John Stewart Middle School Lead Teacher November 2014
[email protected] @jstewedu Charming Chaos: A Flipped Writing Workshop < THE LOVE > My students, 130 eighth graders in a small, urban community diverse in income, culture, language, and parental education levels, love to write. In the first quarter of the school year alone, each has generated--and shared--over 5,000 words of text, and that does not take into account the brave ones who craft novels in November. They write odes, zombie stories, menus for imaginary restaurants, ten-year plans for their ideal future, Shakespearian puppet shows, ribbon-bound letters to summer softball friends, abstracts for invention prototypes, raucous advertisements for businesses they hope to open, mini-dramas about Chewbacca, and soup can labels. All projects are fair game, as long as they are student-driven. My students are in love with writing. < THE HEARTBREAK > It’s hard. This is fully functioning writer’s workshop à la Atwell, à la Graves, and writing workshops take an inordinate amount of time and are difficult to manage within the confines of a single class period. The workshop model is extremely effective, but many teachers are unwilling to surrender the pedantic center of the classroom, citing Common Core and the constant pressure of content to cover. They say it won’t serve everyone: many students need more structure, more direct teaching, and more step-by-step instruction. My students still need support. < THE DELIGHTFUL MADNESS > There is a way. The solution we offer is flipping. Using the methods suggested by Bergman and Sams (2012) and implemented by Thomasson, Morris, (2013) and Musallam (2013), we move content discovery offsite.