The Value of Writing
Whenever my students groan about writing, I wonder what happened to make them loathe it so much. When I ask that very question, I’m either met by “because you make us” or “because I’m not good at it”. The former is a condition of context; the inability to allow student choice for certain writing assignments lends itself to forced essays with unenthusiastic writers. However, the latter is an approachable topic.
Writing is an essential part of life, a skill that, just like cooking, ought to be honed and improved. You wouldn’t expect someone who’s never been near a stove to understand how to make the perfect chicken dinner, yet our students seem to think that sitting before a computer must mean they have to be perfect writers (an already flawed concept). The process of writing and of becoming a better writer seems elusive to them.
However, these students will write every day of their lives. From academic work, to everyday forms and paperwork, to the most common text messages, tweets, and emails, writing will always be a part of their lives, and I don’t want them to go through life hating it simply because they believe they aren’t good at it. Rather, I want them to leave my classroom feeling more confident in their writing abilities and I want them to feel confident stumbling along the way. To steal the words of Kelly Gallagher “I want students to practice writing every day, making their own decisions, failing and learning from that failure, and continuing to follow… ‘the map of disappointments’… to the land where writers live”.
Where We Began
My classroom strives to be the “positive environment for writing” that Charles Whitaker, PhD. agrees is necessary for a successful writing classroom. Whitaker writes “It is important in teaching writing for teachers to create a positive environment for writing, an atmosphere of mutual respect, positive regard, safety. Students should feel they are a part of a community of people supporting each other in developing as writers, readers, and thinkers” (1). Mutual respect is an intrinsic part of my classroom, owing to my belief that a classroom is impossible to control and engage when this element is lacking. We have a clear respect for ideas and opinions in room 208 that I model daily in a myriad of ways from honoring student input and writing down their song suggestions for a political art unit, to asking for students to write prompts for future free write journal entries.
When we work on these free write journals, a daily writing exercise introduced on day 1 of the year, I show them what dedicated writing time looks like by diligently answering the prompt myself. I further encourage a relaxed yet respectful classroom by making space for sharing after the free write time. When we have a prompt that invites the silly, such as “what superpower would you want”, we respect everyone who shares, no matter how truly ridiculous or strange their responses may be. Indeed, the more students that share their strange responses, the more comfortable other students feel to express their strangeness as well.
From the beginning of the year, I wanted my room to be a writing-positive environment. I wanted to stem the flow of “because I’m not good at it” reluctance emanating from my students. I follow the logic that writing every day implicitly improves your writing. My belief was bolstered by Charlotte Van Walraven’s article on “The Benefits of Reflective Journal Writing” as she states “Students who write regularly in a journal consistently see improvements in their writing skills, as well as their creative and reflective thinking” (teachingblog.mcgill.ca). Furthermore, in referencing the numerous different kinds of writing that you can bring into the classroom, Whitaker writes “Writing regularly for different purposes will help students develop as writers and can also help them learn in any study area. Teachers include writing not merely to help students develop communication skills but to promote learning and thinking” (5). In fact, Whitaker and I agree on many points regarding writing as his implication that writing promotes thinking falls in line with my belief that writing vastly improves your thought process. I frequently tell my students to “word vomit” on the page, just get all their ideas out there in whatever order they come, as they can better organize their thoughts when they’re visible.
I was pleased with everything I had started in my classroom. When entering this inquiry process, I wasn’t searching for an alternative for these methods nor was I dissatisfied with how they were working. Nonetheless, I was thoroughly aware that there was so much more I could learn.
Inquiry Process
I believe that if you don’t like your writing, you will not want to improve it. Consequently, doing so means you deprive yourself the opportunity to learn and grow from that piece. Valuing your work is key to improvement. So, how do I help my students learn to value their work?
Can a writing workshop help students value their writing?
