Matthew Worwood: in a world where students write on screens dictate to devices and increasingly rely on digital tools is handwriting a skill we still value or one we’re quietly letting go of and if we are letting go what might we be losing when it comes to creativity and learning along the way this would be the topic of our episode today if this is of interest then this show is just for you because we’re welcoming handwriting specialist Holly Britain onto the Fueling Creativity in education podcast hello everyone my name is Doctor Matthew Worwood

Cyndi Burnett: and my name is Doctor Cindy Burnett

Matthew Worwood: this is the Fueling Creativity in education podcast

Matthew Worwood: on this podcast we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education we’ll be talking with scholars educators and resident experts about their work challenges they face and exploring new perspectives of creativity

Cyndi Burnett: all with the goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers administrators and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning

Matthew Worwood: so let’s begin today we welcome to the show Holly Britain who brings more than 26 years of experience in education from classroom teacher to curriculum director and kindergarten coach central to her mission of helping children teachers and parents reach their creative potential is her work as a handwriting instruction specialist she is a curriculum designer and also the founder of Squiggle Squad Handwriting a unique approach to letter and number formation for early writers Holly works with diverse learners who experience a wide range of learning challenges she speaks nationally writes and teaches about handwriting as a kinesthetic connection to language essential to creativity and self expression now Holly welcome to the show

Holly Britton: thank you such a pleasure to be here I I heard on one of your earlier episodes that your podcast is in kindergarten at this point and that’s great cause I work with kindergarten kids all the time

Matthew Worwood: I appreciate you bringing that up because we just published that episode as of recording yeah Tuesday and Cindy brought up and it’s a great way of of phrasing our our podcast and one of the things I actually really like about it is we’re allowed to make loads of mistakes you know with kindergarteners

Cyndi Burnett: yes and Learned from them

Matthew Worwood: yeah give us a break if listen if we’ve upset you offended you dropped the ball pronounce someone’s name come on we’re 5 we’re 5 years old that’s right

Cyndi Burnett: we’re still in training yeah

Matthew Worwood: well listen full disclosure when you reached out to us I was really interested in this topic around handwriting and and full disclosure it I’m not someone who’s good at handwriting but before we kind of begin to unpack handwriting its relationship to creativity I think what I’m really fascinated about is you know from a 3rd grade 4th grade and 5th grade teacher which I think is is where you kind of finished Holly I’d ask you you you finished up with 3rd 4th and 5th grade teaching how did you end up with this specific focus on handwriting

Holly Britton: well it was in that class that it all sort of came that my understanding of what was going on started really coming to a head. I had started in 7th and 8th grade so I had a really teaching in a classroom so I had a a pretty good idea of what was going on with kids and their writing skills at that level then I found myself in the younger grades coaching brand new kindergarten teachers and watching what was happening at those beginning years as they were acquiring the skill it really was a a very organic understanding that started to happen as I realized that in that 3rd 4th and 5th grade level I was not able to teach higher level learning because they didn’t have a foundational skill that was imperative to their learning so um I didn’t I don’t even know if I would have stepped out of the classroom had Covid not happened because I was on a good track

I really loved being in the classroom I really loved being with the kids I really felt like I was making a difference and then Covid so at that point I had been considering going to get my PhD I had been considering this idea that I had that then became Squiggle Squad and of course I was pursuing classroom  public school education at that point and so I just decided that I was going to do this with the hope that it was going to make a broader a difference in the lives of more kid more teachers and across the states instead of just in m you know one 1 classroom one year at a time um it was a hard decision but um it opened up doors for me to be able to talk more broadly on this topic and how it affects kids and learning so that’s that’s where I how I got into handwriting and then began the um tedious work of figuring out how do we incorporate it into the public school setting where handwriting is not even understood anymore it’s not really even valued um because I think in large part because of the technology and and that that sort of wave of of technology that poured in what 20 – 15 years ago

Cyndi Burnett:  so Holly I really want to understand sort of the the historical timeline around handwriting so if you could just give us a little bit of overview in terms of obviously when we were young we were doing handwriting in school at what point did things change, and what is happening as a result of that change?

