Adding Workshop Elements to Non-Workshop Curriculum

About five years ago my district replaced our workshop-based literacy curriculum with a thematic curriculum integrated with science and social studies topics. This curriculum has benefits for our student population, such as building vocabulary and background knowledge that provide students the language they need when writing. Nevertheless, our students are not developing into the writers we saw with our workshop curriculum. As a result, I have been collaborating with teachers at my school to “workshopify” our curriculum and provide students with the workshop elements they need to grow into successful writers.

Why It Matters: Many of us teach with curriculum that isn’t workshop based, but know that those missing workshop elements would increase our students’ writing development. When our curriculum isn’t supporting our young authors, it’s time for us to get creative in how we provide our students with what they need to maximize their writing potential.

What We Did: Here’s what we have done to adapt our thematic literacy curriculum to include more workshop elements:

1. Reminded ourselves that even though the units are thematic and integrated with science and social studies content, the standards we are teaching and assessing are literacy standards.
2. Rewrote writing lessons in a minilesson format to teach a transferable skill instead of teach to a specific prompt or assignment.
3. Shortened the unit’s single writing project to make time in the unit for students to produce multiple pieces in the genre.
4. Identified parts of the unit when students can write about any topic of their choice to increase their ability to generate their own ideas and promote engagement. This was done in two main ways:
   • During the beginning weeks of the unit, students can write about any topic as they learn about the skills and strategies of the genre.
   • During the final weeks of the unit, after completing the unit-themed writing project, students apply what they have learned about the genre through the unit-themed writing project to writing topics of their choice.
5. Added a publishing party at the end of the unit to celebrate our student authors and give them an authentic audience for their writing.

Example in Action: In a 9 week unit about animals, the curriculum has students write one informational report about the animal’s description, behavior, habitat, life cycle, adaptations, diet, and threats. Keeping in mind that we are teaching and assessing informational writing and not the science standards, we shortened the report to include 3-4 categories.This freed up time for the unit’s writing to flow like this:

• 2 week introduction/immersion in informational writing using a variety of animals
• 2 weeks writing informational reports about one animal of choice
• 2 weeks writing informational reports about a second animal of choice
• 3 weeks of informational writing about any topic of choice
• Writing Celebration to showcase each student’s favorite piece of writing

The Impact: This work is new and ongoing, but the initial results of these changes are encouraging.  Our students are coming up with their own ideas instead of waiting to be told the prompt, writing more volume with more independence, and transferring what they learned in one writing piece to another. Plus, students are remaining engaged in writing whereas before they were getting tired of working on the same piece during an entire unit.

The Bottom Line: When your curriculum isn’t workshop based, “workshopify” it to the extent possible to meet your students’ needs.