What Teachers Need to Know about The Writing Workshop Approach (Book)

December 21, 2016

"The Art of Teaching Writing" is definitely one of the best works of Lucy Calkins in which she makes a strong case in favour of the writing workshop approach. Calkins is one of the renowned and most respected teacher scholars in the field of literacy teaching. Her works particularly Units of Study for Teaching Writing series and Units of Study for Teaching Reading have been featured as firsthand classroom materials in numerous North American schools.

Lucy Calkins together with several other scholars such as Nancie Atwell, Donald Murray, and Donald Graves, to mention but a few, have provided teachers with the building blocks of the writing workshop approach as we know it now." The Art of Teaching Writing" is one of the primary and foundational texts for learning about this approach.

In a writing workshop approach, the focus is on the writer and not the process and hence the mantra " teach the writer then the writing". Concepts of student's voice and choice, active revision and peer editing,  and publishing outside classroom walls constitute the pillars of this approach. In this book, Lucy sheds more light on these principles and provides many examples and scenarios in which the ethos of this approach have been used as well as numerous samples of student writing.