Holly Britton:  well it depends on who you talk to, um arguably handwriting instruction started to um decrease in importance somewhere in the 70s and 80s but it was really when the one to one chromebooks started going into schools that I think we started to lose connection with the importance of handwriting not as an art in in terms of penmanship but rather as a tool for learning because that tool was being usurped by a new higher tech tool and it would um it seems that uh that combined with things like um common core that didn’t emphasize handwriting as something to be taught as a skill but just something to be known and used um so there’s very little requirements in the standards of course there’s no testing or assessments of handwriting skill and yet kids are expected to do it so I think somewhere, I would venture a guess that we that the the importance of handwriting that you would you might see in a parochial school where you’re working on cursive you know every day and in all grades, that really started falling by the wayside in the 70s and 80s and replaced with, I think even if we didn’t have the technology in all of those classrooms I think the mindset started changing around it about that time

Cyndi Burnett: and what are the downsides in terms I wanna look specifically at creativity what happens when we don’t teach handwriting with regards to creativity is there a difference?

Holly Britton: so it’s a big question so creativity as you guys well know um is not always this innate manifestation that happens from the heart and head if you just you know let yourself explore it’s actually backed by knowledge and skill and when kids are really really little they’re they have intrinsic desire to explore they have natural curiosity they have a willingness to please and a desire to know more and we want to play to that those natural bends but they are able to reach their potential because they gain education and are able to use that to create more go further do bigger you know expect more of themselves handwriting is one of those first forays into a skill that they will use for the rest of their life or whatever and I like to talk about handwriting as a verb not a noun so very often  you’ll see a a handwriting sample and you see it as a thing like oh he has really nice handwriting or oh she has really bad handwriting but if we think of it instead as an action as something that a child, or an adult a human uses as a tool to make something, to make a piece of writing, to plan a whatever project you’re doing to fix a problem, to hone a thought it’s a tool that we’re using to actually extricate something from our brain that we can then encode and make what is invisible visible to people in order to communicate those ideas we cannot do that without some sort of training that is not born in us handwriting is not doesn’t come naturally to us the way walking and talking does it is it it is best done and and more utilitarian if it is  if it is Learned and and therefore taught by someone who knows how to do it and gives us the most efficient healthiest way to use it

Matthew Worwood: when you referred to it as a verb, I immediately said I probably should should challenge that because I actually don’t write and if I do write to generate ideas in the way you’re saying I don’t actually I mean I choose to actually scribble them down on a notebook but I don’t have to, however as you were talking and you were thinking a little bit about the thing that we talk a lot about on the show is, that we need knowledge we need understanding we need to be able to think critically in order for us to be creative  I’m wondering if you could speak a little bit about the science is there some  learning science that says when we engage in the act of writing we are actually better at processing information and getting to that knowledge that you’re talking about so from a creativity perspective it might be we’re talking about a modality for some people the act the verb of writing is helpful but for others it might not be however if it’s a tool to construct knowledge and assist us in learning then we can see those connections to creativity so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that

Holly Britton: I love that you noticed that because handwriting to an adult is different than handwriting to a child remember that we are training a brain when we are talking about young children they don’t have what you have in your brain, they don’t have all the tools that you have picked up along the way, and I by tools I mean cognitive tools the way that you the the way the angles you look at problems, the way you you tackle life the way that you address an issue you’ve never Learned before they don’t have that yet. so when we start with them at from a very young age, we are we are wiring that into all those billions of neurons that are looking for connection that are looking for understanding that are are are trying to figure out the world and one of the ways we know children learn is kinesthetically, they learn best by moving and touching and and experiencing through all of their senses and when you get a child, I don’t know if you’ve ever taught kids at a very young age but when you were trying let’s go way back to to four year old five year old six year old and they’re learning letters for the very first time they are only they’re they’re thinking very concretely, their little brains cannot think abstractly yet so they see a letter on a page and they think shape that is a shape, and that shape is called a B, and we are trying to weave in an understanding we are trying to give them as much experience as we can through turning pages on a book; through letting them see our mouth as we pronounce things; through repeating back to us and mimicking we are trying to weave into their little brains the understanding of sound and symbol relationship, one of the best strongest ways to do that is for them to physically trace that movement through that letter they then make that connection as they move into a more abstract understanding that that letter has a sound and that sound spells a word and that we now have to learn how to put those sounds together and spell those things in order to express our thoughts they cannot and science 100% backs this up they cannot learn it the same by pressing it we call that imprint when you make an imprint of a letter it’s different than a trace of a letter where you actually map it into your brain there’s a there’s a couple really good studies on this I’d point you to Karen Harris out of Indiana who’s done a great study on the kinesthetic connection to language and how that maps in our brain um but the point of it is that handwriting is a tool for learning and you have already Learned so much more than those littles that are coming up the pipeline and by the way there’s a lot of  research that would argue that they need that kind of kinesthetic connection up through middle school if not through high school to continue the journey to mastery the to continue that journey to uh towards language mastery

