Creating a community of writers in your classroom.

Getting students excited about writing is a challenge faced by many of the teachers we work with at 100 Story Building. When teachers bring their students to one of our school workshops, many comment on how students who are normally ‘reluctant writers’ are suddenly motivated and excited to write. The central strategy we use to support young writers in our workshops is to encourage student agency. 

Student agency means supporting students to take charge of their own learning, by designing activities that are meaningful and relevant to them, allow them to pursue their own interests, and combine self-guidance with appropriate scaffolding and support. By situating student agency at the heart of creative learning, students are no longer ‘just students,’ but authors in their own right who learn to embrace the creative process and develop their own writing because they want to, not just because they have to. 

Here are a few of the ways that we encourage student agency in the creative process, which you can integrate into your classroom to create a community of writers.

Let students choose what they want to write about (yes, even fart jokes.)

When you let students choose the topics that they want to write about, they become invested in the outcome. In our Early Harvest program (where children write and edit a professionally published book every year) we do this by allowing students to come up with a longlist of themes that might guide the book. Over a few sessions, they narrow down the theme into a shortlist, and then settle on one to use as the theme of the book. Through discussion and guidance, students learn that themes should be broad enough that it allows writers to find many ways to connect with it (so that they can write about something that interests them) but narrow enough that the book still feels focussed and like the stories belong together. 

Why not allow your students to choose a class theme or topic that will guide their creative writing projects for the term? 

Allow students to make as many decisions as you possibly can. 

When we are designing programs, we try and pass across as many decisions as possible to students - even when it might feel a bit scary or risky to give them control. In our Story Hubs program, students are responsible for designing a creative space, and learn how to consult with their peers in order to make decisions. By handing over as much control as possible to the students, we trust them to rise to the challenge, and support them to interrogate their ideas and find solutions that work. This is important both in something as real-world as building a Story Hub, and something as abstract as allowing them to choose what will happen next in the story they are writing.

This strategy makes children and young people the experts in their own creativity, and encourages them to take responsibility for their creative practice, while also increasing their creative confidence. When you make students the experts, they are able to take ownership of the process and build trust in their own abilities. 

In one of our recent Professional Learning sessions at Whittington Primary School in Geelong, a group of year 3/4 teachers opened up to the idea of allowing the students to choose where they wanted to set their next bit of writing: in the real world, in a popular fictional world that they knew, or in the imagined world that each student had recently created. 

The teachers decided that they only needed to be consistent with the form of writing that they were teaching, and that they could open up the other aspects of the task for the students to choose.

Next time you are planning a creative task or unit for your students, ask yourself: which decisions can I leave for the students to make themselves, and how can I treat them as the experts in their own creativity?

Offer a real-world outcome. 

No-one likes putting a bunch of time and effort into something that will eventually just languish in a drawer, or a folio, or the bottom of a school bag. Offering students real-world outcomes for their writing helps get them invested in the process, and helps answer the question, ‘Why are we doing this?’ 

In our Early Harvest program, the outcome is clear: we are writing and editing a book that will be published. But real-world outcomes don’t have to be huge and involved. Perhaps it is a postcard students are writing to a peer or their younger buddies; perhaps it is a classroom zine that gets printed off and distributed. The aim is to create an authentic purpose and audience for writing, so that students can take responsibility for outcome and know that their writing will have an impact. 

When students write stories - or undertake other creative projects - for someone other than themselves, they have to take responsibility for their audience. How can they write something that will engage and excite the real-world person that will be reading it? How can they choose a theme for a magazine that will be read and contributed to by everyone in the class? What creative choices do they need to make to ensure that people other than themselves will understand and enjoy their work? Framing students’ creativity according to real-world outcomes acknowledges that their knowledge is valuable. This helps them to embrace the process, and feel that their input and creativity is valued and celebrated.

What are some real-world outcomes that you can offer your students when you approach your next creative writing unit? Here’s an example from one of the schools we have worked with...

In 2019, Tarneit P-9 College were inspired to replicate 100 Story Building’s Early Harvest model within their school. They gathered a group called the Young Editors and began the process of deciding on a theme for the publication, calling out for pieces of writing from across the school, pairing the selected stories with illustrators from across the school and pulling the whole project together into a guerilla self-published celebration of stories within the school. They are beginning the process again post-COVID and we are excited to see this year's efforts. 

It doesn't have to be a whole production, though. It can be as small as one shelf in the library for hand-written student stories. Perhaps you can ask your students if they would like to write stories for another class to read, or write for a story-partner. Imagine pairing up your students and getting them to interrogate each other about the types of stories they enjoy. What better way to write for a real audience than knowing that you are also about to be written for/to?

Creating a classroom full of engaged writers and creative thinkers can feel like a big task, but placing student agency at the center of your thinking can help. By focusing on real-world outcomes (no matter how small), allowing students to make as many choices as possible, and making them the experts in their own creativity, creative writing can act as a brilliant arena for embracing student creativity and developing a community of excited and exciting young writers.

Want to better support your students to be creative and confident individuals? Ask us about our Professional Learning program for schools and educators, or learn more about our school workshops here.