My idea for a writing workshop did not stem from my initial research into this inquiry process, although my later research did offer tips for improvement. I have had the concept of a writing workshop in my mind since my senior year of high school when my English teacher had us pull the desks into a circle and discuss each one of our essays as a class. I loved the experience. Not only did I enjoy proofreading other students’ work because I had the opportunity to see so many different writing styles, I also found immense benefit in receiving a proofread copy of my own essay from each of those fellow students. The experience stuck with me so I sought to implement a similar workshop that minimized the writing group size and added in some mechanical and structural education along the way.
I decided to implement my writing workshop into my 11th grade plans first. I sorted my students into writing groups of 3-4 people based on who I thought would work well together and I asked these smaller writing groups to workshop each other’s pieces. My own experience with a workshop had been in the benefit of a small class size, however my classes of 26 and 20 students would not be able to work in a class-wide capacity. It would simply take up too much time and would no doubt disillusion the students with the notion of workshopping given the amount of papers on which they would need to comment.
My writing workshop was not only a meeting of writing groups but an opportunity for group work surrounding certain elements of writing I felt needed the most focus. The essay my 11th graders wrote during our 3 weeks of writer’s workshop was a textual analysis and while there are numerous aspects of writing that are important to keep in mind, I chose a handful of basics to hit for our first run with the workshop.
For the first writers workshop we focused on surface issues like apostrophes and commas, spelling and MLA format, what makes a good introduction, using evidence, and even comma rules. Each day focused on a few of the elements listed. On some days students looked at a packet of sample essays and proofread them to the best of their ability, keeping the days foci in the front of their mind. Some days students would come to the board to correct sentences or a class discussion might follow a group discussion around how they used evidence in their budding essay. All of the notes for this workshop were compiled into a Google Slides presentation and posted for students to view at their leisure, and as the workshop progressed I frequently saw students referring to the workshop slides.
By having these mini-lessons each day, I offered students a low pressure way to start critically analyzing their essay and their writing process. Even better, I was able to circulate the room freely, able to give my faster writers their space and able to help my “I’m not good at it” students as much as they needed. I loved the freedom it gave me to help where I was needed rather than drag the entire class along at one particular speed. Charlotte Van Walraven asserts that response is important when reflecting on and improving writing and backs up my method by stating “Response does not have to occur in a formal conference setting; it can occur casually as the teacher looks over a student’s shoulder or in an informal conversation held just before the start of class” (6).
Can writing as a community help students value their writing?
“The act of writing was [once] viewed as a test that students were to complete with no assistance from others. Today, too, students sometimes are expected to write under test conditions, and it is true that teachers today want students to have ownership as writers, but they recognize that they can help student writers gain ownership and independence by working with classmates” (Whitaker 7). I did wonder what might happen if I used the sense of community that I’ve tried to build since the start of the year to help improve writing. I experimented with this in a few ways.
The first way was with my 11th grade writing workshop. All those writing groups not only worked together during the writing workshop on the foci activities, they also worked together as a true writing group and had a peer editing day. Peer editing consisted of each writing group sharing their working essays with each other and making comments as they read. As I circulated the room, I saw several students making multiple comments on their group members essays. I asked some groups if they felt this process was helpful and they agreed that they appreciated having that feedback from people who understood the book and the criteria of the assignment intimately.
Secondly, I introduced writing workshop to my 9th graders by similarly breaking them down into writing groups. These writing groups wrote their textual analysis together as a group rather than writing separately and then sharing. This 9th grade writing workshop was a 3 day endeavour with the bulk of the writing happening on the second day. I scaffolded the paragraph through a slideshow presentation. Slide 1 gave students the directions to the textual analysis assignment. This is modeled directly after what they will be doing for the midterm essay and eventually with part 3 of the Regents. Slide 2 asked them to identify their theme, literary device, and then write their topic sentence. Slide 3 had students find two pieces of evidence where that literary device showed that theme. Slide 4 offered them a graphic organizer table with every part of the paragraph laid out. Slide 5 then asked them to copy over everything from slide 4 and then “make it flow” with transitions and a few proofreads. Slide 6 offered students the rubric for the assignment to refer to (a simplified version consistent with the part 3 Regents rubric).
