that shows you how to breathe and times it on my desktop, and I often have my students do that during sessions when I see that they're really tense.  

Finally, I strongly recommend getting a dog. This is my dog, as we have seen. She is great, she's very fluffy. If you don't have a dog, and you're not getting one for some reason, you could also substitute other animals, soft, furry things, but really, dogs are the best. Okay, so that is our first strategy, calm your body. Next up is change your thoughts.  

Strategy 2: Change Your Thoughts

So, appraisal theory is, scientists speak for, our emotions depend on beliefs about a situation. So when a kid gets a writing assignment, and they start to freak out, it's not just the writing assignment that's causing the freaking out, it's the thoughts about that assignment. Like, this is gonna be so painful, I can't do it, I hate it, I don't want to, etc. So, in theory, if we can change those thoughts, we can change the emotional response. Now, thoughts are generally built on past experiences, and usually when kids have these thoughts about writing, it's because they have very real struggles and skill gaps, so it's a lot more complicated than just saying, think something different, and all will be well.  

I think of shifting thoughts as a long-term process that we keep circling back to. It doesn't happen overnight, but it is worth thinking about and revisiting these beliefs to gradually change them over time. So here are some ways you can do that. Checking the facts, means taking a belief that might be distorted and trying to match it against reality. So one example, I worked with a high schooler who really, really struggled with procrastination.  

Actually, most of my high schoolers struggle with procrastination. But this particular student, just really struggled to get started on assignments. And when we started working together, first time, I asked him, scale of 1 to 10, how painful do you think this essay will be?. And he said, I think a 7. And then we got started, and I said, okay, how bad was it actually? Scale of 1 to 10? 5. So still pretty bad, but that's a difference, right?.  

Reframing Rigid Beliefs

5 versus 7? And we repeated that, and over time, he came to see that writing wasn't always fun, but it also wasn't quite as terrible as he anticipated, and that made it easier to get started. So that's one example of how you could check the facts. Also, when you hang out with psychologists enough, you find yourself just asking people survey questions in everyday life, getting them to rate things on a scale of 1 to 10, it's a whole thing. Next, loosen your grip. Thoughts can be distorted, but sometimes trying to change thoughts gets really exhausting and doesn't necessarily work.  

So instead of changing our thoughts, we can also change how we relate to those thoughts. I've done this in my own writing. I tend toward perfectionism. I may have redone these slides way too many times. And so I've learned that when I start writing. And I stop and hear the thought, that sentence is awful, you have to delete it, it's no good.  

It's not gonna help me to try to play tug-of-war with those thoughts. Instead, I tell myself, that's just the noise that my mind makes. There's that thought again, same old. I'm thinking it, but I don't have to act on it. I can just keep writing. This is hard, it takes practice, but it's been really effective for me.  

Third option is planting seeds, and this is in particular for the rigid thinkers out there, including a lot of my students on the spectrum, who have very strong beliefs about all sorts of things. There's not always an obvious reason behind that belief, but it is very firmly held. For example, I worked with a student who refused to outline. A middle schooler, she was just very opposed to outlines. I was never fully sure why, but she… I don't like outlines, I hate outlines, and you can't make me outline.  

Strategy 3: Lighten the Load

Not the mistake of getting into a debate about outlines. It lasted 20 minutes, and I lost. Because arguing with rigid thinkers rarely ends well. So, I've learned to plant seeds instead. And I really like starting with maybe or I wonder.  

So if someone tells me outlines are useless, I might say, I wonder if there's a version of outlining that could work for you. Maybe. Maybe not. I just wonder. Another funny example of this, when I was working with a high schooler who was reading Hamlet and was outraged by this. Hamlet is stupid, I hate this, why do I have to do this?. And I think I said, maybe you'll find some meaning in the play, and he goes.  

From Shakespeare, as though I just asked him to find the meaning of life in a cereal box, and I couldn't help but laugh, that was pretty funny. So planting seeds, a good strategy, much more effective than arguing about outlines. Next up is Lighten the Load. This comes from what's called cognitive load theory, which has to do with how much information our brains can process at once. And the answer to that is not a lot.  

Our working memory has pretty limited capacity, and if we overwhelm that capacity, it gets hard to learn or really do anything. And this is especially relevant for our 2E kids, many of whom have slower processing speed, working memory limitations, etc. In my experience, overload from writing comes from two sources. So one issue is too much information. That's when we've got two pages of requirements, a rubric, a binder, 5 tabs open, a really long book, maybe a paper that was left in a backpack somewhere, etc.  

Strategy 4: Rethink Rewards

It's a lot, and in a couple minutes, when we revisit Ava, I'll show you exactly how to declutter a messy Google Doc. So that's the first source of overload. The second source, paradoxically, is too little information. Leave a really open-ended prompt, like, write about whatever you want. Which sounds simple, but actually, that's so broad. How are you supposed to decide?.  

A student showed me this meme a couple years ago, and it stuck with me ever since. How to draw an owl, to draw the oval, and then do the rest. And they said, this is what writing assignments feel like. And I thought that was so spot on, because really, a lot of writing assignments are like this. It's like, just write the thing, figure it out. That's really overwhelming.  

So, in this case, we want to add structure. I think most important is to find a first step, and it actually doesn't matter a lot, in my opinion, where you start, you just have to start somewhere. So maybe you spend 2 minutes writing down bad ideas only. This is a fun one, it gets kids relaxed, and we can joke around a little. Maybe you spend 2 minutes gathering your materials, or making a mind map, or talking it through, or even doing the tip skill.  

If someone's really stressed, that would be a great starting point. Notice that all of those are under 2 minutes. That's really important. Keeping it brief makes it so much more manageable. And finally, we've got rethinking rewards. This strategy reflects a behaviorist understanding of psychology, of human behavior.  

Immediate vs. Long-term Rewards

Basically, to simplify a little, if a behavior is rewarding, leads to something positive, we are more likely to repeat that behavior. I take a bite of a delicious cookie, it tastes good, I'll take another bite. If a behavior leads to something bad, we're less likely to repeat it, like drinking spoiled milk. So, what about writing? Well, here's the challenge with writing.  

In the short term, when kids are struggling with writing, or when anyone is struggling with writing, writing is the opposite of rewarding. It's painful and difficult and unpleasant, and avoiding writing feels great, because then you don't have to deal with that. In the long term, though, writing is beneficial, as seen by these happy minions. You build skills, you get better, you don't have to deal with the assignment you procrastinated on. And avoiding writing creates more stress and pain.  

So, if we can find some way to make writing more immediately rewarding. Then we can start to tip the balance here. So here are a couple strategies for accomplishing that. One is cheerleading, being like this penguin. I keep this really simple, I will just say things like, you've got this, great, nice work.  

I know a lot of my students are giving themselves the opposite of this, lots of negative self-talk going on internally, so I want to counteract that. And that's where cheerleading comes in. Doesn't have to be super complicated, but it's helpful. Second option is to picture the payoff. And I'll do this with kids by asking them to visualize. So I might say.  

Visualization and Practical Application (Henry)

I want you to close your eyes and imagine yourself two days from now. And let's say you really buckle down, you finish the essay. You're done, you don't have to worry about it. How does that feel? If we're worried about procrastination, I might also ask them to imagine what it will be like if they've put it off and they have to do the whole thing the night before. That's not comfortable, but I would much rather they think about it now and take a different course of action than have to actually experience that in 2 days.  

I find this particularly helpful for those with ADHD. People sometimes say there are two times in ADHD, now and not now, so time can be really slippery, and two days in the future might as well be two decades, so the visualization makes it much more concrete. And then after we've… we have visualized, the question is, how can you make your future self happier?. Finally, treat yourself. After I finish insert concrete task here, I get to insert enjoyable thing.  

So here are just some examples. Cupcakes, obviously, there's a limitation to some of these. I also find that when I ask kids to identify treats, it's almost always chocolate. I'm like, okay, but you can't eat a chocolate bar for every… no, your parents are not going to be on board with that. So there are other ones too, right?.  

Anything that's fun that someone looks forward to can be a good reward. I've got this talking person here because some of my students just love to talk about their interests, and so I'll say, I would love to hear all about, I don't know, manatees. But we need to finish this writing task, so let's do 8 minutes of writing, and then you can tell me about manatees. So they get writing done, and I learn a lot about very random topics. Video games, you do have to be careful with those, but in theory, they could help.  

Applying Strategies to Henry

Those are our four strategies, high level, with some specific tactics for each. So now, let's go back to our writers and see how we might apply them. This is Henry. Remember, he's our 3rd grade history buff, he's on the spectrum, he's overwhelmed by a ridiculously open-ended writing assignment. We're gonna start with the calm your body skill tip.  

So, having him run up and down the stairs. He is really, really panicking, and we need him to just get in a calmer state. Otherwise, this is gonna be challenging. So, we might gamify this by saying, let's set a timer, we want them to run up and down the stairs, see how many times you can do it in one minute. If he's competitive, this might bring out that competitive urge, and help him calm down a little.  

Change in thoughts. So, Henry is a rigid thinker. I'm not really banking on this strategy being all that effective. Because his mind probably isn't going to change that quickly, but I might plant a seed or two, by suggesting that maybe writing won't always be this hard, or that this feeling will pass. And he may or may not agree with me in the moment.  

