How to Teach a Writing Workshop

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura from youngwritersworkshops.com and I'm going to talk about how to teach a writing workshop. Depending on your target audience, you're going to format your writing workshop a little bit differently but in any case, no matter who the audience is, you want to start with the idea that writers workshops are composed of writers. Make sure you communicate that you're going to be coming to this workshop as a writer and not as a person who's learning to write. This distinction is important because you want your writers to value each other's opinions as much as they value your opinion as a workshop teacher. Its often helpful, especially if its a short term workshop to come up with a focus, for example memoir writing or poetry writing because that gives your participants a little bit more to hold on to, a little bit more of something to focus on that you don't want to leave it too wide open or it might be hard for people to, for the group to gel and give each other good feedback. Approach the workshop with a format where there will be some writing and a lot of peer conferencing or peer feedback. This way those students will get much more feedback on their work then if it was you responding to each writer's work. You want to also be sure to include time for people to ask questions of each other about the bigger picture of being writers. You want to build a community of writers who are going to continue to stay connected. That's one of the benefits of a workshop setting is people can get to know each other and start to really learn from each other. You might want to have a format for publication so that whatever work is produced by the writers in your workshop can also be published. This could be an online, a web page where you publish the work or a print publication. Your writers workshop will go through the process of a first draft, a conference, a second draft revision and then finally publication so you'll want that publication to be the place where the work ends up. So those are just a few ideas about how to teach a writers workshop."