Some students expressed dissatisfaction with the process because the group aspect made them feel cramped in their writing. However, quite a few said that writing in a group helped them generate more ideas which dispensed with some writers block. Ultimately, the group dynamic was partly for this exact reason, and partly because we were working on crunched time before the holidays. Regardless, while I have several ideas of how to improve this kind of writers workshop, I believe that it was an initial success.
The third way I worked with this community dynamic was to have my 9th grade writing groups share their essays with another group and offer feedback. I asked students to offer warm feedback, aspects of the other group’s essay that they felt were strong or they did particularly well, and cool feedback, aspects that they felt the other group needed to improve upon. I overheard some heartwarming “this looks good” comments throughout this workshop time and noticed some genuine compliments being written beneath warm feedback regarding themes, use of evidence, and diction.
Can reflection help students value their writing?
“Reflective thinking demands that you recognise that you bring valuable knowledge to every experience. It helps you therefore to recognise and clarify the important connections between what you already know and what you are learning. It is a way of helping you to become an active, aware and critical learner” (student.unsw.edu). My desire to bring reflective writing into the classroom came entirely from the beauty of this program. We’ve often been asked to write reflectively and I’ve found that it is a wonderfully enlightening experience. I asked both my 9th and 11th grade writing groups to reflect on their writing process for their given essays. In both cases I found this reflection to be another revelation, and not just for the students. The feedback I received about how I ran both writing workshops will move me forward in bettering my teaching and writing workshop practice.
Moving Forward
I have numerous ideas on how to improve my writing workshop process. However, I know that as I progress through this program, share more resources with more teachers, and continue to think and reflect on my practice, I will find even more ways I want to improve the process. However, regardless of the changes I make, I will be assigning my students essays in this writing workshop format for the rest of the year. The number of students who said that writing the essay in class benefited them has simply won me over. Having them engage with the assignment this way allows me to help them while they are writing rather than correct their papers and then have them vanish in a folder full of assorted papers. I feel that this is a far more beneficial way to engage with writing over the traditional write-the-paper-at-home method.
I am still toying with the group writing aspect that I brought into the 9th grade writing workshop. While it may be beneficial to have students collaborate, I want to maintain writing autonomy and, to be frank, they won’t have that option while writing during exams. My thought process is still evolving in this regard.
I very much enjoyed the scaffolded graphic organizer that I presented my 9th graders and I believe that it helped them structure their paragraphs better in addition to getting a greater feel for what the assignment truly required of them. One change (so far) that I will be making to this organizer is to toy around with slide 2 and 3, the topic sentence and evidence slides. I need to have students search for evidence before they decide upon their literary device. I realized in class that many students randomly chose literary devices and then immediately had trouble finding evidence to fit them. As soon as I realized this, I asked that class to reconsider their literary devices after finding some evidence for their theme. I taught the workshop in this order for the remaining two classes. I did not change the structure of the slides, however, and I want to for future writing workshops so that the organizer reflects this progression to find a literary device.
Another change I want to make to my workshop process is how students give feedback. I did not spend a great deal of time modeling how to give constructive feedback. As a result, many students had little to say when it came to giving feedback, especially cool feedback, to their peers. In the future I intend to model constructive feedback prior to asking students to offer it, starting with some sentence frame models. I also think that having a class discussion regarding what constructive criticism looks like may be beneficial.
Do My Students Value Writing?
I did not explicitly ask my students if they found their writing valuable as I intend to wait on this question until we have more writing workshops under our collective belt. However, given how many responses I found where students said they felt “more confident about [their] paragraph” or they found the workshop “extremely helpful”, I am confident that I am moving in the right direction. I have miles to go before I sleep, but I intend to be writing every step of the way, and I intend to be improving as I go. After all, writing is a skill that I will be improving for the rest of my life.
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