Micki and I are extremely pleased to offer this post by a colleague who was extremely active in the Minnesota Writing Project until she moved to the state of Washington. Our loss was certainly their gain!
Throughout my 40 year career as an elementary and middle school teacher, professional developer, teaching principal and instructional coach, I have used the “Writing Workshop” approach to teach writing to all levels of students, primary through adult. I was lucky enough early in my teaching career to work with someone who was trained at Teachers College. I loved the enthusiasm in her classroom around writing, the ownership her students had and the pride they showed when their writing was “published”. I watched and tried her workshop techniques and strategies and was hooked. The formula was simple... start with a demonstration mini lesson (often using a mentor text) to teach a skill or strategy, do a shared writing with students as a group (I write as they give suggestions), watch as they individually try the strategy themselves and then allow them class time to own the strategy and use it independently going forward. This has never failed to produce far better writing than any structured writing program I have ever seen. Students often take the strategy and come up with original writing that was better than anything I would have imagined ahead of time. As a part of this model, I try to “publish” student writing in as many ways as i can ... sometimes I publish the shared writing as a group project or publish the individual writing in anthologies or individual “books” of all kinds. This writing is made available to real audiences, in the classroom, at home or beyond. The process creates independent writers who use different strategies to create their own kinds of writing.
That worked for 40 years. Then came the pandemic. The school where I worked was shut down completely last March. Teachers had very little time to prepare and generally fell back on more canned approaches to everything, including writing. Predictably, the writing they received back from kids was bland, artificial and unsatisfying ... to everyone involved. While trying to support teachers virtually, in my coaching role, I was also stymied. How do we recreate the writing workshop model in a virtual way? Soon after the lockdown, I got a chance to try. My grandson, who lived five hours away, needed more challenge than he was getting from his online school program. I agreed to do a weekly writing lesson with him. Because I wanted him to have an authentic audience, I invited two students his age from my community to join us in the Zoom meeting each week. For me, it was an opportunity to learn about technology tools that could be effective in this remote learning environment. For the kids, it was a chance to learn and share their learning with a peer group. I started with Google Classroom and Zoom. I began by doing my short mini lesson with the group. I would share a picture book with them and we would notice things the author did to make the writing effective. Then I would write with them, using a screen share. We would do a piece of writing together, using their ideas while I scribed. Then I would ask them to try this kind of writing at home and bring it to the next week’s lesson to share with the group. I would post the link to all the work we had shared on the Zoom call for them to access, plus other examples, videos or other resources. I would check in with each of them during the week to see if they needed individual help. They would share their drafts with me through google docs as they completed them, and we all (me included) read our work aloud at the next meeting. I would ask them to listen to their fellow writers and share what they noticed. After the sharing I would give them the choice to try this kind of writing for another week, or to go on to a new strategy or genre. Throughout the spring, we explored all aspects of personal narrative writing, moving from personal narrative to fiction, created all kinds of prewriting formats (timelines, neighborhood maps, webs, scrapbook pages, character posters, etc), wrote newspaper and magazine articles, created poetry, worked on inquiry projects on topics we chose. We published a poetry and fiction anthology, inquiry PowerPoints and slideshows, and a “Pandemic Newspaper”. One of the students took an article she wrote for our class, sent it in and was published by a magazine that accepted student submissions. Another student’s parents published her inquiry work on “Arctic Animals” in hardcover book form through an online publisher. We wrote together until the end of June. All of us felt like the experience was highly successful. The students grew in their confidence and became a real support group for each other. I have heard from their parents that they think differently about writing now and have continued to write on their own. I have shared my experience with teachers in my district and see that many have gone back to this workshop model with their remote and hybrid learning classes this fall. Teachers are much more skilled now at online teaching and are doing a much better job than last spring at engaging students and using the flexibility that remote learning gives to allow kids more independence and choice in their learning. That fits exactly with the writing workshop model. Sometimes a challenge like teaching in a pandemic makes us rethink exactly what is important about what we are teaching and what we are not willing to compromise about ... but also what other ways we can accomplish these important learning goals.
I retired this summer, so I am not working directly with teachers this fall, but I have been asked by our local Arts Alliance to create video writing lessons for remote learning teachers throughout our county. I am working now to figure out how to recreate the workshop model in video form. It is a new challenge, but I am giving it a go and learning along the way. More about that later… maybe!
--Anne Andersen
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