Oct 03 2024 4 mins 4
Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You sit down to write a rec letter after a long fall day of teaching, meetings, coaching, and everything else on your plate. Maybe it’s 9 pm and you’re trying to remember all of Erica’s shining moments from the last three months. But they’re a bit jumbled together in your head with your grocery list, your toddler’s sleep training regimen, and your other 120 students. Your eyes start to droop. The latest episode of Bake-Off just dropped and you are soooo ready to fall asleep on the couch. So you decide to push the college rec to the next day.
Ugh. It’s a terrible cycle that can start to feel like it’s dominating your life. And I’ve been there so many times. Today I want to tell you about the simple switch I pulled that made a big difference. I hope will help you too.
Early in my career, writing rec letters began to feel like my second full-time job. I taught all juniors. I liked them and they liked me, and it seemed like every time I turned around another student was standing in front of me hopefully, eyes wide, waiting to ask me to write their rec. I found myself sitting in front of my computer at all hours staring at my blinking cursor. Combining dozens of rec letters with my role as varsity tennis coach in the fall soon left me sleepless and strained.
I asked for a meeting with my talented colleague in college guidance to find out what was most important to include in my letter, hoping to streamline my process and make my work more effective for my students.
As an English teacher who has probably told your students a million times that they need specific evidence to back up their points, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that the top tip I received was to load my college recs with specifics. Of course, college admissions folks want us to paint them a picture of our students with anecdotes, project descriptions, amazing moments in class when the student shone. And of course, you want to do your student justice by doing just that.
But adding more specifics was hardly going to save me time. So I started asking every student who wanted me to write their rec to fill in a sheet FULL of specifics.
I asked things like: What are you most proud of from my class? When did you feel like you had a breakthrough with your writing, and how did you show it? Can you share about a specific day in class where you really felt like you shone? What’s one project that you feel like showed your ELA skills in top form?
I asked them to be as specific and detailed as possible, to help me be as specific and detailed as possible. And of course, I used their details to remind me of my own take on their work, using my own perspective ultimately to describe their success. But those sheets made all the difference as a shortcut to more effective, quicker recs.
Did all of my student love doing this? No. Some of them complained a bit, but it was a non-negotiable. It helped me write them a better letter, and it helped make it possible for me to fit it in on top of all the other things I was doing in my job. I didn’t feel even slightly guilty about it, and I don’t want you to either.
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