The Case Against Traditional Writing Workshop

Admittedly it has been quite some time since my last post. Life has a funny way of taking us in its own direction despite all our steering. When I last shared, my focus was on the importance of learning community over specific content instruction. Despite the fact that this past school year I traded my Kindergarten classroom for a fourth grade one, I stand by that statement still. In fact, as I critically reflect upon our current models for writing instruction and assessment, I am reminded of the importance of learning communities and understanding the shifting needs of our learners. Despite the fact that writing is so heavily rooted in social constructs, our eduction systems still “ordinarily expect a student to talk mainly to the teacher, write to the teacher, and, surely, determine his fate in relation to the teacher, individually” (Bruffee, 1973, p. 636). However, we must move past this very teacher-centric view of the classroom and engage the learners in a more interdependent process of writing. My position is that by shifting instruction to a more collaborative work model educators may exact more significant learning.

Let's look at the typical writing workshop model since so many of our classrooms employ some variation of this strategy to teach writing. The lesson begins with a teacher-led 10 minute or so mini-lesson on a target skill, after which students will progress to 20-30 minute or so session of independent writing followed by a 5 minute share/wrap up again led by the teacher. Now, let's be clear here that this is the prescription for a writing workshop lesson. However, as any educator in a writing classroom knows these ideal time frames are exactly that...idyllic. For example, my writing period this year was exactly 34 minutes long. If we were able to start exactly at the bell, and my mini-lesson was exactly 10 minutes long, and I reserved 5 minutes for a post-writing share, then my writers would have exactly 19 minutes to begin writing, reflect on the writing they've completed that class period, and prepare to share. Factor in that since most of their writing is completed on ChromeBooks, or they'll later spend entire writing periods typing up what they've hand drafted in their notebooks, they'll need time to access the computer cart and log on to their devices. The workshop model when you have anything less than a 50minute block is a futile effort of racing the clock.

The implication of that being students are forced into rushed, interrupted chunks of writing time to produce first drafts that due to curriculum restraints will almost always stay in the early stages of drafting instead of genuinely moving through the writing stages. Then they are asked to repeat these writing tasks until they've practiced enough someone somewhere believes the classroom teacher can assign a level of mastery to through an often far too ambiguous rubric that wrongly relies on conventions of grammar, mechanics, and standardized/academic language. And we'll repeat this across genres and units of study as we hurdle our way through to the finish line- the big test, where the worth of writing lies in how the frantic, timed writing piece holds up to a biased, unreliable assessment measure instead in the experience and growth of the writer or the effort and determination one has shown to learn how to share their own ideas.