It’s usually not empowering for students to have complete and utter free reign. When confronted with too much choice, students often feel lost. In order to help students make powerful decisions, then, they need to understand their options.
Here’s how this might look in writing workshop. Perhaps a class is engaged in a fiction writing unit. The goal for kids is to develop rich, nuanced characters. Just by clarifying this goal, the teacher has already empowered the students, because they know what they are working towards. Next, the teacher can further empower students by teaching them a repertoire of ways that they can work toward this goal. Each day, students might learn a new strategy for developing characters, such as through dialogue, internal voice, actions, interactions with other characters. They might study mentor texts to get a better sense of how published authors develop characters, and add these strategies to their repertoires.
As students grow their banks of strategies, the real magic happens. In their independent writing, they can make choices about how and when to use the strategies they know to attain the shared goal. One student might choose to rely heavily on dialogue as a way to show how a character is feeling. Another student might use internal voice to reveal the reasons behind a character’s choices. In both cases, students are empowered to develop their characters as they see fit.
At this week’s TCRWP Twitter chat, staff developers Arlène Casimir-Siar and Kisha Howell will facilitate a conversation about ways to empower students in reading and writing workshop. Join them to grow your thinking on ways to set students up to take owership of their work in deep and lasting ways.
Each Wednesday night at 7:30pm eastern, The Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project hosts a Twitter chat using the hashtag #TCRWP. Join arlenecasimirsiar & @kishahowell3 to chat about ways to empower students in workshop tomorrow evening.
Follow her on Twitter @annagcockerille