Lightening the Load and Special Interests

Lightening the load, this is especially important because he's got this super, super open-ended assignment that's just add a paragraph, or write a paragraph about whatever you want. So I've got a little demo of what we might do. I really like the five W's of journalism. Those are the who, what, when, where, why. And they're surprisingly easy to adapt to different assignments.  

So here, I might tell him to write down who are the characters, name a couple, what are the main events. He might get hung up on the definition of main, but we could just say name any three events, the first that come to mind. When does the story take place? where is it set?. Why would you recommend it to your classmates, or not?.  

So we've taken this wildly open-ended task and turned it into a really specific list of things to do. So that definitely lightens the cognitive load of writing. And finally, oh, I jumped ahead. We're going to use his special interest as a reward, because he definitely wants to talk about medieval catapults, or knights, or something medieval. And that will be a great reward as soon as he is done with this writing task.  

Applying Strategies to Ava: Decluttering

We will learn a lot about the medieval era. Awesome. Okay, that is Henry. Let's move on to Ava. So with the Calm Your Body, she's not freaking out on the same level that Henry was, but she's still pretty physically tense, visibly tense.  

And so taking deep breaths is definitely going to be helpful. I often ask students to take deep breaths while I figure out what the assignment is about, and we might do it together. Ava also has a very nice mouse named Fred, so we will grab Fred and have him on hand for this whole experience. Fred is a supportive presence. We like Fred.  

Second, lightening the load, we are going to declutter a Google Doc. And I just need to stop this screen share and start another one. But if the Zoom gods favor me, then this should go okay. Let's give it a try. Okay. Can people see this, this Google Doc? Yes, okay.  

Practical Demo: Organizing a Google Doc

So this is the original Google Doc. And you can see it is pretty long, it's very long. And all of the text looks the same, so it's really hard to just tell what's what here. So, in order to declutter this, I'm gonna take a few steps. First thing, I'm gonna add headings.  

So I'll go… this is our little style thing, I'll select Heading 1. These look like assignment instructions, so I'm gonna say… Assignment instructions… Super creative. These are key dates and deadlines, so I'll also make this a heading. These look like a rubric of some sort, so I'm gonna do that too. Let's go rubric… And I'll leave out the rest, but adding headings would be the first step.  

Step 2. I'm gonna go to File, Page Setup, down here. And currently, we're on Pages. I'm going to select Page Lists. I think this looks slightly nicer, but really the big bonus is now we've got these little arrows, and we can actually collapse this. So it's all still there, but we're gonna hide it, and so we don't have to look at it.  

Formatting Tools for Scannability

This is just helpful in general, in my opinion, but especially for my students with dyslexia, slow processing speed, it feels so much better not to have a massive wall of text in front of you. So, we've already made a lot of progress with this. We can go further, though. We're gonna do some subheadings, yay. So this seems like… general instructions… I know that should be capitalized, but we're gonna leave it for now.  

Paragraph, something… This looks like additional. Oh, and I forgot, another bonus. Click tabs over here, and you get all of these. You can easily jump around and navigate. Okay, a couple more handy things. I really like to put things in boxes.  

My students make fun of me for this, but I stand by the boxes anyway. So we'll go insert… table. And I'm gonna select just a 1x1 table, like this, and now we have a handy box. And if we put this in here, it looks visually contained, and it just becomes easier to move our attention around the document. I also adore checklists.  

The Psychology of Checklists and Color

Making checklists makes me feel powerful. That's also helpful. So we could do step one, step two, step three, and then we can actually check those off. Very exciting. A couple of my younger kids enjoy just checking these off the moment they appear on the screen, and then we have to talk about how checkboxes are significantly less useful if you check them off before they're completed.  

So it's a good opportunity to practice self-control, but otherwise, these are great. All right. And finally, I really like changing the colors, and I'm actually just gonna show you the final version, so you're not sitting here watching me do this for 10 minutes. This actually, this screen reader thing came from yet another student who's so sensitive to light that just a screen like this bothers their eyes. Meanwhile, I have another student on the spectrum whose favorite colors are neon pink and neon green together.  

So it's just a fascinating variety. Here is our final version, so I've colored these, and you can see this looks so much nicer, so much easier to see what is where. And we can also see that Ava actually has a number of ideas that are reasonably well finished. reasonably well-developed, so that's great. Okay, so we've done all of this, and I'm going to stay on the Google Doc for just one more minute.  

Breaking the Perfectionist Spiral

So let's say now Ava is starting to write. I think that the biggest monster in Frankenstein and then she pauses, and selects all of this, and deletes it. And maybe she does that again a couple times. I see this a lot, I do this a lot. It's this perfectionist spiral of, I write something, I don't like the way it sounds, let me get rid of it and make it better, and that can just go on forever.  

And it's really hard to write something and just leave it there when you hate it. So here is the strategy that I really like to use in this situation. So let's say… I'm Ava, I'm writing this, I really want to delete it, but I also need to break this spiral. Instead, I'm going to highlight, I'm gonna go to this little highlight thing, and color it black.  

So I can't see it anymore, it can't bother me as much, but it's still there, and so I'm still building up a tolerance for that imperfection, and if it turns out this wasn't a terrible idea, it's right there on the document. This also stops us from spending half an hour writing and deleting and having nothing on the page, which can be incredibly discouraging. So, I'm gonna go back to the slides. That was our little Google Doc adventure. And… Here we are.  

Applying Strategies to Ava (Recap)

Awesome. And changing thoughts-wise, we might be practicing this whole letting go of the inner editor, trying to disregard that voice that says what you're writing is terrible, change it at once. I definitely have that voice. It's loud. Okay, and finally, Ava is pretty motivated to work on this project, so she doesn't need a ton of rewards, but I'm definitely gonna be saying, you got this, great job, it doesn't have to be perfect, because I know that in her head, she's hearing the exact opposite, and I want to counteract that.  

So, awesome. We've gotten her through the first draft, she gets to go hang out with Fred the Mouse and be done for now. Yay. And yeah, this is the before and after, so you can just appreciate the beauty of a well-organized Google Doc. Last but not least, we have Eli.  

Applying Strategies to Eli: Managing Avoidance

Eli's our 11th grader, he's been procrastinating on history assignments, he's procrastinating on this one, and procrastination is not going to work well for him. And let's say for the sake of the example that he's agreed to a tutoring session. So he's in a session with me, but he's not super motivated. We don't really need to calm him down, because he is cool as a cucumber. If anything, I might need to calm down, because I'm getting a little stressed about this assignment on his behalf.  

Changing thoughts might not work out too well. Remember, he's on the debate team, so if this becomes a debate, he will almost certainly win. And also, debating the necessity of writing can easily become yet another way to avoid writing. Lightening the load, so I'm a big fan of checklists, as you heard. Breaking the assignment down into specific steps is almost always a good idea.  

So, we might say, let's start by talking through the essay, and then start writing. The talking part is great, he's very good at talking, but when it comes time to start writing, that's when it becomes harder. And it really takes coaxing and encouragement on my behalf to get him to write. And he might draft a sentence or two, and then stop, and off in distraction land, talking and talking about something unrelated. So, what do you do in that situation?  

Forceful vs. Gentle Encouragement

I have a few different approaches. I'm gonna name the avoidance by saying something like, right now you're talking, you're very good at talking, you don't need my help with that, but you do need my help with writing, so please let's do some writing. I'm not always this forceful with students. For some students, this would be disastrous, but when they are really, really determined to avoid, and they're doing it very cheerfully and energetically. I sometimes have to be this forceful to get through, so I would only do this if we have a good rapport and they know that I care about them, etc..  

Another thing that catches people off guard and is effective is to say really calmly and neutrally, do you want this to take a long time?. I'm not being snarky, I'm not being sarcastic. I'm genuinely just asking, do you want this to take a long time?. And they'll say, No?  

And then I'll answer, okay, so what can you do to get it done efficiently, and how can I help?. And that sort of turns the tables and invites them to problem-solve, and also gently points out that they're maybe not acting in their own best interest by dallying. Another version of this is to… Again, calmly and non-judgmentally describe consequences. So say something like, if you buckle down and we can get this done, I think we could finish in the next 20 minutes, and you'll have the rest of the weekend free.  

The Impact of Extensions and Scaffolding

If we keep dallying, this could take hours. So, let me know how I can help and what you want to do. So those are 3 ways that we can really encourage writing in the moment and cut through that avoidance. Here's the thing, though. At the end of the day, we're fighting an uphill battle, because avoidance and procrastination are a pattern for Eli, and they have been heavily reinforced in the past.  

He's had these extensions, he's able to turn things in late without an effect on his grades. So not only has he learned that it's fine to procrastinate, he's also learned that when a teacher or tutor says, you need to do this, it doesn't really mean anything. So, the real lasting solution is actually going to be to get rid of those extensions and have real deadlines. In many cases, extensions are the opposite of an accommodation. They're almost an anti-accommodation, because they can just extend the procrastination.  

I'm not saying this is the case for everyone, so please don't interpret this as a blanket stance on extensions, but I've seen enough cases where extensions get in the way that I felt this was worth including. If anything, students with ADHD would often benefit from more deadlines and more scaffolding to get that assignment done. Final thoughts, the dog again, so cute. Practice. Practice is very important.  

