Making Writer's Workshop Possible: The Set-Up

It is understood that to improve in any area, you must practice. This adage is especially true of writing.  If we expect our students to become independent writers, then we must provide them with time to practice.  Up until this year, I taught reading.  I used the Reader's Workshop as a way for my students to improve the skills necessary to be a successful reader.  When I was moved to exclusively teaching writing this year, I knew I wanted to maintain the workshop method in my classroom, so I began researching the Writer's Workshop.  

This past summer, I worked my way through most of the writing all-stars: Ruth Culham, Lucy Calkins, Kelly Gallagher,  and M. Colleen Cruz. I quickly realized WW was going to provide my students with a choice about what they wrote, while simultaneously allowing me to teach the standards that would help them develop good writing technique.  I developed an action plan. I am going to spend the next few weeks blogging about my experience as a newbie implementing my first WW.

The strongest writing classrooms have independent writing projects at their heart.  That is, students are following the whole-class curriculum, but they are also working on their own piece of writing on a topic of their choice (Cruz, 2015).  This is the beauty of the workshop method: students spend time every day independently working on improving their skills.  I am sure I was like many of you.  I was just not sure how to make it work for me in my classroom. I believe I've come up with a manageable way to successfully start a writer's workshop into the classroom.  

Before you begin any workshop routine, you must spend some time explicitly teaching writing.  I spent the first five weeks of school teaching Ruth Culham's 6+1 Traits of Writing.  Once we worked our way through the traits, I began explicitly teaching opinion writing using the POW TIDE strategy. I am about a week into teaching opinion writing and we are ready to begin WW so students can independently practice what they are learning in whole group.

One hallmark of the WW is choice.  Three weeks ago, I put up an anchor chart titled "What I Want to Write About".  It quickly filled up with a variety of topics.  Over the last several weeks, I've gathered as many paired texts on those topics as I could.  Some came from Teachers Pay Teachers, some from newsela.com, and others I had to adapt and modify from newspaper and magazines articles I found.  As I found articles, I filed them by topics.

Last week, I chose texts for our first independent project.  Since we are focusing on opinion writing in whole group, I found paired texts that would fit opinion writing. Since this is my first time giving the students an independent project, I decided to start with six choices.  I didn't want there to be too many texts because I need to be familiar with all of the texts they are writing about.  Yes, this means I had to read all of the paired texts so I can help students when I'm conferencing with them.  The topics my students will choose from for their first project are: Football Heroes (Manning or Newton), Basketball Starts (James or Curry), Presidential Candidates (Clinton or Trump), Self-Driving Cars (banned or not), Pokemon Go! (banned or not), and Abolitionists (Douglass or Garrison).

Next, I copied 15 copies of each of the paired texts and prompts. I have 75 students in my three classes.  I set them up on a table. I put a sign-up sheet by each project so I can keep up with who is writing on which topic. This will help when I conference or have peer groups meet together.  

Monday morning, I will establish clear guidelines when I introduce WW.   Mine are simple.  Since this will be the beginning our WW, students are only allowed to work on skills I've already explicitly taught in whole group through our class model write.  I have already taught the POW in POW TIDE and writing a thesis statement.  This means, when we start next week, students can only work on skills such as tearing the prompts apart, reading their texts, and writing a thesis statement.   I will continue next week teaching mini-lessons on organizing an essay and an introduction paragraph.  Once I've taught the skills and we've practiced it on our class model, students can start on that part of their writing.

Finally, as part of the set-up for WW, I've created a board to help me keep track of where students are in the writing process. When students move to another part of the process, they move their name.  Not only does this let me know where they are, it encourages students to think about the writing process and ensures they don't skip steps, such as organizing their essays, which students are notorious for trying to skip.

I have high hopes for my WW. I believe this strategy will grow all writers in my classroom.  I can offer remediation in small groups or individually to students who need help organizing an essay or citing evidence. I can push my high fliers, who often get overlooked, to add sophistication to their writing by including metaphors or symbolism. WW has the potential to meet the needs of all students in our classrooms.  It is a time that should be valued and protected.

Next week, I will blog about conferencing with students, both individually and in small groups, during WW.