Writer’s Workshop - for authors, not children

Written By Jeanette Breen

By Jeanette Breen

If you google ‘Writer’s Workshop’ you will observe such phrases as, ‘aspiring writers’, ‘bringing talented writers together’ and ‘numerous benefits for writers’. You will find creative writing workshop reviews and websites for courses. This is a critical point. 

Writer’s Workshop is for adults and there is an assumption that those participating in it, can already write. 

So why are schools pursuing the Workshop Model for young students? Perhaps we believe that in the interest of creative pursuits, we should design creative conditions. We have lost sight of the key part of this model however – it needs to be built around writers who have mastered the skill. Yet, many primary schools are setting mastery conditions for novice learners. While students may present in class as motivated, an important question to ask is, what are they learning through this workshop process?

Engagement and learning are not the same thing.

Having worked within a Workshop model for several years, I believed I was providing the best conditions for teaching writing. There was no question of motivation for students when they can write what they want, and then self-publish in a flurry of glitter, glue, coloured paper, and binding tape. I began to question it when I noticed my son bringing home replica published work two years in a row and wondered if unbeknown to me, my students were doing the same. Of course they were!

The Workshop model entails students working through the writing process to learn the art of being an author through editing and revising. The difficulty here is one of mass differentiation. Twenty four students writing on a different topic, each using multiple text types, styles and all of them in the name of becoming an author, made it impossible to fix errors. The task to edit student drafts peppered with inaccuracy and basic mistakes, became very frustrating. I could not divide my time equally nor provide what they needed when the basics were the largest barrier. Meanwhile the workshop environment can become restless while a teacher is attending to one student at a time in an individual conference. What appears to be a busy workspace is a chatty, art and craft haven. It leaves teachers resorting to some low level practices such as: 

  • ‘see 3 before me’
    (code for chat with your mate)

  • ‘go back and add more detail’
    (code for open the floodgates on excessive adjectives and adverbs)

  • ‘write your name on the board and read a book while you wait’
    (code for power through your draft as quickly as you can so you can read)

  • ‘conference with a peer’
    (code for chat with your mate again)

  • ‘make your draft better’
    (code for keep making more mistakes you don’t even know you’re making)

  • ‘decorate the front cover’
    (code for editing is a little complex for you so just do more art)

There may be incidental learning, but overall students were skipping through to the product with a superficial understanding of spelling and grammar as the main areas requiring correction. In fact, being efficient and succinct when crafting words should be the desired outcome. To master word craft, we begin with the sentence as the building block. The students were not learning what they needed using a Workshop Model. This makes sense in the context of my early googling experience - Workshops are not intended for novices.

Having now done a u-turn with writing, I understand that the threads of how we got here are far more murky than realised. In Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story Podcast Episode 4, we learn that The Workshop model was the creation of Lucy Calkins with devastating results - in particular for disadvantaged students. 

Emily Hanford quotes Calkins in this episode:

“...give children the eyes to see, and they will notice the conventions of written language everywhere. They will learn about punctuation, spelling…and the many rhythms of written language from billboards and…labels and books. They will ask about the monogram letters on their bath towels.”  

This kind of osmosis approach to what Hochman & Wexler call ‘the hardest thing we ask students to do’, advantages the privileged. It is not a method that casts the widest net to provide the necessary skills for all, as they progress to more complex and demanding compositions. We are asking them to run the marathon with little preparation.

Natalie Wexler, co-author of The Writing Revolution writes: ‘Writing instruction has enormous potential to build knowledge and literacy, but to unlock its power, two basic principles need to be observed—both of which Calkins overlooks. First, writing activities should be embedded in the content of the core curriculum so that they build the knowledge we want students to acquire. Second, teachers need to modulate the heavy cognitive burden imposed by writing through explicit instruction and supervised practice, beginning at the sentence level if that is what students need.’ 

So how prevalent are approaches focused on creating a product through student led inquiry?

We asked the members of TFE to fill in a survey in an effort to find what was going on in schools and 150 teachers responded. We can see that just over 50% are using a more explicit approach. The other 50% were so varied it can’t be captured properly. Notebook, Workshop, 6+1 Writing Traits are among around 20%. In this small snapshot sample, that is still 1 in 5 schools using a model that has very little rigour or hope of leading novices to mastery in a skill that prepares the way for an academic future.

What are the practical things we need to consider in the implementation of shifting to an explicit writing model? 

1 Everyone’s first advice is to read ‘The Writing Revolution’ which is a great idea. To be clear - this is a set of principles not a program. It looks different in different contexts which means teachers can embrace the methods and move at the pace right for their students, or within the frameworks used at their school.

2. The second piece of advice is to find an example of what an explicit writing approach looks like. This could be in the form of taking a visit to a school a little further on the journey or viewing some lessons.

3. Another way is to trial some lessons. Many generous educators have shared resources for how sentence level lessons could look, how to embed it in content and provide engagement and rigour all at once. Click here for a sample of some lessons from Templestowe Heights available to download and use. They are from various year levels but you can take and adjust according to your students.

4. When the approach becomes whole school, making decisions around how much time and weighting will be invested at every stage of schooling helps lock practice in place. It then becomes an agreement, not a choice. (See below for a possible graphic from Templestowe Heights)

5. If you don’t have the luxury of a supportive leadership, then start with changing one thing. The statistical data from the No More Marking global projects, where we have had the opportunity to view thousands of student scripts, shows an important correlation. Students with high scoring scripts are more likely to use accurate sentences over fragments, run ons, and they tend to demonstrate understanding over comma placement. Showing them how to fix these three things is a good place to start. TWR also offers plenty here.

6. Consider one of the big ticket items for writing (and reading) - background knowledge. Whatever you want to call the building of things that are important to know - make the facts and connections explicit to students rather than hoping they find it in some other way. With units that focus on knowledge rather than inquiry, writing becomes rigorous, shared, and an important tool for learning. You can then map your writing to this.

7. The only way to embed skills to mastery is to review writing skills recursively. This is as simple as the first 5 minutes of every lesson such as in this example.

Consider collecting reviews in a way that everyone can share to create whole school consistency.

8. Assess writing in a way that provides real insight into what students have in place. Multiple Choice Questions can provide important data of what students know without the cognitive load of them writing. Many parts of instruction can be quickly assessed using little more than a paragraph. Or consider regular Checks for Understanding, with mini whiteboards and spot checking skills during a review such as the example below.

To assess longer scripts, Comparative Judgement takes an open ended assessment and makes it intuitive with a numerical score. See below for an example of this process where we choose the better writing.

We are committed to helping educators on this journey in improving the writing classroom. It is time to put aside writing practices that are not maximising success for our students. 

Join the Think Forward Educators Writers Network! Click here.

Coming soon: Natalie Wexler

At TFE we are in the process of organising a series of webinars with more useful tips on writing. The first of these is a presentation from Natalie Wexler scheduled for Thursday Sept 5, 7:30 - 8:30am. Sign up below.

Natalie Wexler:

  • Knowledge Matters Podcast: https://knowledgematterscampaign.org/podcast/

  • Minding the Gap Newsletter: https://nataliewexler.substack.com/

  • Author, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix It (Avery 2019)

  • Co-author with Judith C. Hochman of The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades (Jossey-Bass 2017)

  • www.nataliewexler.com

When you register you will be added to the Think Forward Educators mailing list

Jeanette Breen
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