The Writing Workshop
Writer’s Workshop is a method that is used in classrooms from PreK all the way through universities. It is taught in creative writing courses, elementary classrooms, and depending on where you go, there is can be slight variations and spins on the workshop model. I’ll admit, when I first heard about the writing workshop model from a teacher peer, I was skeptical. Mini-lessons, student conferences, and what seemed like a lot of student independent writing time. How would we possibly cover all of the standards and content we had to teach for the year? What would my students who already understood that day’s mini-lesson be doing during the extensive writing time? Would they be writing additional pieces? More work to prep? How could I possibly meet 1:1 with all of my students. My skepticism was largely due to my overwhelm of already having to teach and prep for multiple content areas, on top of feeling like there was not ever enough time to cover all of the content.
What made me slow down was that my students were not excitedly picking up their notebooks and letting their thoughts pour out of them when it came time to write. We read a lot of books in my class, and thankfully my students were engaged and excited to talk about what we were reading. When it came to writing, however, I noticed my students struggled— a lot. Part of it was due to their own perfectionism and not knowing how to get their thoughts on paper the right way. But if I dug deeper, I had to admit I was not doing justice to the art of teaching writing. Writing always came natural to me, but it is still a struggle at times, as I’ve mentioned in my other posts. I knew my students had a lot to say, but getting them to translate their thoughts into writing was proving difficult. I figured I had nothing to lose, and so I implemented the writer’s workshop method in my class.
For my Writer’s Workshop, I wanted to ensure that a key component of all Writer’s Workshop was central to my own. I wanted it to be a space where students had the chance to confer about their writing. I also decided that the key person who would be conferring with them would be myself. There would be elements of peer sharing, but the essential feedback would be 1:1 between myself and my students. I decided to incorporate the workshop model 3-4 times a week, and the format would look like this:
Mini-Lesson (5-10 mins)
Independent Writing Time/Teacher Conference Time 1:1 (25-35 mins)
Sharing (10-15 mins)
This format proved to be effective for my students and I. We loved the familiarity of the routine, yet no writer’s workshop felt the same. Every day felt unique, and it gave my students a lot of autonomy. Students were going through the writing process and completing entire writing pieces each week, whether personal narratives, expository essays, or argumentative pieces. I was able to cover all of the main writing genres covered in the Common Core State Standards several times over throughout the year, and include time for creative writing, something I hadn’t been able to do before.
As part of my goal of making conferring the center piece of the workshop, I made sure to meet 1:1 for student conferences during the independent writing time, the main chunk of the Writer’s Workshop block. While my students were writing independently, I would meet 1:1 with students to give feedback on their current writing piece. It was not a time to grade it, but rather to check-in with them, ask them what they would like to focus on, and give focused attention and feedback to each student. I wouldn’t meet with every student during each block, but rather make sure that I checked in with every student 1:1 each week. Doing it in this way made it a lot more meaningful and workable. At one point, I had a sign-up sheet where students would add their names and topic they wanted to focus on during their conferencing time because students really wanted the feedback and valued it. In fact, I had to limit some of the students to signing up only once during each workshop, and only after I had made sure I had met with every student once that week. Of course students could still ask me questions related to their writing, but the conferencing time was about checking-in, reading their writing aloud to me, reflecting on their writing, and receiving individual feedback and support just about their writing. It made me know my student’s academic abilities in a deeper level. Those students who I would often see excel in socratic seminars would know struggle to write their first sentence due to the fear of failure. The students who were learning English and often had time translating their Spanish thoughts into English words found new confidence in knowing that a first draft is just that, a first draft. Spelling mistakes were welcome, and speaking to them in their native language about their non-native language helped reassure them that I was always listening and recognized how much effort it took for them to write in a new language. I was also sure to keep track of what students and I talked about, just for my personal notes.
If I’m making Writer’s Workshop sound too good to be true, please try it for yourself first and see how your students engage with it. It was the structure that made my teaching that much better. During my last year of teaching, my former colleague reached out to me with the results of our state standardized tests. Our cohort of 7th graders had done well on the ELA portion of the test. Like really really well! The average score of our group was 94.8% and 87% of our students were at or above target. For the writing strand of the test alone, the average score was 86.7%, and 65% of our students were at or above grade level! This was above the school and state average, and I know implementing Writer’s Workshop was a big part of this. My students finally saw themselves as writer’s.
Have I convinced you to try Writer’s Workshop Yet? Do you already implement it? I’d love to hear how you teach writing! Please leave a comment or send me an email. My next post will go into my detail of what a Writer’s Workshop and specific mini-lesson looked like. Please check out the resources in my store or TPT! The Story Mapping Guide and Creative Writing Prompts in particular are great to implement into a Writer’s Workshop block.