Cyndi Burnett: It’s really interesting and it makes me think about my own kids, I have two children and one of them has excellent handwriting and the other one has horrible handwriting and they had the same teachers growing up but it makes me think about cursive handwriting so is there a difference between cursive handwriting and just sort of block lettering is there anything that’s happening there because I noticed that you know for a lot of kids they my kids have not Learned how to do cursive and so it their their signature is actually quite funny cause it looks like block hand you know when they write their signature now that they’re um 18 and 16 it’s like block lettering, I’m like that’s not really a signature yeah so I’m I’m curious what’s happened there in terms of the cursive and does that how does that play into this whole equation

Holly Britton: so there’s a lot there that’s a it’s a great insight, I mean we really need to to focus in on a few things that you talked about first of all when I do I should probably clarify that when I am talking about handwriting I’m not talking exclusively cursive I am definitely talking about the act of writing by hand using a stylus of some kind on normally on paper, one thing I’d like to get away from a little bit is handwriting as penmanship as looking beautiful  in today’s day and age given that we have so much digital so many dead digital tools , those can make are writing legible and so you could argue that if it’s just because I have ugly writing then I can just use a typewriter or a I could just use a keyboard and me, I’m not that old and I did learn on a typewriter the keyboarding on a typewriter but I’m telling you this technology just flooded in so quickly we really haven’t had time to evolve we’re just doing what’s right in front of us and hoping we can keep up, but my handwriting is not very nice I mean it’s legible but more over and more way more importantly to me is it’s useful I can use it when I need it. I have it as a tool in my toolbox I can pull that out at any moment and I can use it for different reasons and people use it for different reasons you might not use it to create but you might use it to write a grocery list or you might not use it in your office but you might use it in a restaurant when you have to write something down and when I wrote a book years ago and I had endless numbers of napkins that I thought would come to me and I just jot it down as quickly as possible on the back of our seat or something and and there it was and I never thought twice about the fact that I actually had to learn that it just comes automatically it’s natural to me but our kids today are not ,so Cindy to answer your question or your observation about your kids one having neat and one having not so neat I think the harm in that isn’t what your kids handwriting looks like it’s that uh we potentially have neglected to give them a human skill that would otherwise be useful to them and if we think of it as just another modality for creativity then we would be a miss in not giving it to our kid,  it there are plenty of professional people down down the line who still use handwriting even though they publish on computers they there’s I don’t know if you I wrote a blog recently on this but  the likes of Sam Altman have regular note taking protocols that they use to create he has a system, that he wants people to use, because he knows that writing by hand minds something out of the brain gets you thinking gets you your wheels turning in a different way it doesn’t mean it’s the only way it’s just a different way

Matthew Worwood: there’s there’s so many thoughts that are popping through my mind now and I kind of half of me wants to keep some of them for our our debrief episode but you know I I just had a  book I co edited on um generative AI creativity and and the precautions possibilities um and you know Doctor Robert Sternberg who we’ve had on the show he contributed a chapter and one of the things that he was basically saying is use it or you lose it and that’s right he’s primarily you know taking on from kind of a a creative thinking perspective and in his article he talks about some of the things that we’ve just lost along the way and you know there’s a conversation to be had and I understand what’s the value in teaching, students to write and and if we were to unpack that perhaps we get to well how much time do we uh spend on teaching them to write, and maybe that’s more of a better conversation particularly listening to you saying that penmanship is perhaps not the same thing just having them write but if we don’t have that conversation or we’re not having those conversations based on what you just shared there, I’m sitting there thinking wow what if the decisions that we’re making right now lead to us not having the ability to write? I mean that that kind of like worries me because you must be and I don’t know if you got a take on this but it’s not just keyboards right it’s tablets, my youngest son I think he probably was typing on a key a typing on his iPad before he was learning to write with a pen or pencil. what what what’s your what’s your take on that I mean is that is obviously I’ve just said we we we use it or you lose it so I think picking up what you said but I’m now think thinking there and saying even the the way we’re introducing kids to writing has changed and I’m just wondering with all of these things has happened without us I don’t know if we’ve intentionally done that and I don’t know listening to if there’s any science to support that it’s just kind of come about and that’s kind of worrying a little bit