Practice and Virtuous Cycles

Students will sometimes tell me, I tried using a timer, I tried a checklist, and it didn't work. That's a little bit like saying, I went to one violin lesson, and I still can't play a Beethoven symphony. That's just not how that works, right? These are skills, they take practice. I wish I had an overnight solution to make writing magically easy.  

If I had found that, I probably would have monetized it by now. In the meantime, while I search for that. All of these strategies take practice, so if at first you don't succeed, circle back. Second point, success increases motivation. There's a whole side note here with some recent research on achievement and motivation, but if we can set students up for success with writing, that's going to create a virtuous cycle and be motivating.  

And finally, I mentioned that I've struggled with perfectionism. Part of my trying to manage that perfectionism is pushing myself to share my writing with the world, even when I feel that it is not perfect. And it probably isn't, because few things are. So, on my blog, I have a written version of this presentation, all for strategies, specific tactics, and case studies, and on that blog, I'll also be posting additional pieces of writing.  

Final Thoughts and Audience Q&A

About the biggest questions that come up with supporting 2E writers. So we can maybe drop that in the chat, feel free to check that out. And I would love to take questions.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Great, thank you so much, Lucy. Those were, great strategies that I'd like to try with my own kids. So one question that came up is, where should a first grader be in terms of writing?.  

Dyslexia has been ruled out, although she writes some numbers backwards. She doesn't prefer writing, but she will do it. In her school evaluation, she needed to write a paragraph and wrote only a sentence. Then, refusing to do the rest. And the psych said she was really worried about it.  

I'm not sure I need to be, or what the standards for grade 1 are. So how do you feel about the expectations of different ages of, you know, especially very young writers?.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah, it's really hard because… So, I haven't worked in a classroom, I'm not a classroom teacher, so I don't have a great sense of what's normative. I also, with norms, are those representing where kids should be, where most kids actually are?.  

Navigating School Standards and Scaffolding

It's just hard to say. so I don't… I feel like I don't have a great answer to this, unfortunately. I guess I would wonder, how they're doing in school, like, is a kid keeping up with what's expected of them in the classroom?. Because if they're not, then that might affect their ability to learn.  

I also, like, in this case, writing a sentence versus a paragraph, is that ability, or is that not wanting to, or resisting the task, but maybe still being able to write a paragraph?. I wish I had a clearer answer for this, but I don't think there's a simple answer to where a kid should be in learning. But I think talking to teachers and getting that perspective is probably valuable, so that might be the best thing I can recommend here.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Makes sense. Related to the Google Doc that you showed, someone says, I may have missed this earlier, is the student supposed to be able to redo the Google Doc like this?.  

Versus the person helping with the scaffolding. I'm thinking of a high schooler in 10th or 11th grade.  

Lucy Wallace: supposed to is a funny term. If they can, it's great. Often, they can't, and so doing it with them is awesome, and giving them that scaffolding, and with practice, students start learning to do this for themselves.  

Embracing the Student "In Front of Us"

Yeah, if they can, it's great, but if they can't, that's just where they are, and we work with that. I think a lot of working with 2E students is letting go of the shoulds, because we can get really caught up in what should work, where they should be, etc, and that gets in the way of teaching the student in front of us.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Okay, oop. Thank you. I like the declutter strategy. What are your thoughts on an assignment that is interpreted as… by a student as having an infinite amount of steps?.  

Lucy Wallace: Sometimes I interpret assignments that way, too. Some of the college and high school assignments can be really, really complicated. I think in that case, I think we can acknowledge that we might not be able to identify every single step, but there can be at least a few good starting points.  

I also think this strategy works best when practiced repeatedly, and if we can find a reliable first step for any assignment. Like, with one student I worked with, we had this writing process. That we laid out with this color-coded graphic, and it was always, like, we talk through the prompt, we write down bullet points, we expand the bullet points into sentences, we organize the sentences.  

Writing Process Consistency

no matter what they're writing about, we always follow those steps. And later that got expanded and adapted for different assignments, but just having that consistency and knowing that no matter the situation, I know what my first three steps are, that can really help. And that's the tricky thing about writing, too. You can't map out the entire process in advance, so I would say start somewhere.  

Where you start is less important than just having a starting point.  

Yael Valek, REEL: That makes sense. Often that first hump is the hardest.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Someone was asking, too, I noticed, what about using speech-to-text?. Do you use that as a starting point just to get something on the paper, and then they can reorganize it and edit it, move it around?.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah, speech-to-text… okay, this one is complicated, because… It can be a super helpful tool. It definitely is for a lot of students I work with, and sometimes I use it as well, but over-reliance on speech-to-text can get in the way of writing learning. I've worked with kids who use speech-to-text exclusively, and haven't really developed writing skills.  

Thoughtful Use of Dictation

And because they don't have much experience with writing, when they… speech-to-text, they're really just talking. If you were to write down everything that I'm saying right now, maybe an AI is doing that, it wouldn't really be prose, right?. Writing isn't just talking on paper. And so I do worry when kids are using speech-to-text exclusively.  

That said, I think when deployed thoughtfully, it can be a really good strategy. And I've also worked with students who have significant dysgraphia. Spelling is just kind of a nightmare. And I've seen kids develop really creative strategies to combine typing and predictive spelling technology with dictating.  

So maybe typing a few words, but if there's a really hard word to spell, they'll switch to dictation, or just deciding, like, in this moment, is it worth getting the typing practice, or does dictation make more sense?. So that's my little speech, just be thoughtful about dictation, but yeah, it can be super helpful.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Our son tends to resist strongly or even throw a tantrum when others, like a teacher, tutor, or parents, offers to help on any struggles or on writing. Any suggestions?  

Lucy Wallace: That's a tough one. I might approach him in a calm moment, and just say something like, I've got a dilemma, because… when I try to help with writing, it seems like it's not really helpful.  

Problem Solving and Special Interests

Maybe, like, what would you do if you were me? What do you think would work?. I think asking kids to solve problems is a very underrated strategy in general. Sometimes it doesn't occur to me, and then I ask them, and I'm like, oh wow, they have really good ideas when I take those ideas seriously.  

So I think that could be good, and I might also think about, is there any source of motivation?. Maybe he's not motivated to do the writing assignments themselves, but maybe getting them done efficiently and not having them take up a ton of time. would be good. Or maybe just… I find that if I ask students, do you want writing to be easier?.  

The answer is rarely no. People generally want writing to be easier if it's painful, so that could also be a starting point.  

Yael Valek, REEL: And I heard you earlier talk about special interests, and I wanted to circle back to that, because one thing we didn't get to talk about, and I know not all schools and not all assignments at all grade levels have flexibility, but I've noticed from my own kids that whenever there's any choice of something you can write about, if they choose their special interest, it helps so much.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah.

Yael Valek, REEL: So I don't know if you've had luck, having students advocate for that, or sort of twist the assignment a little to be a little bit about, you know, that kind of thing.  

Lucy Wallace: I can think of some really good examples. I actually worked with a college student who was reading, I think, Tolstoy? Yeah, I think Tolstoy.  

Interest-Driven Writing and Messy Drafting

And the student told me this story really lines up with this video game that has a profound commentary on life and death. And fortunately, this was a cool professor who heard that and was like, yeah, that's awesome, write about it. And so the student got to do a whole essay about that. Definitely increased the motivation.  

It was so insightful and brilliant, I loved that.  

Yael Valek, REEL: That's amazing. I'm so glad the professor took a chance on that. I've had mixed, findings with that. We're getting some heart… Any tips for writers who get very distracted by technical details, like spelling and grammar, so that they stop too often to correct the details and make little progress on the actual writing?.  

Lucy Wallace: Yes. So, I would practice messy drafting with them. I demonstrate this for students when they're really struggling, so I'll show them, I'm gonna write a messy draft here, I'm not gonna stop to correct spelling and grammar.  

Look at that typo. Look, that sentence doesn't even make any sense, and I didn't delete it. Look at how I abandoned that thought mid-phrase. I think I have to energetically model it. I've even created first draft bingo, where each square is, like, spelling error, typo, space instead of word, abandoned a sentence, something like that.  

Gamification and Classroom Writing Challenges

So if you gamify it, and if you treat it as almost an… Sorry, my dog is being so weird, that's very distracting. If you gamify it and treat it as almost an endurance sport, like, let's try to write for 2 minutes, next time 3, and then 4, I think that's a great way to develop that skill. And I say that as someone who is usually reluctant to just leave typos uncorrected.  

Yael Valek, REEL: I love the idea of first draft bingo. That's great. Okay, so we have some… you probably know that because of AI, more and more assign… writing assignments are happening inside the classroom, so there's a couple questions about that. Middle and high school assignments are starting to be only in the classroom where there aren't you can't meet with your writing tutor.  

And then there's also a question about timed writing assignments, because the time boundaries may exacerbate anxiety. So I don't know if you have any Things to say about those.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah, so with the timed writing, this is an interesting one because there… so, the research on writing anxiety is disappointingly meeker. It's… it's just kind of a mess. I looked into that scientific body of literature, hoping to get some insights, and the main insight was people define things very inconsistently.  

