The Writing Workshop: Chapters 9, 10, 13

Now that we have covered just exactly what Writers Workshops are, its time to learn how to place them in action in our classrooms. Through these chapters I learned many important things on how to teach writing workshops in my classroom. Five main points that need to be remembered include: 1) Setting up the room to teach (environment) 2) How we live in that room (demonstration) 3) What we teach in focus lessons and conferences (Direct Instruction) 4) What investigations we plan (inquiry) 5) What we require as writing homework (potential of the world). I found some really interesting points that came from these five topics:

* The environment students are surrounded in inside the classroom should be enough for them to write about even without any instruction

* Writing should not be homework; there does need to be homework in writing workshop but it needs to come from observing the world and gathering ideas

* Ever act we make in our classroom teaches students. We do not have to necessarily write with students but just the act of carrying things such as notebooks shows students that we do write.

* One of my favorite quotes in chapter nine was "If it is a workshop, then all kinds of things need to be in that "shop" that students can work with as they go about their writing." -I like this because how can we expect students to write without giving them the materials necessary to do so.

After we have learned how to teach things we need to go back and look at what to teach. Usually about five different things are taught in a writers workshop. 1) Strategies (ways to do things), 2) Techniques (ways to fashion things), 3) Questions (ways to think about things), 4) Relationships (ways to connect things), 5) Conventions (ways to expect things). From these five topics some interesting things I learned was...

* Some of the best ways for students to learn strategies about writing are to observe past strategies of teachers or past students. Here they can see suggestions and try it on their own.

* We need to teach students important questions to ask themselves as writers that way they can manage their work and think about their writing in a different way.

* For some students connecting their writing to something else in the real world can help them better understand what they are doing as a writer. The relationship the book gave that I liked best was "Learning to read like a writer is like a seamstress visiting a dress shop."

In writing we need to pull students together and allow them to get focused back on the lesson again. Teachers can use an overhead or chart paper to write about the focus lesson. When setting the tone I found it interesting that as a teacher we need to show our students that we are both a writing mentor and a fellow writer. Interestingly enough, writing workshops are usually teacher centered. The teacher does the talking and explaining while the students watch and listen. We can get students involved though is by having them share. Any part that the student can input that lends itself to the lesson is interactive. To summarize and end the lesson as teachers we should look for evidence in students' work of their using the possibilities we are teaching them.