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I am teaching now into my fifth decade, and most of that career has been dedicated to teaching students to write.

But for me teaching and assigning writing is not simply about students writing; writing workshop—the foundation of my courses—is how I teach and how my students learn.

In other words, assigning writing and having class sessions grounded in workshop is not a form of evaluation (I am a non-grader), but a more authentic form of instruction and learning experience for students.

However, I recognize daily that having a nontraditional approach to instruction is often misunderstood by students; further, “workshop” is one of the most misrepresented and misunderstood instructional practices among educators and pundits.

Writing workshop, in fact, has been discounted and attacked by right-wing pundits as well as Lisa Delpit, who criticism is grounded in a valid acknowledgement that far too often workshop is implemented poorly or misunderstood by some of its advocates.

I have also discovered that our K-12 use of “workshop” is quite distinct from the creative writing community’s use of the term and their awareness that “workshopping” is often a toxic practice, especially for marginalized people.

Here, then, I want to explain what writing workshop and assigning writing as instructional practice look like in practice while also acknowledging the problems I continue to encounter.

I am currently teaching two new courses that have a major writing assignment. That assignment has several weeks of in-class workshop time dedicated to students doing the following:

• gathering and submitting their working references
• drafting their initial submission
• receiving written and conferencing feedback
• and then revising that essay multiple times before a final submission is included in their final portfolio for the course (instead of a final exam).

Students also spend some of their in-class workshop time designing a brief presentation drawn from the major essay.

Here are the assignments, which will provide context for my discussion:

Assignment for a poverty studies introductory course:

Students will conduct an analysis of discourse concerning poverty through an anti-deficit ideology/critical lens. This project includes a cited essay and a final presentation. Students should gather 8-10 artifacts of discourse about poverty (news/magazine articles, documentaries, YouTube/online programming, podcasts, social media posts, etc.). The essay should be a Cited Scholarly Analysis (5-6 pages [not including title page and references], double spaced, 12 pt. font, APA stylesheet). The presentation should include a PowerPoint-type document and reflect the key points of the essay analysis; presentations should be between 8-10 minutes (please comply with the time limits). Minimum expectations for the cited essay include submitting full initial draft, conferencing after receiving feedback, and submitting one revised draft before resubmitting in final portfolio for the exam.

NOTE: You are not writing a “research paper” on a poverty topic. You should answer the following question: Based on the artifacts gathered, what do the discussion and claims about your poverty topic show about attitudes toward poverty, including stereotypes, misunderstandings, and deficit perspectives?

Assignment for an educational philosophy course (that also carries a general education requirement of “textual analysis”):

Students will conduct an analysis of discourse concerning public education through an educational philosophy lens. This project includes a cited essay and a final presentation. Students should gather 8-10 artifacts of discourse about public education (news/magazine articles, documentaries, YouTube/online programming, podcasts, social media posts, etc.). The essay should be a Cited Scholarly Analysis (5-6 pages [not including title page and references], double spaced, 12 pt. font, APA stylesheet). The presentation should include a PowerPoint-type document and reflect the key points of the essay analysis; presentations should be between 8-10 minutes (please comply with the time limits). Minimum expectations for the cited essay include submitting full initial draft, conferencing after receiving feedback, and submitting one revised draft before resubmitting in final portfolio for the exam.

NOTE: You are not writing a “research paper” on an education topic. You are answering the following question: Based on the artifacts gathered, what do the discussion and claims about your education topic show that people believe (educational philosophy) about education, teaching/teachers, and learning/students?

The process outlined above provides structure for direct instruction on the following:

• finding and evaluating sources appropriate for an assignment in academic writing
• developing genre and essay awareness while planning and writing a cited essay in an academic setting
• understanding and using a scholarly citation style sheet (APA)
• and applying the content of the course to an original analysis (again, instead of testing students in traditional ways).

Students are simultaneously researching, drafting, and revising while I am providing direct and individual instruction (here is the issue raised by Delpit in that some people may implement workshop with limited or absent direct instruction).

While using essay assignments and writing workshop as instructional practices causes students discomfort (they are trapped in a fear of making mistakes, losing points, and feeling as if their work must be instantly perfect and not a process), the largest hurdle I face is students having only one form of cited essay writing in their mind—the research paper.

As you can see above, I explicitly tell them do not write research papers on your topic and to be sure to write the kind of essay required (in the examples above, discourse analysis in which they use artifacts to discuss patterns of discourse about a relevant topic for the course).

Here are the problems with students being trapped in the reductive and inauthentic research paper paradigm:

• They spend a large amount of rhetorical time writing about their sources: “My sources show,” “lots of research confirms,” and similar constructions that are wasted words on something other than the rhetorical purpose of the assignment. They also write a great deal directly about their sources: “Joe Smith conducted research and his essay ‘My Essay on the Topic’ explains.”
• Related, then, they have no voice or individual authority about their topic or rhetorically. I call this “writing like a student.” And thus, they are writing the school-only research paper with the teacher/professor as the default audience.
• These patterns of writing about the sources also result in students waking readers through one source at a time as a sort of overview of what they found and not a nuanced discussion of the topic supported by credible sources.

To this last point, I guide students to seek patterns in the sources they are using so that they can discuss in their own words the content of that research and cite multiple sources:

• From the 1980s (a hot decade for rebooting origins, highlighted by Frank Miller’s Batman) and into the early 2000s, Captain America’s origin continued to be reshaped. Notable for a consideration of race is Truth: Red, White and Black from 2003, which details a remarkable alternate origin as a medical experiment on black men (echoing Tuskegee), resulting in Isaiah Bradley ascension as the actual first Captain America (Connors, 2013; Hack, 2009; McWilliams, 2009; Nama, 2011).

Simple rhetorical shifts can make a huge difference; for example, see the original and then a revised version below:

• Research has shown that interscholastic athletes tend to have heightened social performance, as well be less likely to exhibit problem behaviors (Abruzzo et al., 2016; Howie et al., 2021).
• Interscholastic athletes tend to have heightened social performance, as well be less likely to exhibit problem behaviors (Abruzzo et al., 2016; Howie et al., 2021).

The power of just writing a research paper is overwhelming for students. Virtually every student for the two assignments above did exactly what I said not to do. They simply used their artifacts to write about their topic, never analyzing the discourse in the artifacts and mostly not connecting to the scholarly requirements of the assignment.

We spent the entire due date having that discussion, and as is part of the process, they are learning both course content material and how to write as informed and authoritative young scholars during the conferencing and revising phase.

The hardest hurdle for them along with breaking free of the research paper template is not seeing their initial draft as failing but as a necessary first step.

Many students, in fact, apologize when they receive my feedback.

Assigning essays and writing workshop can and should be transformative instructional approaches that place students in low-risk and authentic learning environments that support their individual growth.

Ironically, however, since using essay assignments and workshop are non-normative experiences for teaching and learning, students experience some initial and sometimes intense discomfort.

Once they overcome these expected hurdles, the outcomes are impressive because students are much more than students and far more capable that most traditional teaching and assignments require.