Timed Tests and Student Support

But math anxiety is much better researched, and there's significant work on timing and that effect on math anxiety. And I don't have a super deep knowledge of it, but from what I understand. There's a perception that time tests exacerbate anxiety, but really it's more that, like, poor performance and a lack of knowledge generally create anxiety, and there's sometimes a conflation of causation and correlation there.  

So with timed tests for writing, I… I'm not sure that the solution would be to avoid timing, I think getting more exposure to that would be helpful in building the skills. That's just my first instinct. And with AI, is the question, like, what to do if you can't have a writing tutor in the moment?.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Yeah.

Lucy Wallace: Practice… I think the best you can do is practice similar tasks with support, or maybe if teachers are open to having, like, a graphic organizer, sentence scaffolds, a clear checklist, something like that, so you don't need a person, but there is some form of support.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Yeah, makes sense. Do you find you have success where others have not in helping reluctant writers?.  

The Role of Non-Parents and Success Cycles

My kids won't let me or his dad help him. Last night, he was up till 1 staring at a blank screen. The assignment was to write two paragraphs, and he'd been working on it all day.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah, I have had success where others are not. I wish I were 100% successful. Some students I work with, we don't quite click, it doesn't work for whatever reason, so I don't want to be grandiose here.  

I also… I wish I knew exactly what every kid needed and what helped them, and had that down to a science, like an exact prescription for what's going to fix the problem. And I think there's a lot of random variation, so sometimes you just have to keep trying until you find something. So yes, I've had success with students who seemed like nothing helped them write. I'm not sure that's anything specific to me, but just the benefit of keeping trying.  

Yael Valek, REEL: I do also find that in the teen years, having it not be your own parents, they don't want to hear it from their… they don't want to hear anything from their parents, right?.  

Lucy Wallace: I could say the exact same thing as a parent, and it would be so much better received, so that's really one of my big selling points, I'm not a parent.  

Dyslexia Resources and Closing

Yael Valek, REEL: Are there any particular reading and writing programs that you use or recommend for students who are diagnosed with dyslexia in middle or high school?.  

Lucy Wallace: Reading or writing program. So, I've been looking into what's called the Hawkman Method. The book is The Writing Revolution. I'll put that name in the chat. It's like this, and you can Google it. I'm thinking of getting formally trained in this.  

I really like it because it involves sentence-level support, practicing constructing sentences. Which is… that just doesn't… that doesn't happen magically. Like, we don't learn to write sentences often without some sort of formal support, and this is the first program I've seen that actually provides that. Has a lot of scaffolding and explicit instruction.  

So, yeah, that's exactly, that's the link. I know people do Orton Gillingham, and some really like that. I can't think of any others off the top of my head, but those two do come to mind.  

Yael Valek, REEL: And someone else is also saying, Per your previous response about it being you and not the parent, that when kids have rejection-sensitive dysphoria, having. Feedback from parents is even more personal and distressing.  

Lucy Wallace: I could totally see that, yeah.  

Yael Valek, REEL: And so another… another person says, their daughter tends to have rigid thinking about independence. If she's given an assignment, she assumes she should be able to do it by herself. Therefore, if someone offers help, she internalizes that as failure. We've talked a lot about the steps of learning, and how even adults ask for help regularly.  

Lucy Wallace: I mean, absolutely. I also sometimes, students who think rigidly will sometimes worry that getting help is cheating, so that's another one that we talk through, but I think, giving examples of asking for help is a really good one, and trying to think of other ones… I think… I mean, I don't know that anyone is truly independent, in that we all rely on other people or learn from other people in some way.  

Shifting Rigid Beliefs and Wrapping Up

So it sounds like you're approaching that very reasonably, and it just might take a long time to… not erode, but to shift those rigid beliefs.  

Yael Valek, REEL: And then, Just so you know, someone recommended a book called How to Read Literature Like a Professor, and said it was very demystifying for his 2E son.  

Lucy Wallace: Oh, awesome. I've heard of that, but haven't read it, so it sounds good. Oh. Oh, I guess another thing, a parent just mentioned this to me, there are chapter books specifically for kids with dyslexia, slash ADHD that are, like, faster-paced, smaller blocks of text, easier to read, and this parent mentioned that her son, who is a reluctant reader, blazed through a whole series and felt much more confident after that.  

So I can just search that up really quickly. That's another good option, I think, for reading.  

Yael Valek, REEL: And you said you have a blog post you wanted us to share about some of. shared today, I'll put that in the chat as well. This is a, blog that Lucy wrote about all the tips that she shared today.  

Lucy Wallace: And these are the dyslexia, ADHD-friendly kids chapter books. That got rave reviews. So, yay.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Just so you know, you're getting a lot of, we're so impressed with you, Lucy, thanks for all the great ideas, and I still… There was one up higher that was also… now I'm gonna lose it, but, that was also praising. how helpful this was. You are incredible, Lucy.  

Thank you for all the wisdom, resources, and information. Thank you for everything you do to support the children you work with.  

Lucy Wallace: Thank you, so nice of you, I appreciate it.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Lots of love in the chat. And Lucy has written a lot of articles that have been super helpful, on REEL, and so I'm also going to just put the link to all of her articles that she's written on our website in the chat, and Callie has put, our, link to, providing feedback on this talk. And, this is the third in our writing series this year, so if you missed the first two events, we have other parts.  

I love how it's been an arc of, kind of, diagnosing what's wrong with writing, essay writing, at the high school level, silly characters, and now the emotions behind getting going on writing, so… We really appreciate, your wisdom. Both from your experience, your research, and your own life. So thank you so much, Lucy. And we'll stop the recording, and we can chat, and you can read all the love in the… chat.  

Lucy Wallace: Awesome.

More of the transcript here - Lucy Wallace's Presentation:

Meeting the Writers

She works one-on-one with students of all ages, helping them strengthen their writing and thinking skills. She has extensive experience supporting neurodivergent and twice-exceptional learners. Outside of work, Lucy loves reading, rollerblading, and studying Russian, usually not all at once. And we will put a link to Lucy's Learning Lab in the chat, and I will let Lucy now share her slides. So welcome, we're so excited to have you.  

Lucy Wallace: Thank you for the introduction. Am I talking loud enough? Is this good? Okay, great. I'm told I have a quiet voice. Let me share my screen. Alright, is that working? Awesome. Let's meet some young writers.  

This is Henry. Henry is a walking encyclopedia. He's a third grader, absolutely loves history, particularly enjoys evaluating historical fiction based on the historical accuracy. He could go on for hours with that. Henry is autistic and easily overwhelmed. He struggles with flexibility, and writing can be really hit or miss.  

Case Studies: Henry, Ava, and Eli

When he likes what he's writing about, it's easy, and the words flow, but when he doesn't like the topic, it's like pulling teeth. So right now, he has an assignment that seems simple to his parents. He has to write a paragraph about a book that he understood really well. But Henry is screaming and crying and refusing to write, and his parents don't know what to do. This is Ava. She's in 8th grade. She's especially strong in math and art.  

She has great visual skills and spatial reasoning, and she's outdoorsy and really appreciates natural beauty and small details that many people might overlook. She was recently diagnosed with dyslexia and slow processing speed. And although in the past Ava enjoyed writing, she has really been struggling this year. Her assignments are more challenging and complex. They're taking up a lot of her time, she really struggles to get started, she gets stuck and feels like she doesn't know what to write, and sometimes it takes her hours or days to begin.  

She's recently started calling herself stupid and saying she's terrible at writing. And right now, she has to write an essay about Frankenstein, and has been at her computer for hours, just writing and deleting. And her parents don't know what to do. This is Eli. He's a junior in high school, very bright, hyper-verbal, super outgoing, star of the debate team, loves it.  

And he has ADHD, so his mind moves really quickly, he gets bored easily, he's always jumping on to the next thing. He's currently taking a challenging history class that he really likes in general, but he's developed this pattern of procrastinating on writing assignments. He usually starts the assignment the night before it's due, and often gets it done late, but because of his IEP, he is able to turn the assignments in late and not get penalized for it. Now it's close to the end of the year. And he has a big essay that his parents know can't be started the night before, like, this is something you really do need to begin in advance.  

The Toolkit: Understanding Emotion and Writing

And they're trying to tell him he's gotta get started, but he really doesn't want to. They don't know what to do. If any of these struggles sound familiar, you are in the right place. My name is Lucy, I'm a writing tutor. This is now repetitive because y'all already established this, but I've been working with kids like Ava and Henry and Eli for years.  

And through this work, I've learned and developed lots of strategies, to work with these writing challenges and the tricky emotions that come with writing. So today, I want to share those with you. I'm going to provide a comprehensive toolkit to help 2E kids overcome writing difficulties. And I'll show you how to implement these strategies, so we're going to revisit these three writers and think about how to help them. But before I get into that, let me just say a little bit more about myself.  

So… Who are you again? It's… I get this question a lot, it's a good one. As established, I am Lucy. I'm 2E, so at age 7 or so, I was fascinated by Shakespeare and performed, Juliet's Balcony speech for my confused classmates, but I didn't really understand the concept of taking turns in conversations. So that kind of sums up my childhood. Here I am, having won some small writing prize at the library. I don't know why I'm wearing a beanie.  

