Writing workshop and peer response

In my memories, I don’t think we had the experience of sharing our writings with our peer learners and receiving feedbacks back in school. Writing is always regarded as an individual thing; no matter it was a weekly journal, a diary, or an academic writing that the teacher assigned.

Yes, back in middle school days, some good articles will be read aloud in front of the whole class by the teacher, but that was just for the appreciation purpose – to allow the whole class enjoy how beautifully the article was written. Gradually it turned out that we admired that writer much more than we appreciated the article. No further comments were invited from the rest of the class, and that article was regarded as the final product – a model article.

Back to my own teaching days, I also assigned writing tasks, on specific topics. But due to the big class (I had 120 college students in one Reading and Writing class), most of the time, my young writers’ reader, and their only reader was me. Occasionally, I would find one or two outstanding “model article”, which conveyed creative thoughts and refreshing air; which also carried a plenty of common mistakes that many other students may make while writing in English. Having got the permission from the writer, I would copy and paste the article to a Word document on a computer to share with the whole class, and also read aloud in front of them. Although the writer’s name had been hidden, and the students were very active in “pointing out” the mistakes, I felt something was not right... Yes, the poor writer’s face was getting redder and redder – he/she was embarrassed to some degree. Although I was still inviting students to appreciate how the paper was structured and how carefully some particular words were chosen, my students’ attention had gradually transferred from “appreciating” to “error correcting”. Will the young writer still be willing to “share” the writing with the rest of the class next time? I doubt.

This Tuesday, we had a writing workshop. We were still using one “sample article”, and the comments from the rest of the class were invited. But this time, our aim was not to “fix the article” or to correct the mistakes; instead, we were to tell the writer what we saw and what we felt about his article. I truly believe that it was a healthy way to encourage the growth of a writer by letting him/her hear the voice directly from the readers, realizing his/her own strengths and weaknesses. It is a community where people trust each other and are honest with each other...

I will definitely adopt writing workshop and peer response in my future classrooms, to build up their confidence in writing, and to help them become a better writer, and, of course, I hope I could be given a smaller classroom.