Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016
Small group workshops in large creative writing classes: because you can’t be everywhere at once
Writing creative writing pedagogy
KATHY MAC
You’d think that in a time of declining enrolments, classes would get smaller. Alas, fewer students means smaller budgets and, therefore, regrettably, larger classes. For creative writing courses, which hold workshopping at the heart of their pedagogy, large classes can be disastrous; more students means fewer opportunities for each to workshop their texts during the term. Furthermore, though millennial students (those born after 1982) are inherently team-oriented and well adjusted to creative writing courses, putting them in a large class and expecting them to participate fully on an individual basis can be disastrous. One solution to both problems is to break the class into small workshop groups. However, instructors face issues concerning leadership: those of us teaching classes capped at twenty-five or more, who don’t have access to teaching assistants, worry about what will happen in groups when we’re not with them: What can we do to ensure students focus on the workshop process?
Twenty-five students and no teaching assistance; that was my challenge when I began teaching creative writing at St. Thomas University in 2005. Fortunately, in 2003 I participated in a teaching workshop, Team Learning in Liberal Arts Courses, led by Brent MacLaine (a poet and award-winning professor at the University of Prince Edward Island), so by the time I came to teach creative writing I had a couple of years of experience using MacLaine’s strategies for literature classes. MacLaine had adapted these strategies from Larry Michaelsen’s Team-Based Learning techniques, developed for huge (mandatory disclosure) business and science courses. I developed ways to adapt Michaelsen for my creative writing classes.
Though Michaelsen delineates four key principles for successful team learning in academic courses, when it comes to teaching creative writing only the first two principles require effort (Box 1); the other two appear in the workshop process. First, “groups must be properly formed and managed” (2) for several consistent components. Barriers to group cohesiveness need to be minimized by ensuring that the groups are created in a random manner, so that pre-existing cliques don’t persist (3). Furthermore, member resources need to be distributed so that “each group [has] access to whatever assets exist within the whole class and [does] not carry more than a ’fair share’ of the liabilities” (3). In a creative writing class, assets might include things like experience in a workshop, at creative writing, or in journalism, while liabilities may include a tendency to speak before thinking, not speak up at all, or the inability to concentrate for an extended period. Finally, groups need to be big enough to maximize the creative resources of the members, and yet not so big that they prevent full participation by individuals in the group. Michaelsen has determined the optimal size for an academic group is five to seven people; my experience with creative writing is that seven is too large. However, five is a minimum, given that students sometimes miss class.
The way to create correctly sized groups without pre-existing cliques, but with a fair distribution of assets and liabilities, is to administer a questionnaire at the beginning of the course (Box 2). It’s important to explain to the students that it is more like a magazine questionnaire than an evaluation — there are no incorrect answers. Once they’ve finished the questionnaire, I have them line up around the perimeter of the classroom in the order of their final score, and then count themselves off. In a twenty-five-person class, I’ll plan on having four groups, so each student calls out in order “one,” “two,” “three,” or “four.” The number they call designates their group for the first half of the term.
Michaelsen and MacLaine recommend keeping the same groups for the entire term, which is effective for academic courses that use the groups once every couple of weeks or so. However, in a creative writing class, the groups are used for at least half of the allotted time every week. Consequently, it’s better to change the groups once or twice every term; this helps to keep cliques from forming, keeps a fresh critical perspective for each day’s workshop, and ensures that no single group is burdened for the whole term with a socially inept or disturbed student.
