As a dance teacher in public elementary schools for the last 25 years, Janet Adams has always recognized the creative link between dance and writing, and offered her students structured opportunities to combine the two. She has also honed her management skills and kept a pretty tight ship. Creative expression, though, be it through dancing or writing is messy and noisy work. Recently, with the push for more self-direction from the new Common Core and the new National Core Arts Standards in Dance, Adams has begun to discover that her insistence on silence and a dictated pace has not been conducive to either choreographic or literacy development. She writes here that her tight-fisted control over her classroom was keeping her students from collaborating and forcing a lockstep pace, hindering their ability to work at their own developmental level. Relinquishing her control has allowed her students to progress at their own developmental pace. Adams has found that structuring more independence in her classroom has also left her more freedom to address the cognitive artistic and social needs of individual students. She is also discovering that an increased emphasis on linguistic connections to dance has served to focus and facilitate learning in students of all ages, building their capacity to express ideas in any form. Her students are beginning to see that the creative process for dance and writing are parallel.