Classroom Management in a Student-Led Writing Workshop Ep 3

🎯 In this episode, I’m walking you through the daily structure that keeps students engaged and independent without constant redirection. You’ll hear exactly how I:

✅ Use student-led routines to minimize off-task behavior
✅ Reinforce expectations without micromanaging
✅ Turn workshop into a powerful classroom management tool
✅ Build a classroom culture where students lead, collaborate, and stay on task

Whether you teach in a classroom or homeschool around the kitchen table, you’ll walk away with real strategies you can start using tomorrow.

➡️ Learn more about the FULL Structured Writing training PD

📆 Grab my yearlong writing planner for free (it includes my eBook!)

🎥 Watch the teaching strategies in action on YouTube

📝 Read the latest blog posts for writing tips & ideas

HAVE A QUESTION? Email me at robin@structuredwritingteacher.com

Transcript

Ep 3 Classroom Management in a Student-Led Writing Workshop

Transcript:
(00:01) We're going to start with a visual i want you to put an image in your mind of your classroom full of kids or your kids at home and what does that look like and sound like and feel like and and let's let's amp it up it's right after lunch and they've just come into the room what are your immediate thoughts and reactions to that type of energy typically the first word that comes to mind is chaos right after lunch can be quite the moment but now I want you to imagine your students coming in from
(00:47) lunch and instead of chaos it's focused energy so think of it that way how can I set up a situation where we can get that energy focused and as you walk into the classroom you have one student who has immediately without being told gone and grabbed all the journals they're starting to hand them out put them on everybody's desk you have another student who's taken their their spiral notebook or the or the binder that you've made for them that has some scripts in there and they are confidently walking up to the front of the room to get ready to start the class on
(01:26) their writing warm-up for workshop again you haven't said a word to them you're just welcoming kids into the classroom and then you have another student who's already in there prepping the room helping to make sure that the lighting is right that the instrumental playlist is pulled up that the timer is all ready to go so you have these class leaders at the front of the line they come into the room and they do all the work so you're not in there scrambling for control of the classroom and you're not pulling teeth begging them to do the right thing go walk in quietly all that it's just a
(02:03) well oiled machine and and you're not even at the at the wheel of the machine that the students are at the wheel and it's not a fantasy this actually happens when you set up that workshop in a really really strategic and structured way now if you're new to the podcast I'm Robin Mellom and I'm a middle school ELA teacher instructional coach and I'm a children's book author and today we're going to talk about how to build a student-led writing workshop that has like really solid classroom management that it's structured it's sustainable and it's shockingly effective and so the
(02:44) classroom management techniques I'm going to go through today will also work for all the other parts of your day honestly but but truthfully this idea of a student led workshop and I also use student led in other parts of the classroom so I have students who read through the agenda they share out what the warm-up it they do all the greeting of the class so everybody kind of eventually has some sort of a job but the idea of turning over you know control of your classroom can feel kind of terrifying because what if it does turn into chaos what if you're just chasing people around trying
(03:24) to get them to do the right thing or there's blank stairs and you just you only have like a 40inut block of time um but what you do is you shift like if we just focus on the workshop shift the ownership of it so shift it more into we are a team and I am your coach but you have captains and you have each other so you're not managing every single minute because you have some routines and the students are taking over and they will learn this independence and that independence like they actually love it when I stand at the door and just greet them how's your
(04:04) lunch how you doing what did you do oh look at that um and then there's other kids in the classroom already taking over there's something about that that feels like really adult to them they finally feel like we've been given some respect in a way and and it raises the expectations and they secretly deep down love that they do so you are handing over the keys for this but but you are the one who is like the puppet master here right you are the one who is setting this all up for success so I'm going to go over like
(04:40) when I talk about classroom management I'm going to talk about it in two different ways one is proactive management and reactive management and this first part here I'm going to talk about the workshop in a proactive way so when you launch it here's what I would recommend that at the beginning I always tell everybody to go ahead and assign your leaders right away after they share their slides of like what is this workshop about even though I will say you have to be a little bit like I always tell my friends like don't be a puppy be a cat like you kind of have to be cool about things right you need to
(05:19) know when to slowly dole all this out you don't want to throw everything at them on day one because you're being a puppy so instead just kind of ease into it and check this out so I show the student slides and kind of give them an overview of the workshop but then I say "But you know like you guys aren't ready for that you're you're going to need to do an activity where we have we practice a certain skill and once I'm satisfied that you guys are able to do this skill then I know you're ready." And they're
