Opening Doors: My Experience with Creating a Writing Center

            At the beginning of this school year, I opened a door.  A colleague suggested that I start a writing center, so I did.  The administrators and my colleagues were receptive. It had to do with writing and it didn’t cost anything. 

            “Kids will stay after school, and I’ll give them a place to write,” I said.  “Kids don’t have enough opportunity to write what they want.”
            “And then I’ll start using those kids to work with other students in the classroom.  If students need help proofreading or revising, or if they just need some support with getting an assignment done, I’ll have a stable of coaches who can help out.” 

            I e-mailed a few parents, talked to a few kids, and started the school year thinking it was worth a shot, and maybe it would do some good. I work with 7^th graders, though, not college students, and keeping 7^th graders motivated can certainly be a challenge, as can keeping them from being mean to each other.  It seemed like a good idea, but I waded into the idea gently, like I was getting into a cold pool on a breezy 65-degree day.  

            I planned to have my first meeting during the second week of school. I figured I might have a few kids there, and then begin the work of building things from the ground up.  If I could get five or six kids, I reasoned, I could eventually build up to 10 or so. 

            That first day, I had to take the meeting to the computer lab.  Twenty-five kids showed up.  I set up an interactive board on Google Classroom, and they began to write.  It took a while for them to settle down (some more than others), but once they did, they all wrote.  They wrote a lot. 

            It turns out, I have a lot of students who want a place to write. 

            That continued unabated through September and October, and when we started our end-of-day directed study period, I had some of those students and a few others begin working as coaches.  Again, the results astounded me.  I sent the coaches out into the hallways looking for kids to work with, asking teachers to send kids who needed help, and the kids came back with students who needed assistance. 

            And then they got to work.  On two occasions, I hade more than 20 kids in my room, all working in pairs, and all of them were focused and on task.  One sixth grade coach told me he couldn’t help with a worksheet on pronouns, because he didn’t know what a pronoun is.

            “Well,” I told him.  “I guess now you’re going to learn.”

            I left him to work with his struggling classmate, and observed from a distance as they both figured it out together. 

            I had another student who was eager to help, but who I feared would be a bit pushy and arrogant as a coach.  I paired him with a student who needed help fixing an essay, and prepared to intervene if things got nasty or contentious. 

            My concern was unfounded.  They sat quietly and went over the essay sentence by sentence, correcting errors and repairing syntax.  The end result was a million times better than the original, and both students thanked me. 

            Time and again, I saw the idea of a writing center bear fruit.  Not every kid wanted to be a coach, and not every kid wanted to be coached, but I had plenty who were happy to fill either role, and some who, by the end of the year, had filled both at different times.   

            And the meetings continued.  After Christmas break, the number of kids attending had dwindled a bit, but I now had a core group of kids who were devoted to the cause. The directed study period had been eliminated school-wide, though, and the writing center itself showed signs of petering out.  The kids began to talk about how to make it work better for them, about how to be more productive, and I talked to them about the need for a purpose in writing. 

            “You guys are writing, but you’re not writing with any purpose.  You post the beginnings of stories and ideas that you haven’t done anything with. You need to post less, and write more, and you need to start thinking about who you are writing for and where you want it published.” 

            At that point, someone suggested a school newspaper. 

            “Great idea!!” I said, and I meant it.  It was a great idea.  Of course, I had tried similar projects before. They worked wonderfully, as long as I was willing to do all of the work. I loved the idea of the students starting a newspaper, but I had no desire to start a paper myself. 

            That was when a single student spoke up. “If no one else wants to do it, I’ll set up the paper,” she said.  “I need to do a project for my Governor’s School application, and it might be fun.” 

            And she did. 

            At the beginning of last year, I cracked open a door just to see if anyone was waiting outside, and the kids nearly crushed me trying to get in.  Twenty-five kids came to that first meeting, and at that point, the writing center was still nothing more than a vague idea, an afterthought to getting my year off to a good start.

            By the end of the year, I had more kids asking to help than I had things to have them do.  The meetings picked up again towards the end, and the newspaper developed nicely. Most importantly, kids were taking their writing seriously, working to get things right, and working together to improve the quality of writing we were doing for the newspaper, in the writing center, and in English class. It wasn’t perfect, by any means, but it seems to be working. 

            A game changer?  Maybe. 

           

            So, now I have a Writing Center, which is nothing more than a room full of kids who want to write and want to help out.   Where this will go, I have no idea, but I intend to see it through. 

            Which means I need a lot of things.  I need materials to help my students understand the types of writing they need to know, which includes news and feature articles, professional correspondence, public relations and marketing, essays, and all types of creative writing. I need the local paper and the local university writing center to come and talk to my kids, or even better, I need to take my kids to them.  I need poets and authors to come and speak as well, and let my kids know what they need to do to be considered good writers. 

            I need my former students to come and talk, too, mostly about what writing has come to mean to them.  I need to keep that newspaper growing.  I need to host a poetry slam in some exotic location on World Poetry Day (and I need to find a way to bring that tradition to the United States, for that matter). 

            And my Writing Center needs a home, a place where my eager and self-motivated student coaches can welcome their classmates and spread the knowledge and passion they are developing for the written word. 

            My vision, as I wrote it the other day in front of my students, is to create a place that “is dedicated to making writing and literature relevant and central to the lives of all students at Thornburg Middle School and to the community at large,” which is a fancy way of saying that I want all of my students to understand that writing is important, and hopefully learn to love and appreciate writing as much as I do.

            I opened a door.  Most days, when I open a door at school, I am simply letting fresh air into an otherwise empty room, and the kids who enter do so with some hesitation. Many of them have stated openly over the years that they hate reading and writing, or have been ashamed that they love it.

            This time, though, the room filled up on it’s own, and rather than wait until class was over, we were able to find hidden doors that lead us all beyond the dull and lifeless world of testing and multiple-choice and essays with five paragraphs that each contain 5 sentences, to a place where high expectations and standards mean something and we can experience real success.  

            Opening that door was the best thing I’ve done in ten years of teaching.  Next year, with the help my students, their parents, and my colleagues, I hope to open a few more.