Response to WW Ch. 11 & 12 and "Writing for Justice"

The first chapter focused on the most important component of the writing workshop, in my opinion: allowing each student to write about what is important to them. It is true that students can write a piece on a topic given by the teacher, but they are unlikely to find much, if any, meaning in it. Allowing students to write about something that they are interested in gives the assignment much more meaningful and allows them to take more away from the lesson. The teaching part of the writing workshop is not in assigning students a topic, it is in giving students techniques and strategies to use in their writing. This material may find its way in to students' work for that day, but if it does not, that has to be okay. The students will add the material in to their writing if and when they want to. The students in the writing workshop are their own guides in their writing, the teacher's job is just to provide them with a better set of tools.

As a person who appreciates structure and control, I really liked the chapter that focused on units of study. When we first started reading The Writing Workshop, I was stressed out by how small and disconnected the focus lessons seemed. After reading this chapter, I've been able to think of them as pieces of a larger lesson, which makes them much less intimidating to create. Instead of thinking that you have to effectively teach a large concept in less than 10 minutes, you can make that large concept your unit of study. Then, you can use your focus lessons to dive in to individual components of that concept. Units of study do give a seemingly unstructured writing workshop some structure in the long-term, and that makes it much more likely that I will include it in my classroom in the future.

In "Writing for Justice- Persuasion from the Inside Out" by Mark Hansen, the idea that students need to write about a topic that is important to them is highlighted. As Hansen pointed out, when students write about a topic that they perceived as meaningless, they begin to view writing as meaningless. When students write persuasive letters that do not produce any change, they begin to believe that writing can not lead to change, and this is absolutely NOT what we need to be teaching our students. Allowing students to write about important topics that they are passionate about allows them to see purpose in their persuasive writing. Instead of just writing to complete an assignment, they write because they want to persuade someone to share their views on the subject. This makes their writing powerful.