I regularly have students in introductory creative writing classes write a short “Workshop Response” paper on the workshop process. In his response, Corry Melanson — a student in creative writing — reported that his first group, “instead of building a constructive workshop sandwich of ’compliment / criticism / compliment,’ made an overly sweet sandwich of ’compliment / compliment / compliment’” (1). The second group of the course had a more “satisfying sprinkling of criticism and compliment,” but “was still not perfected. Awkward silences often echoed through the group … [which] often resulted in people being nitpicky about commas, apostrophes, and so on” (1). By the third group, “the process finally started to become what it was meant to be. Comparing a piece that I first wrote in the first group, then rewrote for the third group, the marks on the copies I made for my peers told a story about how much we’ve improved in the workshop process. The first group of copies was left mostly blank, save for an occasional smiley face or an underlined phrase. The later group of copies, however, was marked to satisfaction with many grammatical mistakes underlined and circled, comments filling the margins and a satisfying summary of what the person thought at the end of the piece” (2). The change was evident in the actual workshop as well, where “criticism was usually in such available bounty that the group often had to force ourselves to move to the next piece before we ran out of time” (2).
Corry saw such a positive growth in workshopping skills over the term because students were held accountable to each other for their work, which is the second crucial principle from Michaelsen that applies to creative writing courses: “Students must be made accountable” (4). Without accountability for their behaviour in the workshop groups, they have no motivation to actually do the work necessary for a healthy workshop — provide sufficient copies of the text that they’ve written by the deadline (usually several days before class), read the others’ texts for class, and participate fully in the in-class workshop (4—5). Michaelsen developed peer evaluation as a strategy for ensuring accountability.
Peer Evaluation
Peer evaluation motivates students marvellously. As Michaelsen notes: “Peer assessment is essential because team members are typically the only ones who have enough information to accurately assess one another’s contributions” (5). Furthermore, in my experience students are more sensitive to the impression that they make on other students than they are to my opinion of them, and consequently they work hard to keep up their part of the workshopping bargain.
Peer evaluation is based on a form (Box 3) that individual students fill out either during their final class with a group or via email in the last week of working with a group. (If peer evaluation is done during class time, it’s best if group members don’t sit together while filling out the form.) As the form indicates, students assign each student a grade from 1 to 10, with a 9 or a 10 meaning that the person has given a 90 percent or 100 percent contribution, while a 5 means 50 percent or “passable.” Less than 5 means he or she failed to participate adequately. The student decides on a mark according to very specific criteria that we discuss prior to administering the peer evaluation form: attendance, effort made to participate, willingness to listen and consider others’ ideas, preparedness (bringing sufficient copies of their own work on time, reading the material in preparation for the workshop), and then the quality of the contribution. The rules for assigning a peer evaluation value are laid out in Box 3.
Through the peer evaluation form, I acquire two sets of feedback: a number out of ten, and comments. The numbers assigned to each student by their group members are averaged together to give them their final peer evaluation value for that group, worth 5 percent of their final grade. Peer evaluation grades given through the term are added together, so when a class has three sets of groups, peer evaluation will be 15 percent of the final grade. If there are only two sets of groups, peer evaluation is worth only 10 percent. Making the peer evaluation count for more than 5 percent for each group might invite students to inflate the peer evaluation grades they assign.
Along with calculating a grade, I also compile comments on the peer evaluation forms, strip away any elements that might identify the person who made the comment, and email them to the student commented upon (Sweet and Michaelsen 27). Doing this provides a wake-up call for students who come to class inadequately prepared; their peers let them know, kindly but unyieldingly, that they are not pulling their weight in the group. Poor peer evaluation grades and comments in the first or second group often change student behaviour, in large part because students cannot remain anonymous in the course. The result is more participation as the course continues, and better peer evaluation grades at the end.
Evaluation Rubric
Peer evaluation is just one part of my overall evaluation strategy in creative writing classes. The whole looks something like Box 4.
Fifty percent of the final grade is based on weekly writing and the final portfolio; determining the relative weight of these is the first group activity students undertake. First, they determine within their group how they would like to see the 50 percent divided between the two items, and then they choose one group member to represent them in a meta-group, which comes to an agreement on behalf of the whole class. The only rule is that neither the workshop writing nor the final portfolio can be worth less than 10 percent.
