Paper serves as a magic mirror. Paper is sharper, more unclouded, than the marriage of glass and aluminum powder. Whether we scratch our thinking or our imagination onto the page, we are looking deeply inside ourselves. We are seeing things we did not know where inside. And we make decisions with each line...if we want to keep going. Do we like what we see?
Sharing our writing--at any level--is revealing to others what we look like beyond the protective shell of appearance.
My notebooks are accumulating years of sketches, lists, broken paragraphs, side notes, and illegible scrawling--extemporaneous thinking, planned picture books, ideas for teachers, and knowledge gained through reading and attending conferences--some of this work never evolves beyond that moment. Most (high 90%) never sees the light of day. But some of my work (single digit percentages) in my notebooks has evolved, has been read, has been shared, has been published.
Keep writing. Keep your students writing. Building a community of writers begins with the writer in the paper mirror.