Connecting Science and Strategy

California's not that cold. And then here I am at this big football game, and all I want to do is read Harry Potter. In high school, I discovered that I love teaching writing, and teaching in general. So I volunteered with various nonprofits, ran an academic program at my school, and started a tutoring business. In college, I majored in psychology, I did undergrad at Stanford, and I was really fortunate to join a lab focused on emotion research.  

So I've gotten to work with and be mentored by amazing scientists who are spending their careers trying to understand emotion and how people manage emotions. And I've gotten to learn in depth about this whole scientific field that provides really valuable insights. I started drawing on those insights in my tutoring work, as I encountered more and more students who struggled with writing. And the observations from tutoring have informed my research. I graduated from college a couple of years ago, moved to Boston, where I currently live, so I tutor full-time now, and this fall, I'll apply to PhD programs, so I'm still hoping to study these writing interventions formally.  

In today's talk, I'll be drawing on these two experiences as a tutor and as a budding researcher to give you some really practical tools to help 2E writers. And this is the new site for Lucy's Learning Lab. There'll be a link at some point, or maybe already, so feel free to check that out. Before, actually, before we get into those strategies, let's talk for a minute about emotion. When I started in the lab, I think my first day, I asked, what are emotions, and I expected, if people are studying this for their whole careers, surely they have a simple, straightforward definition that everyone agrees on.  

The Four Core Strategies

Nope. Scientists debate the definition of emotion endlessly, but for our purposes, emotions consist of thoughts. Physical sensations in the body, and behaviors. And if we can change those components, then we can change the emotion. So each of these strategies aims to shift emotions from a different perspective, a different understanding of emotion.  

We've got Calm Your Body, which focuses on the physiology. Change your thoughts, so those are the cognitive aspects. Lighten the load, this has to do with cognitive load. And finally, rethink rewards, and that's with more of a behaviorist understanding of writing behavior. We'll go through each of these in more detail, and then apply them to the writers.  

Strategy 1: Calm Your Body

Strategy 1, calm your body. So you may have heard of the sympathetic nervous system. This is the division of the autonomic nervous system that controls involuntary functions, and specifically the fight-or-flight response. So this is what helped our ancestors fight woolly mammoths or other big scary creatures. It increases the heart rate, makes us breathe faster, tenses our muscles, releases adrenaline, and slows down non-essential functions in the body.  

Its counterpart is the parasympathetic nervous system. Which is responsible for rest and digest. It promotes relaxation and recovery, helps us feel calm and safe, slows down our heart rate and breathing, all of that good stuff. In general, when a kid is freaking out about writing, or really anything, the sympathetic nervous system is more active, and we want to calm that down so that they can get into writing mode and tackle the task at hand. The first strategy to do this, I think of this as tip the scales.  

TIP is an acronym, represents four effective ways to calm intense emotions. And this comes from dialectical behavior therapy, which was originally developed for borderline personality disorder, but I think is really applicable to a wide range of experiences. So T is for temperature. This is an example of putting your face in ice water that triggers what's called the dive reflex, so it lowers the heart rate and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Intense exercise matches intense emotions, so you could do jumping japs, run up and down the stairs, sprint, even push-ups.  

Physiological and Cognitive Shifts

Paced breathing. I think this is very fast-paced breathing. I think you're supposed to do it a little slower than in this image. But in general, breathing slowly activates the parasympathetic nervous system. And finally, progressive muscle relaxation involves tensing and relaxing one muscle group at a time. I really like this one, and have been doing it regularly for quite a while, actually.  

It helps in the moment, and it also helps me be more aware of when I'm physically stressed, so I'm a huge fan of PMR. So that's Tip the Scales. A couple of others. I know we just talked about breathing, so maybe it's cheating to list this as a different strategy, but Tip is specifically for really intense emotions, and taking a breath is good pretty much all the time. I have a little GIF that shows you how to breathe and times it on my desktop, and I often have my students do that during sessions when I see that they're really tense.  

Finally, I strongly recommend getting a dog. This is my dog, as we have seen. She is great, she's very fluffy. If you don't have a dog, and you're not getting one for some reason, you could also substitute other animals, soft, furry things, but really, dogs are the best. Okay, so that is our first strategy, calm your body. Next up is change your thoughts.  

Strategy 2: Change Your Thoughts

So, appraisal theory is, scientists speak for, our emotions depend on beliefs about a situation. So when a kid gets a writing assignment, and they start to freak out, it's not just the writing assignment that's causing the freaking out, it's the thoughts about that assignment. Like, this is gonna be so painful, I can't do it, I hate it, I don't want to, etc. So, in theory, if we can change those thoughts, we can change the emotional response. Now, thoughts are generally built on past experiences, and usually when kids have these thoughts about writing, it's because they have very real struggles and skill gaps, so it's a lot more complicated than just saying, think something different, and all will be well.  

I think of shifting thoughts as a long-term process that we keep circling back to. It doesn't happen overnight, but it is worth thinking about and revisiting these beliefs to gradually change them over time. So here are some ways you can do that. Checking the facts, means taking a belief that might be distorted and trying to match it against reality. So one example, I worked with a high schooler who really, really struggled with procrastination.  

Actually, most of my high schoolers struggle with procrastination. But this particular student, just really struggled to get started on assignments. And when we started working together, first time, I asked him, scale of 1 to 10, how painful do you think this essay will be?. And he said, I think a 7. And then we got started, and I said, okay, how bad was it actually? Scale of 1 to 10? 5. So still pretty bad, but that's a difference, right?.  

Reframing Rigid Beliefs

5 versus 7? And we repeated that, and over time, he came to see that writing wasn't always fun, but it also wasn't quite as terrible as he anticipated, and that made it easier to get started. So that's one example of how you could check the facts. Also, when you hang out with psychologists enough, you find yourself just asking people survey questions in everyday life, getting them to rate things on a scale of 1 to 10, it's a whole thing. Next, loosen your grip. Thoughts can be distorted, but sometimes trying to change thoughts gets really exhausting and doesn't necessarily work.  

So instead of changing our thoughts, we can also change how we relate to those thoughts. I've done this in my own writing. I tend toward perfectionism. I may have redone these slides way too many times. And so I've learned that when I start writing. And I stop and hear the thought, that sentence is awful, you have to delete it, it's no good.  

It's not gonna help me to try to play tug-of-war with those thoughts. Instead, I tell myself, that's just the noise that my mind makes. There's that thought again, same old. I'm thinking it, but I don't have to act on it. I can just keep writing. This is hard, it takes practice, but it's been really effective for me.  

Third option is planting seeds, and this is in particular for the rigid thinkers out there, including a lot of my students on the spectrum, who have very strong beliefs about all sorts of things. There's not always an obvious reason behind that belief, but it is very firmly held. For example, I worked with a student who refused to outline. A middle schooler, she was just very opposed to outlines. I was never fully sure why, but she… I don't like outlines, I hate outlines, and you can't make me outline.  

Strategy 3: Lighten the Load

Not the mistake of getting into a debate about outlines. It lasted 20 minutes, and I lost. Because arguing with rigid thinkers rarely ends well. So, I've learned to plant seeds instead. And I really like starting with maybe or I wonder.  

So if someone tells me outlines are useless, I might say, I wonder if there's a version of outlining that could work for you. Maybe. Maybe not. I just wonder. Another funny example of this, when I was working with a high schooler who was reading Hamlet and was outraged by this. Hamlet is stupid, I hate this, why do I have to do this?. And I think I said, maybe you'll find some meaning in the play, and he goes.  

From Shakespeare, as though I just asked him to find the meaning of life in a cereal box, and I couldn't help but laugh, that was pretty funny. So planting seeds, a good strategy, much more effective than arguing about outlines. Next up is Lighten the Load. This comes from what's called cognitive load theory, which has to do with how much information our brains can process at once. And the answer to that is not a lot.  

Our working memory has pretty limited capacity, and if we overwhelm that capacity, it gets hard to learn or really do anything. And this is especially relevant for our 2E kids, many of whom have slower processing speed, working memory limitations, etc. In my experience, overload from writing comes from two sources. So one issue is too much information. That's when we've got two pages of requirements, a rubric, a binder, 5 tabs open, a really long book, maybe a paper that was left in a backpack somewhere, etc.  

Strategy 4: Rethink Rewards

It's a lot, and in a couple minutes, when we revisit Ava, I'll show you exactly how to declutter a messy Google Doc. So that's the first source of overload. The second source, paradoxically, is too little information. Leave a really open-ended prompt, like, write about whatever you want. Which sounds simple, but actually, that's so broad. How are you supposed to decide?.  

A student showed me this meme a couple years ago, and it stuck with me ever since. How to draw an owl, to draw the oval, and then do the rest. And they said, this is what writing assignments feel like. And I thought that was so spot on, because really, a lot of writing assignments are like this. It's like, just write the thing, figure it out. That's really overwhelming.  

So, in this case, we want to add structure. I think most important is to find a first step, and it actually doesn't matter a lot, in my opinion, where you start, you just have to start somewhere. So maybe you spend 2 minutes writing down bad ideas only. This is a fun one, it gets kids relaxed, and we can joke around a little. Maybe you spend 2 minutes gathering your materials, or making a mind map, or talking it through, or even doing the tip skill.  

If someone's really stressed, that would be a great starting point. Notice that all of those are under 2 minutes. That's really important. Keeping it brief makes it so much more manageable. And finally, we've got rethinking rewards. This strategy reflects a behaviorist understanding of psychology, of human behavior.  

