Workshop teaching values authentic work. 

Workshop classes begin with a teacher-selected mini-lesson (10-15 minutes in length). This lesson is designed to be the most effective instruction for the whole group at that moment and might focus on classroom procedures, craft, or conventions.

Just before individual work time begins, the teacher asks each child to say out loud what their plan for the writing time is. This utterance functions as a commitment and makes the student much more able to jump right in. And it’s immediately clear to the teacher if someone is not sure where or how to begin that day. 

Students are then loosed from the meeting area to write in their own spaces. The teacher circulates around the room as a mentor or a coach, giving each student the suggestions or feedback that will most benefit them at that moment. The writing time is long enough for people to make real progress. 

At the end of the class or at another designated time, the group has purposeful sharing. Each person’s work (whether just a sentence or the whole piece) is heard and honored. Although a hallmark of workshop is individual choice, the team nature of the classroom is continually emphasized by the attention and respect we give each other’s writing and sharing. 

A beautiful side-effect of workshop is the continual exposure that students have to how people talk about the writing process. Teacher conferences are not a silent enterprise of letter grades or marginal comments; they are whispered conversations that nearby students can overhear. When doing this innocuous eavesdropping, kids learn that the teacher talks with everyone about what is really working in a piece and asks everyone where they might go next. They learn that writing is process and it is not just them who might benefit from looking at the start of a piece again. They come to understand revision as a central tenet of what writers do, and they believe that one can use writing as a way to explore your thoughts in a process, not just record them in writing as a static product. This belief is a fundamental shift in what writing is, and will serve students well throughout their lifetime. As teachers, workshop enables us to reach a wide range of learners at CTL without ever leaving someone behind who is struggling or telling someone who is quick that they should sit and wait for the rest of the group. 

The History

University of New Hampshire professors Donald Graves and Donald Murray became interested in translating writing workshops - research-based ways to help adult writers hone their craft - into K-12 education. Working with groups of interested teachers at Bread Loaf and in other summer institutes throughout the 1980’s, their ideas gained traction and inspired many. Nancie Atwell, CTL’s founder, moved from writing articles and essays to publishing In the Middle, a seminal book about workshop teaching for writing in the middle school classroom. The three editions of that book combined have sold more than 600,000 copies. The royalties from In the Middle funded the construction of CTL. Nancie went on to publish several other books about the workshop approach to teaching writing and reading. In 2015, her work in revolutionizing the way people thought about teaching writing was acknowledged when she was honored as the inaugural recipient of the million dollar Global Teacher Prize through the Varkey Foundation. She donated that prize to fund tuition assistance at CTL.