Writing Workshops
Overview / Writing Workshops / Mission, Principles / Teacher Coaches / Results
At the heart of Powerful Writers is the daily writing workshop. Teachers set aside at least 45 minutes a day, four days a week for writing. It's this daily practice, coupled with strong instruction, predictable structures and routines, and an atmosphere of safety, trust, and creativity that ensures student progress.
Devoted to the notion that the best writing emerges from the details of a child's everyday life, Powerful Writers teaches students to cultivate their writer's awareness and mine their lives for meaning. Throughout the year they collect thoughts, memories, wishes, and observations inside their writing notebooks, choosing several to take through the incremental steps of the writing process to publish narratives, essays, poems, and feature articles.
For many teachers, Powerful Writers supports the most meaningful part of the teaching day, "the only part of the day that makes perfect sense," says John Muir teacher Ann Superfisky. When students write about what they know and care about, for real audiences and for real purposes, they invest in their writing and want to grow as writers. The returns on this early investment are profound. Students build skills and confidence that spill across a wide range of subjects and writing structures -- lifelong skills that will support them far beyond the classroom walls.
While writing workshops are key to strengthening students' skills in writing, they offer schools much more. Powerful Writers classrooms are rich with diversity. Shaped by the details of children's real lives, writing provides teachers and classmates with windows of understanding through which they can clearly see one another. What's more, as children document and share their stories, they bring history to life and deepen cultural understanding.
We boarded the airplane in Vietnam. I didn't know how to speak English. I was scared the first time I boarded, scared to meet new people. Me and my family sat close to the window. I was thinking, how would I leave my country? What would happen to my homeland? What would it be like meeting my father once more? Natalie, grade 4
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 "Before Powerful Writers I never wrote with the children. I just went around and gave them ideas. Anne [teacher coach, pictured above] shares her life with the children and it makes kids feel safer. They see her writing about something personal and they see that they can write about something that has hurt them, too."
Lamarre reads her story, "When I Discovered That I Was Not Beautiful." "I grew up in Haiti thinking I was beautiful," Lamarre says. "Everyone called me 'princess.' Then when I went to kindergarten a 3rd grader said I looked like a bald-headed monkey." This episode changed Lamarre's life. "This taught me how a few words can affect someone's life," she says. "I learned to be careful about how I use words, because words can be poisonous."
Words can also be an antidote to poison, as Lamarre discovered when she read this story to the kids in her class. "When I first wrote the story the kids were so compassionate," she says. "They all ran up to me and said, 'you're so beautiful, Ms. Lamarre.' "
Excerpted from Seattle Times, Dana Standish writer, 6/04
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