Immediate vs. Long-term Rewards

Basically, to simplify a little, if a behavior is rewarding, leads to something positive, we are more likely to repeat that behavior. I take a bite of a delicious cookie, it tastes good, I'll take another bite. If a behavior leads to something bad, we're less likely to repeat it, like drinking spoiled milk. So, what about writing? Well, here's the challenge with writing.  

In the short term, when kids are struggling with writing, or when anyone is struggling with writing, writing is the opposite of rewarding. It's painful and difficult and unpleasant, and avoiding writing feels great, because then you don't have to deal with that. In the long term, though, writing is beneficial, as seen by these happy minions. You build skills, you get better, you don't have to deal with the assignment you procrastinated on. And avoiding writing creates more stress and pain.  

So, if we can find some way to make writing more immediately rewarding. Then we can start to tip the balance here. So here are a couple strategies for accomplishing that. One is cheerleading, being like this penguin. I keep this really simple, I will just say things like, you've got this, great, nice work.  

I know a lot of my students are giving themselves the opposite of this, lots of negative self-talk going on internally, so I want to counteract that. And that's where cheerleading comes in. Doesn't have to be super complicated, but it's helpful. Second option is to picture the payoff. And I'll do this with kids by asking them to visualize. So I might say.  

Visualization and Practical Application (Henry)

I want you to close your eyes and imagine yourself two days from now. And let's say you really buckle down, you finish the essay. You're done, you don't have to worry about it. How does that feel? If we're worried about procrastination, I might also ask them to imagine what it will be like if they've put it off and they have to do the whole thing the night before. That's not comfortable, but I would much rather they think about it now and take a different course of action than have to actually experience that in 2 days.  

I find this particularly helpful for those with ADHD. People sometimes say there are two times in ADHD, now and not now, so time can be really slippery, and two days in the future might as well be two decades, so the visualization makes it much more concrete. And then after we've… we have visualized, the question is, how can you make your future self happier?. Finally, treat yourself. After I finish insert concrete task here, I get to insert enjoyable thing.  

So here are just some examples. Cupcakes, obviously, there's a limitation to some of these. I also find that when I ask kids to identify treats, it's almost always chocolate. I'm like, okay, but you can't eat a chocolate bar for every… no, your parents are not going to be on board with that. So there are other ones too, right?.  

Anything that's fun that someone looks forward to can be a good reward. I've got this talking person here because some of my students just love to talk about their interests, and so I'll say, I would love to hear all about, I don't know, manatees. But we need to finish this writing task, so let's do 8 minutes of writing, and then you can tell me about manatees. So they get writing done, and I learn a lot about very random topics. Video games, you do have to be careful with those, but in theory, they could help.  

Applying Strategies to Henry

Those are our four strategies, high level, with some specific tactics for each. So now, let's go back to our writers and see how we might apply them. This is Henry. Remember, he's our 3rd grade history buff, he's on the spectrum, he's overwhelmed by a ridiculously open-ended writing assignment. We're gonna start with the calm your body skill tip.  

So, having him run up and down the stairs. He is really, really panicking, and we need him to just get in a calmer state. Otherwise, this is gonna be challenging. So, we might gamify this by saying, let's set a timer, we want them to run up and down the stairs, see how many times you can do it in one minute. If he's competitive, this might bring out that competitive urge, and help him calm down a little.  

Change in thoughts. So, Henry is a rigid thinker. I'm not really banking on this strategy being all that effective. Because his mind probably isn't going to change that quickly, but I might plant a seed or two, by suggesting that maybe writing won't always be this hard, or that this feeling will pass. And he may or may not agree with me in the moment.  

Lightening the Load and Special Interests

Lightening the load, this is especially important because he's got this super, super open-ended assignment that's just add a paragraph, or write a paragraph about whatever you want. So I've got a little demo of what we might do. I really like the five W's of journalism. Those are the who, what, when, where, why. And they're surprisingly easy to adapt to different assignments.  

So here, I might tell him to write down who are the characters, name a couple, what are the main events. He might get hung up on the definition of main, but we could just say name any three events, the first that come to mind. When does the story take place? where is it set?. Why would you recommend it to your classmates, or not?.  

So we've taken this wildly open-ended task and turned it into a really specific list of things to do. So that definitely lightens the cognitive load of writing. And finally, oh, I jumped ahead. We're going to use his special interest as a reward, because he definitely wants to talk about medieval catapults, or knights, or something medieval. And that will be a great reward as soon as he is done with this writing task.  

Applying Strategies to Ava: Decluttering

We will learn a lot about the medieval era. Awesome. Okay, that is Henry. Let's move on to Ava. So with the Calm Your Body, she's not freaking out on the same level that Henry was, but she's still pretty physically tense, visibly tense.  

And so taking deep breaths is definitely going to be helpful. I often ask students to take deep breaths while I figure out what the assignment is about, and we might do it together. Ava also has a very nice mouse named Fred, so we will grab Fred and have him on hand for this whole experience. Fred is a supportive presence. We like Fred.  

Second, lightening the load, we are going to declutter a Google Doc. And I just need to stop this screen share and start another one. But if the Zoom gods favor me, then this should go okay. Let's give it a try. Okay. Can people see this, this Google Doc? Yes, okay.  

Practical Demo: Organizing a Google Doc

So this is the original Google Doc. And you can see it is pretty long, it's very long. And all of the text looks the same, so it's really hard to just tell what's what here. So, in order to declutter this, I'm gonna take a few steps. First thing, I'm gonna add headings.  

So I'll go… this is our little style thing, I'll select Heading 1. These look like assignment instructions, so I'm gonna say… Assignment instructions… Super creative. These are key dates and deadlines, so I'll also make this a heading. These look like a rubric of some sort, so I'm gonna do that too. Let's go rubric… And I'll leave out the rest, but adding headings would be the first step.  

Step 2. I'm gonna go to File, Page Setup, down here. And currently, we're on Pages. I'm going to select Page Lists. I think this looks slightly nicer, but really the big bonus is now we've got these little arrows, and we can actually collapse this. So it's all still there, but we're gonna hide it, and so we don't have to look at it.  

Formatting Tools for Scannability

This is just helpful in general, in my opinion, but especially for my students with dyslexia, slow processing speed, it feels so much better not to have a massive wall of text in front of you. So, we've already made a lot of progress with this. We can go further, though. We're gonna do some subheadings, yay. So this seems like… general instructions… I know that should be capitalized, but we're gonna leave it for now.  

Paragraph, something… This looks like additional. Oh, and I forgot, another bonus. Click tabs over here, and you get all of these. You can easily jump around and navigate. Okay, a couple more handy things. I really like to put things in boxes.  

My students make fun of me for this, but I stand by the boxes anyway. So we'll go insert… table. And I'm gonna select just a 1x1 table, like this, and now we have a handy box. And if we put this in here, it looks visually contained, and it just becomes easier to move our attention around the document. I also adore checklists.  

The Psychology of Checklists and Color

Making checklists makes me feel powerful. That's also helpful. So we could do step one, step two, step three, and then we can actually check those off. Very exciting. A couple of my younger kids enjoy just checking these off the moment they appear on the screen, and then we have to talk about how checkboxes are significantly less useful if you check them off before they're completed.  

So it's a good opportunity to practice self-control, but otherwise, these are great. All right. And finally, I really like changing the colors, and I'm actually just gonna show you the final version, so you're not sitting here watching me do this for 10 minutes. This actually, this screen reader thing came from yet another student who's so sensitive to light that just a screen like this bothers their eyes. Meanwhile, I have another student on the spectrum whose favorite colors are neon pink and neon green together.  

So it's just a fascinating variety. Here is our final version, so I've colored these, and you can see this looks so much nicer, so much easier to see what is where. And we can also see that Ava actually has a number of ideas that are reasonably well finished. reasonably well-developed, so that's great. Okay, so we've done all of this, and I'm going to stay on the Google Doc for just one more minute.  

Breaking the Perfectionist Spiral

So let's say now Ava is starting to write. I think that the biggest monster in Frankenstein and then she pauses, and selects all of this, and deletes it. And maybe she does that again a couple times. I see this a lot, I do this a lot. It's this perfectionist spiral of, I write something, I don't like the way it sounds, let me get rid of it and make it better, and that can just go on forever.  

And it's really hard to write something and just leave it there when you hate it. So here is the strategy that I really like to use in this situation. So let's say… I'm Ava, I'm writing this, I really want to delete it, but I also need to break this spiral. Instead, I'm going to highlight, I'm gonna go to this little highlight thing, and color it black.  

So I can't see it anymore, it can't bother me as much, but it's still there, and so I'm still building up a tolerance for that imperfection, and if it turns out this wasn't a terrible idea, it's right there on the document. This also stops us from spending half an hour writing and deleting and having nothing on the page, which can be incredibly discouraging. So, I'm gonna go back to the slides. That was our little Google Doc adventure. And… Here we are.  

Applying Strategies to Ava (Recap)

Awesome. And changing thoughts-wise, we might be practicing this whole letting go of the inner editor, trying to disregard that voice that says what you're writing is terrible, change it at once. I definitely have that voice. It's loud. Okay, and finally, Ava is pretty motivated to work on this project, so she doesn't need a ton of rewards, but I'm definitely gonna be saying, you got this, great job, it doesn't have to be perfect, because I know that in her head, she's hearing the exact opposite, and I want to counteract that.  