Holly Britton: well there’s a lot of science that would um would say we should not abandon the teaching of handwriting a lot of science you guys,I can flood your inbox a lot decades so we can’t we should not be sweeping that under the carpet as if it doesn’t matter to the human brain because it does I think a lot of people feel that in their gut when it comes to handwriting I feel like it’s people have not pinpointed exactly why it bothers us that we don’t handwrite well anymore but it it bothers us it bothers those of us that do it and know how to do it I can’t tell you how many people I talk to on a regular basis that say what do you mean they’re not teaching handwriting in school of course they are that’s like that’s like teaching someone to read you don’t not teach them to read of course you teach them to handwrite and and then teachers or you know people up the pipeline don’t understand that if you’re not actually addressing handwriting at that level you’re actually not addressing a lot of what it takes to be a writer, English conventions, orthography, the ability to communicate your idea clearly has a lot to do with how you encode language from your brain onto the paper so that all starts super super early, and I would like in it maybe a better way to think about this is in in light of say sports or an instrument learning to play an instrument you go through a time where the mechanics of how to play,how to play a game, how to play a an instrument the mechanics are boss those that’s what drives your learning at the very beginning and then you go through you’re you’re practicing the mechanics and now you’re practicing putting into practice your practice putting into play so now you might have a recital or you might have a tournament and now you have to take the things you Learned in your drills and your mechanics and now you have to put it and in that would be like middle school that, or that would be like um from say second grade in on through to say high school where you’re playing the game and you’re having to combine the skill with learning how to play the game and actually in the game and do it well and there’s a lot of struggle there there’s a lot of failure there there’s a lot of frustration there and there is a time when you wanna give up there’s a time when you just say, I hate this why am I doing it and a coach or a parent or another teammate comes alongside you and says you can do this, you’re good at ityou’ve got it you can do this and then they move past the struggle and they get to the joy of what it means to play an instrument to go out and pick up a football game and just be able to play and enjoy the game that kind of like intrinsic reward is built through hard work and skill building and I would argue that language requires skills that would then enable a person to find joy in creation and by not giving that you might actually hurt a child and and not help them reach their potential because they didn’t have the skill they needed to go as far as they could have gone

Cyndi Burnett: this is all really interesting it’s giving me so much to think about and Matt I think we’re gonna have a really interesting conversation in our debrief episode around handwriting and and cursive too because I do, I do want to touch upon that but right now what I’d really like to focus in on for those teachers who are listening is so what advice would you give to them? because there’s so much to think about when they have and I know kindergarten is a big topic a big hot topic right now in terms of the expectations of kindergartners it’s much different than when I was in kindergarten, so what advice would you give to teachers who have a lot to cover but think that handwriting is important what advice would you give to them or recommendations

Holly Britton: they think it is important or it is so I would say that um to treat it like the skill it is at first especially in those early grades they need they need explicit instruction the science backs that up they need time practicing um as any good skill building, training provides and then they need a a reason to use it they need that gives them motivation so things that might uh make them happy would be learning how to write their name, which is you know where they usually start and we very often start improperly which means that you get bad handwriting habits into second, into a kind of 1st and 2nd grade and then those teachers won’t change those habits if I could use this question to jump into your reference to cursive one more time please, right now handwriting right now in society in culture handwriting needs to be about efficiency and speed and the ability to get your thoughts on paper to get you first to hone your thoughts, to clarify your thoughts and then get it flowing because you want if you want your brain to flow your hand needs to flow if you want your brain to flow your keyboarding needs to flow which by the way Matt and and kind of in reference to another question that you had asked earlier keyboarding one finger at a time peck peck peck is also not a transcription skill it breaks up the learning or the thinking flow, and when I was teaching in those 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade classes, I could have let the kids use their keyboards but they didn’t have keyboarding skills either so there was no transcription skill that allowed them their working memory to you know pass that off onto onto the long term memory and allowed their brains to start thinking about those those higher level skills, cursive allows for those those ligatures that attach letter to letter to letter means that you are not having to pick up your pencil as often and you’re getting that flow going so yeah maybe it looks pretty maybe it doesn’t, but pretty handwriting is a sign of coordinated dexterity that allows for flow so instead of thinking of it as let’s get their handwriting pretty let’s think of it as let’s get their handwriting sized properly in the right direction with flow and probably their handwriting will straighten up

