Running a workshop

None of those 5 is about poetry. They are the load bearing parts, and a workshop that gets them right survives a bad prompt, a wet Tuesday and a group that did not choose to be there. Running poetry with young people sets out what a workshop is as a way of teaching; this page is the build.

What you need, and what it costs

What a workshop needs is paper, pens, a room with a door and a wall to put the rules on, which is why a workshop of this kind can genuinely be run for nothing. The cost is the adult's preparation, which for a first block of 6 sessions runs to roughly an hour a session.

• Notebooks, one each, kept in the room between sessions and given to the writer at the end of the block.
• Model poems, printed, one a week, chosen because they can be heard once rather than because they are important.
• A wall, or a flipchart sheet, for the rules the group agrees in week 2.
• A timer, visible, so writing time is protected by something other than the adult's judgement.
• A route, known before the first session, for a disclosure that arrives in a poem.

Free published material for the teaching point is good enough to use rather than writing your own from nothing. The Poetry Society publishes education resources and runs Young Poets Network for writers under 25, the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets both publish classroom material free to use, and BBC Bitesize covers the terminology a class is assessed on elsewhere. Curriculum packages built for elementary and kindergarten writing workshop, with their units of study and their clipart, are a different animal and do not scale up to a room of 15 year olds.

A session that fits a 50 minute lesson

A 50 minute lesson holds a whole workshop if the talking is rationed, and the ration is 10 minutes: one device, one short poem read aloud twice, one sentence naming what the device does. Then the room writes for 15 and reads back for 15.

1. Put one concrete question on the board before anybody sits down, so the settling 5 minutes are already working.
2. Read the model poem aloud twice, slower the second time, saying what to listen for before the second reading rather than after it.
3. Name the device in plain words, in one sentence, and give the prompt in one more.
4. Write for 15 minutes with the group, in silence, and do not circulate for the first 5, because a teacher walking the room in minute 2 stops every hesitant writer dead.
5. Hear 3 or 4 drafts, volunteers only, and have the room describe what it heard rather than judge it.
6. Close by saying what happens to the draft before next week, and collect the notebooks.

The middle of that hour is taken apart in more detail on Teaching poetry, including how to read a poem aloud to a class without acting it.

The first 4 weeks, week by week

The first 4 weeks establish the habit, and their order is not interchangeable. Nobody performs in week 1, the rules exist before the first honest poem is read, and revision arrives only once there is something worth cutting.

Weeks 5 and 6 carry the rest: learning a poem well enough to put the page down, and a showcase somebody outside the group attends. A block that ends with a folder rather than an event teaches the group that the writing was an exercise.

How big a group, and what changes above 15

A group of 12 to 15 is the working size, because everybody has to be able to read inside one session and the arithmetic is unforgiving: 15 readers at 90 seconds each is 22 minutes before a word is said about any of the poems. A timetabled class of 30 is still workable, and it splits into 2 circles for the reading back, in opposite corners, with the adult moving between them. The alternative is worse: a room where 6 confident students read every week and 24 learn that the workshop is for other people.

The rules that go on the wall

The rules go up in week 2, in the group's own words, and they exist to make honesty survivable rather than to make the room polite. Six of them cover almost everything that goes wrong.

• Describe before you judge: say what you heard and where you got lost before saying whether you liked it.
• Talk about the poem, not the person: the speaker in a poem is not automatically the writer, and treating it that way ends honest writing.
• Nobody has to read out: passing is normal and needs no reason, in every session including the last one.
• What is said here stays here, with one stated exception, which is the safeguarding route below and which is said out loud in week 1 rather than discovered later.
• The writer speaks last: no explaining the poem before it is read and no defending it until everyone else has finished.
• The adult writes too, and reads out first in week 1, which is the one part of this that cannot be delegated.

The student who will not write

The student who will not write is usually not refusing the workshop, so remove whatever is actually in the way rather than insisting. Six moves cover most of it, in this order.

1. Narrow the prompt until a blank page is impossible: one object, one room, one sentence somebody said.
2. Change the unit from a poem to a list, since 10 things has no first line to be frightened of.
3. Offer transcription: 6 things you can hear, or a conversation overheard on the bus.
4. Take the audience away by saying plainly that this one will not be read out by anybody.
5. Let them copy out somebody else's poem by hand, which is a real exercise and not a punishment.
6. Ask, quietly and later, whether the difficulty is the writing or the spelling, because a weak speller hiding is the commonest cause and a scribe or a phone solves it.

A student who writes nothing across 4 weeks and shows no other difficulty is telling you something that is not about poetry, and the answer to that is a conversation rather than a better prompt.

When a poem discloses something serious

A poem that discloses something serious is handled as a disclosure and not as a poem: receive it, record it, pass it on the same day, and do not investigate it. This is why a workshop cannot promise confidentiality, and why that limit is stated in week 1, before anybody has written something they would not have written had they known.

• Say the limit first: what is said here stays here, unless somebody is being hurt or is at risk, and then it goes to one named person.
• Know the name before week 1: in England every school has a designated safeguarding lead, the equivalent role carries different titles elsewhere, and a library or youth setting has its own named person under its own policy.
• Record it in the words used: what was written or said, when, who was present, and what you did next, written the same day.
• Do not question the writer about the content, do not copy the poem to anybody outside the safeguarding route, and do not promise that nothing will happen.
• Say what you have done: tell the young writer that you have to pass this on and to whom, unless doing so would put them at greater risk.

The statutory guidance differs across the United Kingdom and the adult running the room should be reading their own. England has Keeping Children Safe in Education, published by the Department for Education, under the wider multi agency guidance Working Together to Safeguard Children. Scotland has the National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland, published by the Scottish Government. The Welsh Government publishes the statutory safeguarding guidance for education settings in Wales, and the Department of Education publishes the equivalent for Northern Ireland. The NSPCC runs a helpline for an adult unsure whether a worry meets the threshold, and Childline exists for the young person.

Two things follow for the writing itself. Personal material is not to be discouraged, because a workshop that allows only safe subjects produces nothing anybody wants to hear, and Spoken word poetry has always run on the opposite instinct. And the claim that a workshop is therapeutic should not be made by the person running it, which is one of several claims taken apart in The evidence, and its limits.