Running poetry with young people: the writing workshop

That single reversal is the whole method. The class stops being an audience for literature and becomes a group of people making some, and every other decision in the hour exists to protect the 15 minutes in which that happens. It is a way of teaching before it is a subject, which is why it works in a school hall, a library meeting room, a youth club and a pupil referral unit, and why the adult holding the room needs a different set of answers from the young writer sitting in it.

What a writing workshop actually is

A writing workshop is a workshop because the material on the table is the work of the people in the room, and it has three moving parts that stay the same whatever the age of the group. A short teaching point, usually one device or one decision. A stretch of protected writing time in which the adult writes too. And a reading back, in which drafts are heard and described rather than marked.

The shape is not new and it is not a poetry invention. It came out of classroom research into how children actually compose, associated with Donald Graves at the University of New Hampshire in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it reached most schools through Nancie Atwell, whose book In the Middle set out the middle school version, and Lucy Calkins, whose Teachers College Reading and Writing Project turned it into units of study for primary and elementary classrooms. That is the tradition most of the freely available workshop guidance and curriculum material comes out of, and it is why so much of it is aimed at kindergarten and elementary readers.

A spoken word workshop with 14 year olds borrows the structure and changes almost everything inside it. The mini lesson is a device rather than a punctuation rule. The writing time is longer and quieter. The share at the end is the part that carries the risk, because a poem written from life is not a recount of a weekend, and a room that laughs in the wrong place in week 2 will not hear anything honest in week 6.

How the hour is built

The hour is built in 5 blocks, and the arithmetic matters more than the theme. A timetabled lesson of 50 minutes divides cleanly, and the version that fails is always the one that spends 35 minutes talking about poetry and 10 minutes writing it.

A club, a library group or a community session that has 60 to 90 minutes uses the same blocks with the writing and the reading back stretched, and can hear everybody instead of a sample. That extra time is the single biggest advantage a library has over a classroom, and it is worth saying out loud to a librarian who assumes a school does this better.

What running a workshop costs the adult

Running a workshop costs about 21 hours for a first block of 6 sessions, of which only 5 are spent in front of the group. The rest is the part nobody budgets for, and it is the reason good workshops stop after one term rather than the reason they fail.

• Contact time: 6 sessions of 50 minutes, which is 5 hours, and the only figure that appears on a timetable.
• Preparation: about an hour a session the first time round, because every model poem has to be read, timed and checked for what it will set off in the room.
• Reading drafts: about 45 minutes between sessions for a group of 15, done as a reader rather than as a marker.
• The showcase: an afternoon of setting up and an evening of running it, about 6 hours between them, plus the consent forms gathered weeks earlier.

The second time the same block runs, preparation drops to roughly a third, because the model poems, the prompts and the rules are already chosen and the adult already knows which week the group goes quiet. Running a workshop sets out that build session by session, including the first 4 weeks in order and what to do about the student who will not write anything at all.

Which writing workshops are best?

No ranking worth trusting exists for workshops of this kind, and the question misfires because a workshop is not a product with a specification. The one worth joining is the one that still has the same people writing in week 6, and 4 things predict that better than any reputation: the group is small enough that everybody reads, the adult writes alongside them, the rules for talking about a poem were agreed before the first poem was read, and the block ends with something that happens rather than with a folder.

Searches for workshops in London, Toronto, Melbourne, Austin, Bangalore or Johannesburg are looking for a local room, and no national reference can honestly answer that. The routes that do work are the same everywhere: the library service, the local writing development agency, the education pages of the national poetry organisation, the youth strand of a nearby literature festival, and the English department of the school itself, which frequently turns out to have run one before.

Workshops online are a real option and a different craft. The writing time works better than most people expect, because a shared silence with cameras off is a genuine silence. The reading back is harder, since a poem said into a laptop loses the room that a poem is written for, and a group above 8 stops being a circle. Adult programmes, university seminars and residential courses for writers over 18 are a separate world with a separate purpose, and nothing on this site is written to them.

Writing workshops for beginners

Writing workshops for beginners are built around removing reasons not to start, and the first session is the one that decides whether there is a second. Nobody performs in week 1. Nobody reads out unless they volunteer. The first prompt is narrow enough that a blank page is not an option, and the list poem is the most reliable first poem there is, because it gives a shape that holds a writer up while they find out what they are writing about.

The classroom half of that is set out on Teaching poetry, including how to get from a device on the board to a draft in a notebook inside the same hour, and Poems that work with teenagers covers what to read aloud in the room and why some famous poems die on contact with a class of 15 year olds. Spoken word poetry is the wider form all of this sits inside, and a teacher who has never seen a poem performed should watch several before running the first session.

What a workshop is honestly claimed to do

Workshops are claimed to do 5 things for young people: build confidence, improve speaking and listening, raise literacy attainment, lift attendance and engagement, and improve wellbeing by giving a young person a way of saying something they had no other way of saying. Those claims are not equally well supported, and the difference between them is worth knowing before a business case is written on the back of them.

The honest short version is that the evidence is strongest for the outcomes closest to the activity itself and weakest for the outcomes furthest from it, and that a workshop evaluated by the person who ran it is not evidence at all. The evidence, and its limits sets out what the research actually supports, what it does not, and why a study of 30 students in one school proves nothing on its own. It is the page to read before promising a head teacher an attendance figure.