Are you a teacher? Are you wondering how you could help your students improve their writing skills? If your answer is yes, then this article is meant for you. We shall look at a technique known as writing workshops. The method is not only effective in boosting students writing abilities but also their responsiveness. It is hence a pretty essential skill that you should use in your classroom.
The writing workshop teaching strategy has been used by a lot of teachers over the years. Most of the teachers who use it bear witness to its effectiveness. If you have never heard of this technique, then worry not because we have got you. We shall look at how you can implement writing workshop in classroom strategy effectively. Hence without further ado, let us get right into it.
What exactly is a writing workshop?
Do you provide your students with a topic to write about and live them to ponder over it? How about you switched this monotonous habit into letting your students decide what they want to write. That is what writing workshops are all about. You set aside some time for your students to write, but let them choose a topic they like. Students enjoy writing content based on a topic that they want.
To increase a student’s ability to write, students require three things, that is:
- Owning their content
- Guidance from experienced writers
- Community support of fellow students
When you implement the strategy of writing workshops, you are providing all these aspects on a silver platter. You provide your students with sufficient writing time, which in turn boosts their writing capability. What is more, your students get a chance to view themselves as better writers and, in time, grown to become great in this field. Writing workshop elementary classroom work best due to nurturing young minds. Of course, older kids require set topics most of the time.
Writing workshop essential guide
Mini-lesson
A mini lesson only lasts for about 15 minutes tops. It is a lesson of strategy. Here you get to bring together all your students to discuss a common topic. The topic should be pretty straightforward, one that each student can easily undertake without so much as a challenge. Here students and the teacher do the following:
- Raise concerns
- Explore different issues
- Model some technique
- Reinforce your strategy
You can get guides of mini-lessons from many sources, from the prepared curriculum to the internet. It would help if you also got to know your students’ needs before you commence this lesson. Their needs can be the agenda.
There are 4 main parts of this lesson
- Connection
- Teaching
- Active engagement
- Link
Status update
It mostly takes about three to five minutes. In this stage, you check on your students to identify where they are as per their papers. That is, are they in the following stages:
- Drafting
- Revising
- Editing
- Evaluating
- Publishing
You can use a record board to capture this data to avoid wasting a lot of time at this stage.
Writing
Take around twenty to forty-five minutes. At this moment, let your students go wild in their writing. You can be undertaking your writing too or helping your students when they get stuck. Make sure you stick around in class for this stage; remember you are their expert writer. You also get to know what each student is working on.
Sharing
The sharing period takes around five to fifteen minutes. In this stage, your students get to effectively share their writing with classmates. Here is a tip that you can implement to make this step more effective.
- Have students record in case all the students are sharing. You can then mark the students who have shared.
- You can also make use of groups. Students can sit around in groups and share information on their writing. Pretty effective!
Teaching grammar in writing workshop also works. You can set aside time to assist the students having grammar trouble in their writings.
Conclusion
Writing workshops in classrooms are pretty effective. We hope this article will help you implement this strategy in your classroom.