So, awesome. We've gotten her through the first draft, she gets to go hang out with Fred the Mouse and be done for now. Yay. And yeah, this is the before and after, so you can just appreciate the beauty of a well-organized Google Doc. Last but not least, we have Eli.  

Applying Strategies to Eli: Managing Avoidance

Eli's our 11th grader, he's been procrastinating on history assignments, he's procrastinating on this one, and procrastination is not going to work well for him. And let's say for the sake of the example that he's agreed to a tutoring session. So he's in a session with me, but he's not super motivated. We don't really need to calm him down, because he is cool as a cucumber. If anything, I might need to calm down, because I'm getting a little stressed about this assignment on his behalf.  

Changing thoughts might not work out too well. Remember, he's on the debate team, so if this becomes a debate, he will almost certainly win. And also, debating the necessity of writing can easily become yet another way to avoid writing. Lightening the load, so I'm a big fan of checklists, as you heard. Breaking the assignment down into specific steps is almost always a good idea.  

So, we might say, let's start by talking through the essay, and then start writing. The talking part is great, he's very good at talking, but when it comes time to start writing, that's when it becomes harder. And it really takes coaxing and encouragement on my behalf to get him to write. And he might draft a sentence or two, and then stop, and off in distraction land, talking and talking about something unrelated. So, what do you do in that situation?  

Forceful vs. Gentle Encouragement

I have a few different approaches. I'm gonna name the avoidance by saying something like, right now you're talking, you're very good at talking, you don't need my help with that, but you do need my help with writing, so please let's do some writing. I'm not always this forceful with students. For some students, this would be disastrous, but when they are really, really determined to avoid, and they're doing it very cheerfully and energetically. I sometimes have to be this forceful to get through, so I would only do this if we have a good rapport and they know that I care about them, etc..  

Another thing that catches people off guard and is effective is to say really calmly and neutrally, do you want this to take a long time?. I'm not being snarky, I'm not being sarcastic. I'm genuinely just asking, do you want this to take a long time?. And they'll say, No?  

And then I'll answer, okay, so what can you do to get it done efficiently, and how can I help?. And that sort of turns the tables and invites them to problem-solve, and also gently points out that they're maybe not acting in their own best interest by dallying. Another version of this is to… Again, calmly and non-judgmentally describe consequences. So say something like, if you buckle down and we can get this done, I think we could finish in the next 20 minutes, and you'll have the rest of the weekend free.  

The Impact of Extensions and Scaffolding

If we keep dallying, this could take hours. So, let me know how I can help and what you want to do. So those are 3 ways that we can really encourage writing in the moment and cut through that avoidance. Here's the thing, though. At the end of the day, we're fighting an uphill battle, because avoidance and procrastination are a pattern for Eli, and they have been heavily reinforced in the past.  

He's had these extensions, he's able to turn things in late without an effect on his grades. So not only has he learned that it's fine to procrastinate, he's also learned that when a teacher or tutor says, you need to do this, it doesn't really mean anything. So, the real lasting solution is actually going to be to get rid of those extensions and have real deadlines. In many cases, extensions are the opposite of an accommodation. They're almost an anti-accommodation, because they can just extend the procrastination.  

I'm not saying this is the case for everyone, so please don't interpret this as a blanket stance on extensions, but I've seen enough cases where extensions get in the way that I felt this was worth including. If anything, students with ADHD would often benefit from more deadlines and more scaffolding to get that assignment done. Final thoughts, the dog again, so cute. Practice. Practice is very important.  

Practice and Virtuous Cycles

Students will sometimes tell me, I tried using a timer, I tried a checklist, and it didn't work. That's a little bit like saying, I went to one violin lesson, and I still can't play a Beethoven symphony. That's just not how that works, right? These are skills, they take practice. I wish I had an overnight solution to make writing magically easy.  

If I had found that, I probably would have monetized it by now. In the meantime, while I search for that. All of these strategies take practice, so if at first you don't succeed, circle back. Second point, success increases motivation. There's a whole side note here with some recent research on achievement and motivation, but if we can set students up for success with writing, that's going to create a virtuous cycle and be motivating.  

And finally, I mentioned that I've struggled with perfectionism. Part of my trying to manage that perfectionism is pushing myself to share my writing with the world, even when I feel that it is not perfect. And it probably isn't, because few things are. So, on my blog, I have a written version of this presentation, all for strategies, specific tactics, and case studies, and on that blog, I'll also be posting additional pieces of writing.  

Final Thoughts and Audience Q&A

About the biggest questions that come up with supporting 2E writers. So we can maybe drop that in the chat, feel free to check that out. And I would love to take questions.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Great, thank you so much, Lucy. Those were, great strategies that I'd like to try with my own kids. So one question that came up is, where should a first grader be in terms of writing?.  

Dyslexia has been ruled out, although she writes some numbers backwards. She doesn't prefer writing, but she will do it. In her school evaluation, she needed to write a paragraph and wrote only a sentence. Then, refusing to do the rest. And the psych said she was really worried about it.  

I'm not sure I need to be, or what the standards for grade 1 are. So how do you feel about the expectations of different ages of, you know, especially very young writers?.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah, it's really hard because… So, I haven't worked in a classroom, I'm not a classroom teacher, so I don't have a great sense of what's normative. I also, with norms, are those representing where kids should be, where most kids actually are?.  

Navigating School Standards and Scaffolding

It's just hard to say. so I don't… I feel like I don't have a great answer to this, unfortunately. I guess I would wonder, how they're doing in school, like, is a kid keeping up with what's expected of them in the classroom?. Because if they're not, then that might affect their ability to learn.  

I also, like, in this case, writing a sentence versus a paragraph, is that ability, or is that not wanting to, or resisting the task, but maybe still being able to write a paragraph?. I wish I had a clearer answer for this, but I don't think there's a simple answer to where a kid should be in learning. But I think talking to teachers and getting that perspective is probably valuable, so that might be the best thing I can recommend here.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Makes sense. Related to the Google Doc that you showed, someone says, I may have missed this earlier, is the student supposed to be able to redo the Google Doc like this?.  

Versus the person helping with the scaffolding. I'm thinking of a high schooler in 10th or 11th grade.  

Lucy Wallace: supposed to is a funny term. If they can, it's great. Often, they can't, and so doing it with them is awesome, and giving them that scaffolding, and with practice, students start learning to do this for themselves.  

Embracing the Student "In Front of Us"

Yeah, if they can, it's great, but if they can't, that's just where they are, and we work with that. I think a lot of working with 2E students is letting go of the shoulds, because we can get really caught up in what should work, where they should be, etc, and that gets in the way of teaching the student in front of us.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Okay, oop. Thank you. I like the declutter strategy. What are your thoughts on an assignment that is interpreted as… by a student as having an infinite amount of steps?.  

Lucy Wallace: Sometimes I interpret assignments that way, too. Some of the college and high school assignments can be really, really complicated. I think in that case, I think we can acknowledge that we might not be able to identify every single step, but there can be at least a few good starting points.  

I also think this strategy works best when practiced repeatedly, and if we can find a reliable first step for any assignment. Like, with one student I worked with, we had this writing process. That we laid out with this color-coded graphic, and it was always, like, we talk through the prompt, we write down bullet points, we expand the bullet points into sentences, we organize the sentences.  

Writing Process Consistency

no matter what they're writing about, we always follow those steps. And later that got expanded and adapted for different assignments, but just having that consistency and knowing that no matter the situation, I know what my first three steps are, that can really help. And that's the tricky thing about writing, too. You can't map out the entire process in advance, so I would say start somewhere.  

Where you start is less important than just having a starting point.  

Yael Valek, REEL: That makes sense. Often that first hump is the hardest.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Someone was asking, too, I noticed, what about using speech-to-text?. Do you use that as a starting point just to get something on the paper, and then they can reorganize it and edit it, move it around?.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah, speech-to-text… okay, this one is complicated, because… It can be a super helpful tool. It definitely is for a lot of students I work with, and sometimes I use it as well, but over-reliance on speech-to-text can get in the way of writing learning. I've worked with kids who use speech-to-text exclusively, and haven't really developed writing skills.  

Thoughtful Use of Dictation

And because they don't have much experience with writing, when they… speech-to-text, they're really just talking. If you were to write down everything that I'm saying right now, maybe an AI is doing that, it wouldn't really be prose, right?. Writing isn't just talking on paper. And so I do worry when kids are using speech-to-text exclusively.  

That said, I think when deployed thoughtfully, it can be a really good strategy. And I've also worked with students who have significant dysgraphia. Spelling is just kind of a nightmare. And I've seen kids develop really creative strategies to combine typing and predictive spelling technology with dictating.  

So maybe typing a few words, but if there's a really hard word to spell, they'll switch to dictation, or just deciding, like, in this moment, is it worth getting the typing practice, or does dictation make more sense?. So that's my little speech, just be thoughtful about dictation, but yeah, it can be super helpful.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Our son tends to resist strongly or even throw a tantrum when others, like a teacher, tutor, or parents, offers to help on any struggles or on writing. Any suggestions?  