Workshop responses provide another method of ensuring student accountability. Due on the class after the workshop groups have changed, page-long workshop responses detail what each student has learned from the most recent group. Here’s how these assignments are explained in the course syllabus:
The subject of these short assignments is your experience of the critiquing process; what you learned and from whom. Be specific; mention the titles and authors from your group that you choose to discuss in these papers, either positively (i.e., from X’s comments, I learned to …) or negatively (from Y’s story, I learned never to …). These papers should demonstrate the development of your critical “eye.”
Each of these is worth only 2.5 percent; I require two, after the first and second workshop groups, and one event review. Students then have the option of responding to their third group, reviewing another literary event, or doing an introduction for their final portfolio, so that they will have earned 10 percent of their final grades. This 10 percent, plus the 15 percent for peer evaluation and 5 percent for participation (assigned by me and based in large part on attendance and getting workshop material in on a timely manner), means that 30 percent of the course’s grade comes from their preparation for, and active participation in, the workshop.
The final objective in the first few classes is to encourage positive group norms. In the case of a workshop group for a creative writing class, this means setting up a useful, positive paradigm for critiquing texts. In a playwriting workshop in 2007, Kent Stetson laid out clear rules:
1. Compliment the playwright.
2. Pick out the central image.
3. Question (for criticism).
4. Urge (for next draft).
5. Pick out the theme (this is a text about …).
In my experience the first, third, and fourth of Stetson’s precepts are the most useful, though I introduce students to them all. I also request that the author not participate in the discussion initially; she or he may speak up later in the critique if requested by another member of the group — a stricture honoured more in the breach, particularly by less experienced workshoppers. By the end of a one-term course, though, even the most voluble have learned the value of listening rather than defending.
The way the creative writing program works at St. Thomas, there are always a few people in each class who have taken a creative writing course in the past, which provides another contributing factor to the success of the groups; I try to ensure that each group includes at least one experienced workshopper. Finally, along with introducing Stetson’s rules for workshopping, I emphasize to the students that a critique of a text is not a criticism of the author; on the contrary, when a reader gives deep critical attention to a text the reader is in fact complimenting to the author in a most compassionate, disinterested, meaningful way.
Conclusion
In a perfect world, all creative writing courses would be capped at twelve students. But this world is not perfect, and nor is group learning in a large creative writing class; I am constantly adjusting my instructional practices. For example, changing the groups only once per term (instead of twice) increases the sense of community and the support for at-risk students, a disproportionate number of whom seem to end up in creative writing. However, leaving students in the same groups for too long can lead to cliquishness and off-topic gossip rather than actual focus on the texts during the workshopping that takes place when I’m out of the room. Similarly, the critical ability of students new to workshopping is fairly shallow; they are often so enamoured with the process of workshopping — with reading stuff that one of their peers actually created — that they miss some of the most egregious problems with passive verbs, pedestrian premises, ambiguous symbols, and the like. I mitigate this as much as possible by modelling and refining the workshopping process for them every couple of weeks, pointing out things they can be looking for in their own and others’ work. However, there are limits to the efficacy of my front-of-class pronouncements, no matter how I ground them in their own work. Finally, even with a mandated out-of-class meeting around the mid-term, students do not get enough “face-time” with the professor.
The use of small group workshops in large creative writing courses is not a panacea. But it can be absolutely brilliant, and it is the best solution I’ve found to the problem of a high student-to-teacher ratio. Though not terribly significant in terms of final grade, peer evaluation has a disproportionately positive effect on students’ writing, reading, and workshopping skills.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Kathleen Wall for her thoughtful edit of an earlier version of this paper. A previous version of the paper was included in the Wascana Review 43.1 (2011).
Works Cited
Melanson, Corry. “Final Workshop Critique.” ENGL 2013: Creative Writing I, St. Thomas University. Unpublished assignment, quoted with permission.
Michaelsen, Larry K. “Getting Started with Team-Based Learning.” U of British Columbia. Web. 22 Aug. 2013.
Sweet, Michael, and Larry K. Michaelsen. “Critical Thinking and Engagement: Creating Cognitive Apprenticeships with Team-based Learning.” Team-Based Learning in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Ed. Sweet and Michaelsen. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2012. 5—32. Print.