The Influence of Workshop Philosophy

I can feel workshop philosophy impacting more areas of my life than what I typically thought of as the reading and writing contexts in which I teach utilizing workshop. I have started to realize that I apply the concept of learning from mentors all over. Recently I posted on my other blog about mentors for a type of scrapbooking, Project Life, that I am doing for the first time this year. Of course, scrapbooking when viewed as a combination of pictures and text in order to preserve memories can be a writing genre; however, I did not always recognize it as such. Over the last year I have been reflecting more and more on the power of the process of scrapbooking as a valuable asset to writer's workshop.

One of my favorite workshop related phrases is, "Read like a writer, and write like a reader." Once I found out that I was going to teach university level courses, I started to view my college coursework from two lenses. On the one hand, I was paying attention to the content. On the other I was "learning like a teacher", noticing how various professors set up their courses and built a sense of community within the classroom. A couple of weeks ago was the first week of my spring semester class. As the professor was getting started, I was taking some notes of what he was doing on my computer. One of my classmates sitting next to me looked over and asked quietly, "What are you doing? Writing down everything we do?" I tried not to laugh, knowing he was a bit incredulous that I would be taking notes when we weren't really to the content yet.

Workshop philosophy prompts a powerful mindset of constantly viewing the world and experiences from multiple lenses - of being able to embrace and enjoy experiences, while also reflecting on how the experiences impact us in order to improve who we are in various capacities - as readers, writers, teachers, scrapbookers, mothers... The possibilities are endless.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

This week I was looking through a bin that a colleague left for me with writing samples to use this year in one of my literacy courses. I had noticed before that there were a lot of her kids' writing from their younger years in school; however, I did not realize that there were also some from when her daughter was in my class, especially from her 6th grade year.

Though the writing was not pertinent to the class that I was preparing for (emergent lit), and I had plenty of prep work to do, I just could not pull myself away from the writing. She even had the spiral bound dialogue journal. At first it felt almost like sneaking a peek at someone's diary, yet, that feeling quickly went away as I remembered that I was actually the original intended audience. I read over her thoughts that she had written in all different formats and once again found joy in all of her writing voice.

I also reflected back on those early days and months of what ended up being three years with those students (from 6th-8th grade). It was interesting to think about how I learned so much about her and her classmates through what they chose to write in their homework journals. I was also thinking about myself as a teacher.

Aside from the spiral notebook, there was also an informational picture book related to American History that the 6th graders read aloud to the younger grades. Then there was book responses and her update of a Cinderella story with a dog as the protagonist! So many artifacts providing glimpses into what was important in that first year and validating the importance of documenting life and learning.

I will probably be glimpsing back in that bin from time to time...