Matthew Worwood: and and you know what what I’m I’m taking away um a little bit is that just first of all being able to write in a way that other people can read your writing and and that’s that’s different right because we could theoretically you know get that scanned by AI and it quickly generates the the word it’s passed over um and the act of writing for oneself is very is I mean, I get the the motor movements but that’s that that spatial planning that kind of self explanation on the page that relationship between your thoughts and not being in a situation where you where you kind of like you know having to type it on a keyboard or even suddenly going and having to open the computer open the document put the type on all of that breaks the flow and I’m just thinking there’s probably if I’m a teacher there might be a benefit me saying hey everyone here’s the notepad the notebook at the beginning of the semester and I actually have a notebook as well and it’s like hey we’re doing this science project any ideas that come up you are welcome to quickly write down some thoughts don’t worry I’m never gonna look at them doesn’t matter how scrappy it is it’s your notebook for you to write whatever you wanna write in in any moment that you need you need to do and I think that’s something we probably can do and I don’t think that’s gonna significantly disrupt probably what we already have planned in the classroom

Holly Britton: Matt I absolutely 100% agree with you and love those ideas and I could add a billion more to those higher grades the problem is if they were never given those skills early on they handwriting hurts it hurts their brain it hurts their hand they’re not taught how to hold a pencil properly anymore they’re not required to make their handwriting useful to them they’re not even doing it enough to feel like it’s part of who they are and so then to that’s that’s why I came out of the classroom that was my problem I needed them to use it as a tool but they didn’t have that tool in their toolbox and even if I said hey get out the tool they’re like they don’t even know they don’t even know what I’m asking I found myself teaching more of how to use handwriting to get their thoughts on paper than the thoughts that were coming out on paper and and that by that age I I had taught that age enough to know that should have been that should have been easy for them that should be easy for them and I’m telling you in classrooms it is not easy for them they hate it they don’t want to do it and it’s not because they can’t it’s because they were not taught 

Cyndi Burnett: and just one more thing I want to point out is as I mentioned I have two high schoolers and now with the onset of AI they’re having a lot more assignments where um teachers are giving them those little blue books and saying I’m gonna have you write a paper in your own handwriting in the next hour so that they know that they’re not cheating and so I think having those skills now is going to be even more important because in high school that’s how they’re going to determine these kids wrote it on their own they sat in front of me with their little blue books and wrote it up and I think we’re in trouble if if our kids don’t know how to write

Holly Britton: I agree and on that handwriting also evidences what they do and don’t understand so if you I saw some I saw a substack article where she was um showing how she was teaching our 3rd graders about Charlotte’s web and they had read the the blog was on a whole book reading and  she showed a sample writing of a 3rd grader writing a sentence that had something to do with the the story and I was shocked, that there was not only misspellings no capital letter at the front, hardly legible the the quality of the sentence was terrible and that’s not to judge the child that as as as one observing as an educator observing I could tell you a whole lot of things that that kiddo did not understand about the English language from what he wrote on that paper right right wrote on that paper and so we should be using handwriting as an evidence for understanding in our in all subjects across all the grades and I love what you had to say about what they’re doing in high school and I will back that up by saying they’re also doing that in universities and kids are coming in they’re being asked to read entire entire novels and write essays and they can’t do either because they’re not being trained to do that in our schools.

Cyndi Burnett: well Holly it’s time for us to wrap up and we’ve really enjoyed this conversation around handwriting and creativity and what it means in the classroom not definitely not something we’ve talked about before so before we go we ask all of our guests if they would be willing to share the most creative educational experience you have had and why so tell us about yours 

Holly Britton: well that would be a long answer but I’ll answer shortly my foray my first foray into education was when I started teaching my very first kiddo myself which was way back in the early nineties and homeschooling was still kind of underground you know social services could show up at your door and and and take your kids and so so it was a scary thing I’d never thought about doing it before but wow it opened doors you talk about creative education uh I could tap my kids potential I could tap my own potential, we are you know, I don’t think I would be who I am today if I had not educated all four of my kids through every grade every subject and and got to I mean they all play music speak a second language, we traveled, we you know we drew we just so much creative opening because  for myself because I got to be that hands on educator from beginning to end

Matthew Worwood: well Holly thank you so much as Cindy alluded to think we’re gonna have a really fun debrief conversation around this topic of handwriting and for our listeners out there if you think you’ve got a colleague who’s been wrestling with writing instruction lately maybe someone who’s concerned about students handwriting or or to make sense of writing in an increasingly digital classroom then obviously we do think that this episode is for them so please share it and don’t forget to subscribe to our Extra Fuel newsletter which you can find the link to on our website Fueling Creativity podcast.com

Matthew Worwood: my name is Doctor Matthew Worwood

Cindy Burnet: And my name is Doctor Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Cindy Burnett and Matthew Warwood. Our podcast assistant is Anne Fernando, and our editor is Sheikh Ahmed