High Expectations and Safety

Students have many choices in writing, but in writing workshops not wanting to write is not an option. In writing workshops everyone writes. The author talks about how they feel that by writing, students will get better at writing. Writing workshop teachers have to make a place in their classrooms where it's okay for everyone to write and feel safe when writing.

In a high school classroom you might use this strategy by at the start of the workshop giving the students a list of goals for this writing workshop. The list needs to be open but guided. It might include write about something you enjoy, use as many adjectives and adverbs as you can, when the writing is complete go back through and highlight all the adjectives and adverbs you used, after this pick someone to share what you wrote with, compare your numbers of adjectives and adverbs, see if you can add something to each others work. As for the safety of that workshop just encourage the students, and remind them not to be rude to other students work. -Lindsay Olenick

I think this would be a great thing to do if you were going to be teaching at the high school level except kids can be really mean. They might write things on a paper that were not constructive to the assignment. Also, some students might have a hard time coming up with something to contribute and might also cause conflict in the group, one student feels they are doing all the work. Amy


That is very true what Amy was saying about how students may write things that were not constructive to the assignment. Kids can be really mean so another thing to do is maybe not always having students read aloud maybe just have students turn in their papers if some of them are feeling anxious on what they have written in their papers.