Morning meeting and writers workshop

Good morning or evening –

Last week I wrote about Bazz – and realized just how deeply I am touched by her passion for Pershing.  Within the last few days I wrote about an issue I was having with one of my brothers – a sort of Ground Hog day occurrence that needed to  change.  Through a brief stint of writing, I was able to uncover some of the underlying issues and some possible solutions to moving forward.

So I’m still pondering Lucy Calkin’s case for her underlying premise of the Writing Workshop, i.e., writing begins with lifework.  She quotes John Cheever – “When I begin to write, I found this was the best way to make sense of my life”.   The following questions arise out of this simple, profound statement:

• Is writing about one’s life, the first necessary step on the journey to becoming a writer?
• If I don’t write about my life, will I be less able to make sense out of it?
• Is providing students opportunities to write about their lives giving them a way to negotiate conflicts? Recognize strengths? Identify recurring negative patterns? Celebrate accomplishments? Be more aware of self/others/the greater world?
• Could giving our students opportunities to write about their lives, be the most effective way to encourage the more advanced writing that future schooling and the real world will require? 

So many of you are doing Writing Workshop in your classrooms – bravo to you!  And, so many of you are doing Morning Meeting.   Morning Meeting and Writing Workshop philosophies are intertwined.  Perhaps just considering how Morning Meeting and Writing Workshop philosophies are intertwined can lead you to tap into the best in each program; in other words, what students share in either activity can fuel an activity or a direction in the other program.

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Students writing to family in Mexico about earthquake