Lucy Wallace: That's a tough one. I might approach him in a calm moment, and just say something like, I've got a dilemma, because… when I try to help with writing, it seems like it's not really helpful.  

Problem Solving and Special Interests

Maybe, like, what would you do if you were me? What do you think would work?. I think asking kids to solve problems is a very underrated strategy in general. Sometimes it doesn't occur to me, and then I ask them, and I'm like, oh wow, they have really good ideas when I take those ideas seriously.  

So I think that could be good, and I might also think about, is there any source of motivation?. Maybe he's not motivated to do the writing assignments themselves, but maybe getting them done efficiently and not having them take up a ton of time. would be good. Or maybe just… I find that if I ask students, do you want writing to be easier?.  

The answer is rarely no. People generally want writing to be easier if it's painful, so that could also be a starting point.  

Yael Valek, REEL: And I heard you earlier talk about special interests, and I wanted to circle back to that, because one thing we didn't get to talk about, and I know not all schools and not all assignments at all grade levels have flexibility, but I've noticed from my own kids that whenever there's any choice of something you can write about, if they choose their special interest, it helps so much.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah.

Yael Valek, REEL: So I don't know if you've had luck, having students advocate for that, or sort of twist the assignment a little to be a little bit about, you know, that kind of thing.  

Lucy Wallace: I can think of some really good examples. I actually worked with a college student who was reading, I think, Tolstoy? Yeah, I think Tolstoy.  

Interest-Driven Writing and Messy Drafting

And the student told me this story really lines up with this video game that has a profound commentary on life and death. And fortunately, this was a cool professor who heard that and was like, yeah, that's awesome, write about it. And so the student got to do a whole essay about that. Definitely increased the motivation.  

It was so insightful and brilliant, I loved that.  

Yael Valek, REEL: That's amazing. I'm so glad the professor took a chance on that. I've had mixed, findings with that. We're getting some heart… Any tips for writers who get very distracted by technical details, like spelling and grammar, so that they stop too often to correct the details and make little progress on the actual writing?.  

Lucy Wallace: Yes. So, I would practice messy drafting with them. I demonstrate this for students when they're really struggling, so I'll show them, I'm gonna write a messy draft here, I'm not gonna stop to correct spelling and grammar.  

Look at that typo. Look, that sentence doesn't even make any sense, and I didn't delete it. Look at how I abandoned that thought mid-phrase. I think I have to energetically model it. I've even created first draft bingo, where each square is, like, spelling error, typo, space instead of word, abandoned a sentence, something like that.  

Gamification and Classroom Writing Challenges

So if you gamify it, and if you treat it as almost an… Sorry, my dog is being so weird, that's very distracting. If you gamify it and treat it as almost an endurance sport, like, let's try to write for 2 minutes, next time 3, and then 4, I think that's a great way to develop that skill. And I say that as someone who is usually reluctant to just leave typos uncorrected.  

Yael Valek, REEL: I love the idea of first draft bingo. That's great. Okay, so we have some… you probably know that because of AI, more and more assign… writing assignments are happening inside the classroom, so there's a couple questions about that. Middle and high school assignments are starting to be only in the classroom where there aren't you can't meet with your writing tutor.  

And then there's also a question about timed writing assignments, because the time boundaries may exacerbate anxiety. So I don't know if you have any Things to say about those.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah, so with the timed writing, this is an interesting one because there… so, the research on writing anxiety is disappointingly meeker. It's… it's just kind of a mess. I looked into that scientific body of literature, hoping to get some insights, and the main insight was people define things very inconsistently.  

Timed Tests and Student Support

But math anxiety is much better researched, and there's significant work on timing and that effect on math anxiety. And I don't have a super deep knowledge of it, but from what I understand. There's a perception that time tests exacerbate anxiety, but really it's more that, like, poor performance and a lack of knowledge generally create anxiety, and there's sometimes a conflation of causation and correlation there.  

So with timed tests for writing, I… I'm not sure that the solution would be to avoid timing, I think getting more exposure to that would be helpful in building the skills. That's just my first instinct. And with AI, is the question, like, what to do if you can't have a writing tutor in the moment?.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Yeah.

Lucy Wallace: Practice… I think the best you can do is practice similar tasks with support, or maybe if teachers are open to having, like, a graphic organizer, sentence scaffolds, a clear checklist, something like that, so you don't need a person, but there is some form of support.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Yeah, makes sense. Do you find you have success where others have not in helping reluctant writers?.  

The Role of Non-Parents and Success Cycles

My kids won't let me or his dad help him. Last night, he was up till 1 staring at a blank screen. The assignment was to write two paragraphs, and he'd been working on it all day.  

Lucy Wallace: Yeah, I have had success where others are not. I wish I were 100% successful. Some students I work with, we don't quite click, it doesn't work for whatever reason, so I don't want to be grandiose here.  

I also… I wish I knew exactly what every kid needed and what helped them, and had that down to a science, like an exact prescription for what's going to fix the problem. And I think there's a lot of random variation, so sometimes you just have to keep trying until you find something. So yes, I've had success with students who seemed like nothing helped them write. I'm not sure that's anything specific to me, but just the benefit of keeping trying.  

Yael Valek, REEL: I do also find that in the teen years, having it not be your own parents, they don't want to hear it from their… they don't want to hear anything from their parents, right?.  

Lucy Wallace: I could say the exact same thing as a parent, and it would be so much better received, so that's really one of my big selling points, I'm not a parent.  

Dyslexia Resources and Closing

Yael Valek, REEL: Are there any particular reading and writing programs that you use or recommend for students who are diagnosed with dyslexia in middle or high school?.  

Lucy Wallace: Reading or writing program. So, I've been looking into what's called the Hawkman Method. The book is The Writing Revolution. I'll put that name in the chat. It's like this, and you can Google it. I'm thinking of getting formally trained in this.  

I really like it because it involves sentence-level support, practicing constructing sentences. Which is… that just doesn't… that doesn't happen magically. Like, we don't learn to write sentences often without some sort of formal support, and this is the first program I've seen that actually provides that. Has a lot of scaffolding and explicit instruction.  

So, yeah, that's exactly, that's the link. I know people do Orton Gillingham, and some really like that. I can't think of any others off the top of my head, but those two do come to mind.  

Yael Valek, REEL: And someone else is also saying, Per your previous response about it being you and not the parent, that when kids have rejection-sensitive dysphoria, having. Feedback from parents is even more personal and distressing.  

Lucy Wallace: I could totally see that, yeah.  

Yael Valek, REEL: And so another… another person says, their daughter tends to have rigid thinking about independence. If she's given an assignment, she assumes she should be able to do it by herself. Therefore, if someone offers help, she internalizes that as failure. We've talked a lot about the steps of learning, and how even adults ask for help regularly.  

Lucy Wallace: I mean, absolutely. I also sometimes, students who think rigidly will sometimes worry that getting help is cheating, so that's another one that we talk through, but I think, giving examples of asking for help is a really good one, and trying to think of other ones… I think… I mean, I don't know that anyone is truly independent, in that we all rely on other people or learn from other people in some way.  

Shifting Rigid Beliefs and Wrapping Up

So it sounds like you're approaching that very reasonably, and it just might take a long time to… not erode, but to shift those rigid beliefs.  

Yael Valek, REEL: And then, Just so you know, someone recommended a book called How to Read Literature Like a Professor, and said it was very demystifying for his 2E son.  

Lucy Wallace: Oh, awesome. I've heard of that, but haven't read it, so it sounds good. Oh. Oh, I guess another thing, a parent just mentioned this to me, there are chapter books specifically for kids with dyslexia, slash ADHD that are, like, faster-paced, smaller blocks of text, easier to read, and this parent mentioned that her son, who is a reluctant reader, blazed through a whole series and felt much more confident after that.  

So I can just search that up really quickly. That's another good option, I think, for reading.  

Yael Valek, REEL: And you said you have a blog post you wanted us to share about some of. shared today, I'll put that in the chat as well. This is a, blog that Lucy wrote about all the tips that she shared today.  

Lucy Wallace: And these are the dyslexia, ADHD-friendly kids chapter books. That got rave reviews. So, yay.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Just so you know, you're getting a lot of, we're so impressed with you, Lucy, thanks for all the great ideas, and I still… There was one up higher that was also… now I'm gonna lose it, but, that was also praising. how helpful this was. You are incredible, Lucy.  

Thank you for all the wisdom, resources, and information. Thank you for everything you do to support the children you work with.  

Lucy Wallace: Thank you, so nice of you, I appreciate it.  

Yael Valek, REEL: Lots of love in the chat. And Lucy has written a lot of articles that have been super helpful, on REEL, and so I'm also going to just put the link to all of her articles that she's written on our website in the chat, and Callie has put, our, link to, providing feedback on this talk. And, this is the third in our writing series this year, so if you missed the first two events, we have other parts.  

I love how it's been an arc of, kind of, diagnosing what's wrong with writing, essay writing, at the high school level, silly characters, and now the emotions behind getting going on writing, so… We really appreciate, your wisdom. Both from your experience, your research, and your own life. So thank you so much, Lucy. And we'll stop the recording, and we can chat, and you can read all the love in the… chat.  

Lucy Wallace: Awesome.