Struggling Writers: Writers Workshop

      It is only natural, that as writing community is created in a classroom, a workshop type atmosphere also appears. There is a type of freedom that students get when we allow them to engage in a writers workshop, and to use a term coined by Chris Street, the “sage on a stage” (637) is removed. In doing so, the feeling of a writing community is stronger and students feel a closeness with their teacher that they could not feel before. Part of a writers workshop is to give the students more power over their learning. When it is put into their own hands, they feel more responsible. High school teacher Shelby Scofield even said that allowing her students to choose what skills they worked on helped her to “narrow down the specific skills that my students are struggling with.” She also gives different suggestions as to how a writers workshop could be set up.  The image here represents one way in which she set up the stations in her classroom, in order to allow her students more movement and freedom to move about to the stations that found most useful to them. Working together like this within writing workshops helps to create a sense of mutual progress that can’t be faked, as everyone works together to improve themselves.

            A major part of writing workshops that help create this feeling of community is having the teacher write alongside the students. Penny Kittle acknowledges the scariness of this thought in her article and podcast (which I highly recommend listening to her podcast, she is wonderful to listen to) about writing workshops: “I didn’t want to jump into that pool of uncertainty and try it myself. Let’s face it, writing teachers are quite comfortable telling, but showing involves something else entirely” (9). While there may be a desire to avoid writing with students, this is actually extremely beneficial. It is not fair to expect something of our students that we could not expect of ourselves, and as we write, they notice. Kittle continues on, “I know understood the terror and the power of risking the truth in your writing” (10), as teachers we more fully understand the struggles of our students as we write alongside them. It has an effect on the students, that helps further this feeling of trust that is necessary to have a well working workshop.

Writing with the students also helps them to see that nobody’s writing is perfect on the first try. We can help show them the importance of drafting and trying out new things. Breaking away from old habits and experimenting. As the teacher, we have the power to model for our students and they are watching when we really do write. Ruth Ayres talks (check out her blog here) about how she models for her students, “I talk through the choices I’m making, narrating the thoughts in my head as I draft. Other times I simply write and ask them what they notice” (1). Speaking out loud allows the students to see exactly why she doing what she is doing, they can see a clear point A to point B. By having them discuss what she is doing, she is allowing them to ponder why she would do certain things and consider what they would be doing. Both concepts are beneficial and can help students. Teachers need to take the confidence to actually write, because it will make a huge difference in helping their students improve writing.

Make sure to check out the beginning of this set of posts about struggling writers right HERE






Scholarly Sources (Not blogs/websites)

​Street, Chris "A Reluctant Writer's Entry into a Community of Writers." Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 48.8 (2005): 636-641. Web. September 23 2016