perspectives in Education and Deafness

Writer's Workshop

Beauty from Chaos

Writer's Workshop

Students draft, share, edit, and publish writing. Adults give daily mini-lessons on writing style, grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Students and adults work on ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions.

One morning Amanda * , a 15-year-old student in my freshman English class, rushed in to see me on her way to breakfast.

"Sandi Fisher, I rewrote my essay last night," she said. "I can't wait to show you. It has REALLY changed."

"That's great," I smiled back. "What did you change?"

"The whole thing is different. Just wait until you see it," she said.

"How did you get the ideas to make changes?" I asked.

"Well, last night I was doing sit-ups and thinking about my essay. This new idea just popped into my mind, and I had to write it!"

"You know, Amanda, that's exactly how I do my best writing—I rehearse what I want to say while exercising!"

That afternoon I read Amanda's rewritten essay. She also asked another student, who had been providing feedback in response to the essay as she developed it, to read it. We agreed that the ideas flowed much more smoothly in the latest version.

"It's a keeper," I told her.

These kinds of discussions—formal and informal, with a small group of students, and on a one-to-one basis—exemplify the writing conferences that occur in our classroom. They are based on the assumption that all children want to become writers—and they will become writers through encouragement and praise. As Lucy Caulkins (1986) explains in The Art of Teaching Writing:

Human beings have a deep need to represent their experience through writing...There is no plot line in the bewildering complexity of our lives but that which we make and find for ourselves...Writing allows us to turn the chaos into something beautiful, to frame selected moments of our lives, to uncover and to celebrate the organizing patterns of our existence. (p. 3)

Why is it, then, that so many of our students—deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing—say, "Ugh, I hate to write?"

When Amanda first came to me two and a half years ago, I gave her a questionnaire that asked her about writing and her attitude toward it. Her responses were typical of students who are used to writing, correcting grammatical mistakes, and turning in the piece for a grade. Although she indicated that she enjoyed writing stories, Amanda believed that good writing consisted only of using appropriate vocabulary and grammar.

Amanda, a teacher's delight, looked up from what she was writing recently, and signed, "I can't wait to see what will happen next in my story." She takes risks and immediately tries new strategies and techniques that I demonstrate in mini-lessons.

Amanda is unique, and of course the majority of students are not as enthusiastic as Amanda is. Writers' workshops enable these less-motivated students to become learners, too. Given a chance to write drafts, get thoughtful feedback on content, and revise in order to reach their intended audience, our students grow and develop as writers and learners.

	ABOVE: Amanda prepares her questions.

Structure of Workshops
From Storytelling to Research

The structure of my workshop has not changed since 1988, when a colleague gave me a copy of the first edition of In the Middle by Nancie Atwell, a book that changed fundamentally the way teachers thought about developing students' reading and writing skills. After reading it, I never considered returning to the traditional way of teaching. I began a writers' workshop and saw that students, if given the chance to develop their ideas, become writers.

We begin with a mini-lesson. Each student reviews what he or she did the day before and plans what needs to be accomplished during the period. Students then write, conference with each other and/or me, and share their writing.

	ABOVE: Andy Vasnick responds via fax.

Mini-lessons include talking about a variety of topics related to writing, including brainstorming sessions for topic ideas. Last year a group of students wanted to study Deaf culture. As part of their study, I asked them to write anecdotes describing their unique experiences as deaf people. At first, they told me that they had none. I recounted some of the stories that deaf adults—Sam and Pat Yates, from Gallaudet Unversity—had told me. We invited Bonelle Amann, our school's ASL specialist, to share some of her favorite stories about being deaf. That started the ideas flowing. We "just talked" for two or three class periods before the students began writing. As a result, everyone had more than one anecdote to tell. After subsequent mini-lessons on form and structure, some students decided that their anecdotes could be shared better through poetry.

	ABOVE: From the faxed response, Amanda writes an outline and first draft.

These same students wanted to undertake a research project on an aspect of Deaf culture. Amanda chose to focus on the National Theatre of the Deaf, but was stymied when she couldn't find enough printed information. This prompted a mini-lesson on the difference between primary and secondary sources, and on the role of interviews.

Andy Vasnick, a former actor with the National Theatre of the Deaf, had been a substitute teacher at our school so Amanda decided to arrange an interview with him. She developed interview questions, faxed them to Vasnick, and prepared to write up his responses. When she discovered that she had uncovered only factual experiences—not the impact of Vasnick's experiences on his life as was her purpose—she faxed him a new set of questions. Vasnick again responded and Amanda cut and pasted his responses into her existing article. Still not satisfied, she contacted Vasnick one last time. The form of her questions changed as she shared her information through content conferences with her peers and with me. Through talking with us, she became aware of what her readers wanted to know.

	ABOVE: Amanda asks more questions and adds the information as the draft is edited.

Once Amanda was satisfied with content, we worked on editing. She began with a self-edit, using "Skills I Have" and "Skills I Need" sheets. Then she gave me the draft to check. I noted some of the errors that she had overlooked in the margins. During our editing conference, we worked on the organization of ideas within a paragraph and smoothed out awkward sentences. Finally Amanda went to the computer to type her final draft, proud of the work she had done.

"...Workshop teaching balances students' need to be challenged with their need to progress at their own individual pace (Bullock, 1998, 6)." I use writers' workshops to individualize teaching and curriculum and meet the needs of each student. Students like Amanda can experiment and grow rapidly as writers while others in the same class receive the encouragement, structure, and guidance they need to learn that writing can be a rewarding and fun challenge.

* Amanda is indeed the student's real name. Appreciation is extended to Amanda and her grandmother who gave permission to publish this article, and some of Amanda's original work. Back