Workshop Environment

V. Using a variety of instructional activities in a workshop environment

Graham & Perin (2007) identify the process writing approach as one that has a small but significant positive effect on student writers. This approach, often called a “writing workshop,” includes extended writing opportunities, writing for real audiences, cycles of planning, writing, and editing, student interaction and collaboration, self-reflection and self-evaluation, and a supportive environment for writing. The researchers emphasized that explicit teacher training in the process writing approach made a clear difference in the effects of this strategy.

Classroom examples of using a writing workshop environment:

1. Alternative to a book report: a character’s letter to the editor (middle school)
Writing from the point of view of a fictional character demonstrates students’ comprehension of their reading and requires that they use analytical skills. In this lesson, students choose a character from a novel they have read and consider the significant beliefs and feelings of that character to identify an issue or situation that would spur that character to try to persuade the audience of other characters in the novel to take a specific action or change their position on an issue. The lesson includes discussion of the genre of letters to the editor, a review of persuasive writing structure and letter format, and an emphasis on multi-draft writing. The lesson focuses on the character Roy Eberhardt, from Carl Hiaasen’s Newbery Honor Book Hoot for its examples. Students can complete the activity for any book that they have read. The lesson can also be adapted so that students write letters for a book that has been read by the entire class.
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=930

2. Collaborative stories 1: prewriting and drafting (primary, and can be modified for higher grades)
This lesson by Renee Goularte, from Magalia, California, involves students in two prewriting activities: brainstorming ideas using story maps, and creating beginnings of stories. It also involves two collaborative-writing activities in which they draft a story on chart paper. Before starting the activities, the teacher reads aloud the first few sentences from a variety of children’s books which have unusual, exciting, or particularly descriptive openings. Each student works individually to read what has been written before, adds the “next sentence,” and passes the developing story on to another student. The story is passed from student to student until the story is complete. Later, the story is revised by the groups (see the subsequent lesson on the Web site below).
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=221

3. Collaborative stories 2: revising (primary, and can be modified for higher grades)
Students engage in a whole-group revising process using a story written in the lesson above. Each student adds a sentence at a time. The teacher leads this shared-revising activity to help students consider story content. Students participate in the marking of text and revising.
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=222

4. Creative outlining (high school)
In this lesson by Laura Hennessey DeSena, students prepare by reading a short story in class, then freewriting a response to the story that leads to a framework for a literary analysis essay. Students develop a thesis idea from their body of freewriting. This central idea serves as an organizational principle for creating an outline for an original literary analysis essay. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is used to model this process, but any well-written short story may be used.
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view_printer_friendly.asp?id=1071

5. Using stories (multiple grades)
In Tapestry of Tales: Stories of self, family, and community provide rich fabric for learning, Amy Stuczynski and others at Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory provide evidence for using personal, family, and community stories in classrooms, preschool through high school. The book includes practitioner examples for using stories as the basis of classroom projects that reinforce reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking skills.
http://www.nwrel.org/tapestry/