In the April issue of the Learning Center Exchange, I reported on a project that I was in the middle of – a Writer’s Workshop for Learning Support English students. I originally got the idea from work I had done with the National Writing Project and from consistently hearing students talk about wanting to get through their English class. They did not see the developmental English class as a way to improve their skills and become better writers for a lifetime. They saw it almost as a punishment for being poor students earlier in life, not being smart enough to get into college track classes, and/or just something to a check off their list of things that had to be done to get a degree and go on with life. After two summers of training with the NWP and hearing such discouraging dialogue from students, I had the crazy idea of trying to get them to change their image of themselves. I wanted them to see themselves as writers who could incorporate writing into their lives for the rest of their lives. Of course, I also hoped that they would be successful in their classes through this change and through new ways of working with writing. Here is a brief, informal summary of our work and the results.
The Writer’s Workshop was offered to only those students who were enrolled in our Learning Support English classes. I developed a brochure to publicize the meeting – once a week for 1 1/2 hours in the afternoon, and with the help of the staff members in the Writing Lab and the faculty who teach the English classes, we publicized the workshop and “talked it up” as a small-group alternative option for success in the class. These students were required to attend the Writing Lab, and the Writer’s Workshop met outside of that venue, so getting them to come was problematic. Students were not initially offered credit to attend; however, some instructors decided to give extra credit for their students’ attendance and participation. It was from these instructors’ classes that our small group eventually came.
Since students voluntarily came to the Workshop and were not required to do any outside work or assignments, I wanted each session to be a stand-alone event that would allow for freedom of movement of students from week to week. I also used a sign in sheet so I could send a report to teachers concerning who came/participated in each session. Following a pattern somewhat similar to the NWP summer sessions, every meeting started with a little conversation related to school and later, as they became comfortable with each other, the conversations opened up to family and personal issues as well as school events. We then spent ten minutes in a free, non-stop writing exercise, always with a topic or purpose to the writing – and I wrote with them. This was followed by their sharing of their writing. At first, their sharing was based on content, but this grew to become content, style, organization, and discussions of future ideas.
After their sharing, I presented a focused mini-lesson of some kind were everyone participated. These lessons were drawn from a variety of materials such as those I garnered in the NWP summer sessions, as well as from some of my favorite books such as Anne Gere’s Writing on Demand and William Strong’s Sentence Combining. I made a point of using materials that were not being used in the classroom or by any instructors. I also made a point to sit with the students in a group circle to give the lesson from that position – like I was one of them or with them in the process. I also made a point of participating in and asking questions of them all along the way. I wanted each lesson presented as “here is something fun – wanna’ try it?” I consciously worked at giving each presentation as if they were making the decision with the idea that they would feel empowered about the activity and learning. I always had a back up in case they decided they didn’t like what I presented – which never happened. After the mini-lesson, we would talk about what value they saw in it and how it might apply to their class and their work. We talked about the upcoming week and their expectations and work in their classes. Finally, we closed the session with 5 to 7 minutes of reflective writing.
The cornerstone of the Workshop, from my point of view, was writing, writing, writing. I gave them journal assignments from the first day. Of course, they were not required to do the daily journaling, but I constantly asked them about it. I brought my own notebooks – I have several - and showed them what I did and how I did my journaling. I gave them pages of journaling ideas and topics. I asked them during the week whenever I saw them about their journal writing to give them encouragement and urge them to try it or keep it up. We also wrote with a purpose at the beginning and ending of every session.
At the fist Workshop session, you would have thought that first ten minute, non-stop writing session was going to kill them! They fidgeted, they twirled pens and pencils, and they bit their nails and tapped their toes, and they erased or marked out multiple times. At the end of that first session, the longest piece of writing from any of the students was three sentences – and those were fragments! Also, at that first session when we talked about journaling, there were rolled eyes, hems and haws, and looks of despair, but all I could do was encourage them and show them my notebooks and talk about how my journals – or diaries – helped me. They were not being graded so I had no way of knowing if they would do any of the suggestions or even come back…but they did. Progress seemed immeasurable, or even non-existent, but they continued to return each week.
I first noticed the change in one student, SR when she came to a session smiling. She had done well on a paper in class and her pride showed. In that same session, another student, RM, admitted that he had been journaling almost daily since we started and pulled out his notebook to show us. It seems that right after our first session, his basketball coach had talked with him about trying to gain focus and control over his temper during games. RM remembered that I had said and shown the group how I used my journals to write about my fears, sorrows, joys, defeats, prayer needs, ideas for teaching, ideas for writing – everything - as a way of dealing with my life – and he decided to try this for himself, and he was writing almost every day. He said that even his coach had noticed a difference in his attitude. RM said it was because he got all his frustration out on his paper! A halleluiah chorus was ringing in my head, but for them I just smiled.
Later that week, one of the instructors came to my office to say she was seeing “remarkable” changes in the writing of those students from her class who were attending the Workshop and that they were using and talking about the things we had done.
Another instructor came to see me to say that SR, the girl who finally smiled, had obviously different body posture: straight shoulders, more smiles, more participation in class, and this student also was talking about Workshop activities and doing better in her writing.
At the end of the semester, seven students had participated in the Workshop – all of them were repeating their Learning Support English. Of these students, all of them passed their Departmental Essay Exam – a first for several of them, and six of the seven passed the COMPASS exit exam. On a survey given to them at the end of our work, they all said the Workshop helped them pass their tests, that it should meet more than once a week, and that we needed to figure out a way to get more students involved because it was so great. Of all the activities we did, some of the most popular were journaling and the different ways we wrote or approached writing, and all of them reported that they believed themselves to be “writers” as compared to “students in a writing class”.
Almaee, R. (2005). [The a b c’s of our lives: Individual project book]. Unpublished work from
Southwest Georgia Writing Project, Georgia Southwestern State University.
Almaee, R. (2006). [Reading in the writing lab]. Unpublished document.
Gere, A., & Christenbury, L., & Sassi, K. (2005). Writing on Demand: Best Practices and Strategies for Success. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann.
MacLean, M. & Mohr, M. (1999). Teacher-Researchers at Work. Berkeley, California: National Writing Project.
Strong, W. (1994). Sentence combining: A composing book ( 3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.