Writers' Workshops: It Takes Time and Energy to Turn Students into Writers

 

    My 10th grade students have just started a unit on personal narratives and this being the first major writing assignment of the school year, I know it’s important to plan for a solid writing workshop. I can already tell that many of my students are hesitant writers–meaning they hesitate to call themselves writers. I’ve been reading the writings of Robert J. Graham and Dorfman & Shubitz recently, so I’ve been grappling with figuring how to help them build their identities as writers and part of our writing community. The writing workshop is specialized time that invites them to focus on their writing in ways they haven’t previously.

    WW’s are helpful for students to be able to visualize the writing process as all stages can be represented in a well-crafted WW. At the beginning of a unit, different stations can model various brainstorming and prewriting strategies. Inviting your students to rotate and try a strategy that’s different than their normal is vital for spurring creativity and originality. Here are some ideas for brainstorming stations:

• Zines: draw and caption a short story through a little comic book. Give a variety of prompts that aim to get them thinking about personal experiences, stories, hobbies, memories, and so on. For more information on how to make a Zine, look here!
• Brainstorm: Grab a sheet of paper and start with a good old brainstorming web. Choose a couple interests or hobbies and start branching out into more specific topics
• Mentor texts: One station could have a stack of a variety of mentor texts and a should have/shouldn’t have genre study sheet. In small groups they can read and discuss the conventions of personal narratives, writing down their noticings on their charts. Make sure to have variety in the types of mentor texts you display. For more information on incorporating  mentor texts, take a look at this amazing article from “Moving Writers”

    Once they’ve got somewhere to start they need motivation to get somewhere else. Until the hard deadline of the final project, students will find themselves in many different stages in the writing process, drafting and revising in their own time that works. As the teacher, you can shepherd them along this process with introducing more workshopping opportunities–this time aimed at drafting and revision. The workshop could be a single day or multiple days, depending on the needs of your students. Some rotating station ideas could include:

• Reading out loud: This tool is most helpful for me personally as a writer as often a sentence or passage sounds better in my head than it does out loud. Reading the paper out loud to another student helps the writer view their paper as a reader would and they’ll catch a lot of grammar mistakes this way
• One-on-one teacher feedback: Being available for individual questions or mentoring as a part of the workshop will invite some students that normally don’t have time to seek my help to ask for it. They come to me with questions or just ask me to look at their paper as a whole
• Peer feedback: Even more beneficial for their writing skills is to review each others papers and provide student feedback. This is best done in small groups or rotating partners where they have enough time to read, provide feedback, and receive it.

**Helpful hint: Learning how to give feedback is very important for developing writers–they often learn more from giving feedback than receiving it. Consider starting the year with a few mini-lessons/activities devoted to teaching them what type of feedback is most helpful (for more information about the importance of student-led feedback, see Chanski and Ellis)**

• Outlining their writing: For students concerned with their “flow,” have a station dedicated to outlining and annotating their own paper, writing the main idea of each paragraph to the side. Paragraphs containing more than one main idea should be separated while they can organize and reorder sections for a more natural sequence of events

    These are just a few things that can be helpful for students to view their writing with fresh eyes. Holding regular writers workshops, whether small or large, will help students internalize the fact that writing is a process: the “final” version should never be the same as the “first” version. And ultimately, we want students to have designated time for them to write and experiment. What works for one student may not work for another but all of these strategies are helpful for students to begin to see themselves as writers, not just students who write.