The problem kept changing. That was the whole lesson.
What four students taught me about why knowing the Ten Writing Essentials isn't enough.
Dear readers,
This year I did something I hadn’t done in a while.
I went back to working closely with a few students on a regular basis.
Each student I worked with had a complicated diagnosis.
Each student was stuck in ways that smart and caring educators had not been able to unstick.
It’s this experience that sits at the heart of the 10 Essentials Writing Cohort — which I launched last year and am now bringing into its second summer. I’ve spent nearly thirty years refining the 10 Essentials Framework across schools and districts.
But knowing a framework and truly understanding what it demands of the educator holding it are two different things.
I needed to find out for myself.
So I did.
Across all four students, the pattern was the same. Just as I thought I understood what a student needed, the problem changed.
Some weeks it was anxiety. The skill need was there but completely inaccessible because the fear was in the way. Every instructional instinct I had around writing craft was the wrong move. What each student needed had nothing to do with craft. It had everything to do with safety — lowering the stakes, building just enough confidence that instruction could land at all.
Other weeks it was practice. Pure repetition. The skill existed in supported conditions and disappeared the moment support was removed. The research on this is clear and I followed it. More attempts. More low-stakes volume. More chances to feel the skill in their hands until it started to belong to them.
And then the problem changed again.
Genre. A student could write complex sentences and was completely lost the moment we moved those sentences into genres.
The writing essential I needed that week was entirely different from the one I’d needed the week before.
And then real-world connection. Sometimes the work turned abstract and distant and I watched students disengage in a way I recognized immediately.
Nothing clicked until I found the bridge between what we were doing and something that actually mattered to their lives outside of school.
Anxiety. Practice. Genre. Real-world connection.
Four students. Constantly shifting problems. A sequence I could not have predicted in advance.
I couldn’t afford to stay focused on the problem I’d just solved. The moment you solve one, another opens.
That’s not failure. That’s teaching. I knew that from the consulting table. I’ve said it to educators for thirty years. But this year I knew it from somewhere else. I felt it every single week in a way I hadn’t before.
All four students are now at grade level.
In one year.
I literally worked myself out of a job. Most students with complicated diagnoses stay in tutoring for years. These four won't need me next year. That's what transformative teaching looks like when it works.
But the lesson I want to sit with isn’t the outcome. It’s what the process demanded of me.
Knowing all ten of the writing essentials is not the same as understanding all ten. Understanding means knowing what each one solves, what each one opens up, and how to manage that honestly across children, classrooms, and curriculum. Without that work, you reach for what feels familiar — not what the moment requires.
The framework should be in your hands. Not in front of your eyes.
Now multiply that by thirty students in a classroom. Each at a different moment in that same shifting sequence. Some stuck on confidence, some needing repetition, some needing genre, some needing connection — none of them holding up a sign.
That’s what teaching actually is. And that’s what a list of writing essentials, on its own, cannot prepare you for.
What prepares you for it is understanding the paradox living inside each writng essential. What it gives you and what it costs you.
When to reach for it and when to put it down. How to hold the whole repertoire available — so that when the problem shifts, as it always does, you have something real to reach for.
That’s what I teach in the cohort this July.
Not just the list. The judgment the list requires.
We meet five times on Zoom — July 8, 9, 15, 22, and 23 — in a small group with teachers and school leaders in the same room. That mix is intentional. The conversation between a classroom teacher and a literacy coach wrestling with the same paradox is unlike anything either of them reaches alone.
We are close to capacity.
Three free things are waiting before you commit — a worksheet with all 10 Essentials, the full syllabus, and a 25-minute webinar where I walk through the framework and the paradoxes at the heart of it:
Grab it all here
And if this is landing, if you’ve felt that moment where the problem shifted and you weren’t sure what to reach for, reply to this email. I read everything and I’d love to hear what you’re sitting with.
Warmly, Leah