(05:50) like "What what skill what are you talking about?" And that's when we do the voice exercise and that's the one that they absolutely love and they all do really well with it and then I can say "I'm so impressed let's do this let's get into the workshop are you ready?" Yes and assign the leaders there's one little side note I would make here because I've taught grades four through 8 so I would be a little bit different with eighth graders maybe seventh graders depending on what what your situation is but for my eighth
(06:24) graders everything that everybody does ever is either cringey or not cringey and so having student leaders where there's like this notebook and there's a script and you're welcoming everybody and blah blah blah it can feel like kind of goofy at first and the you don't want the eighth graders to be like "Oh my god this is so cringe.
(06:54) " So I don't have them do the leadership jobs at the beginning i do them until we've done one or two sessions and then you can see their minds change they're like "Oh I like this this is fun." And by the time you see them going "That was fun." That's when you go "Okay you know what i really need help with you guys taking this over and I'd love for you guys to take some jobs can I give some jobs out?" Sure so do it that way all right my second suggestion for your workshop is to make sure that you have a routine that's built and it's predictable so it's the same each time the students know what to expect and they actually
(07:28) thrive in this so that every once in a while when you throw in a little change if it's a slight change they'll kind of love it if it's a big big change they will throw an absolute fit and that's actually kind of awesome too because sometimes we have things that come up we can't do our workshop today we have this we've got you know meetings whatever it's teacher work day and they can't have the workshop that week and they absolutely melt down and that will make you the happiest teacher in the world when your kids melt down for that reason
(08:01) so you have this routine so that um there's a warm-up that the students lead and I know I talk about I do warm-ups just when we start our ELA class and somebody asked me about this and here's what happened um the ELA 3 a day warm-ups that we do every single day that are very important we'll we'll get into deep talks about that what why they're so helpful for every part of this writing program but what we would do is we would start out the workshop day and we were doing the ELA 3 a day and then moving into the workshop like
(08:35) everything was set up the lights the tables all the stuff was ready to go but we did the ELA 3day and then the leaders came up and and started the workshop but I started to notice that the students were saying "Can we skip that part and just do the warm-up for the workshop?" And that's a specific thing too the warm-up they do it's just like a 60-second thing that the kid comes up with to get them writing and I decided to turn it back to them like I said writing is always best when they have a choice in the matter
(09:08) and I said to them "Well I don't know what like what do you guys think should we do these three a day on the same day we do workshop what should we do and they had a discussion like a back and forth pro con let's talk about it and they determined that they really actually wanted to extend the writing time during the writing portion because you add more time as you go along you build up to it you don't start with a huge long block you start with a short block and then have them vote on whether we add minutes to it again more choice the more say they can have in it the
(09:40) better so they chose to make the ELA 3 a day warm-ups optional and we would skip it but kids could do it if they wanted to and what was surprising was that a majority of them went back and did that warm-up i gave him like an extra point if you did it and they absolutely love those warm-ups the ELA 3day things they just love them because there's quick rates in there um and it's such a it's just great for them to be able to have that decision making there so anyway you have a warm-up routine with your leaders and
(10:20) that's consistent and then you follow up with a mini lesson and they time you for 7 minutes which is super fun because everybody's kind of on the edge of their seats to see if we can fit it all in in seven minutes and you have a timer and then we move into independent writing time they share in their trios we do diamond all the things but the order stays the exact same every time and within that there's voice and choice so there there is the students can um choose things they can they can choose their path they can
(10:52) choose their skill but there's so much routine in there and they know exactly what this is going to be um that they just thrive on that in a minute I'll talk more about how to use classroom management techniques in the workshop when the students aren't doing what they should be doing but this is all the proactive stuff like if you have all this stuff set up on the front end of your expectations and what this all looks like it will take care of a lot of problems not every problem and we'll get to that so the third thing is is that
(11:25) choice about um when they write during that time because you want them to stay on task right if everybody is writing to the same exact prompt um it can be a little cumbersome and overdone however I will say like I said if you flip things around every once in a while sometimes just as a let's throw this out here we would I would find a prompt that was so cool that I would say "We're all going to do this one today.
(11:59) " And see what kind of variations we come up with so we could do that but every once in a while don't do that every single time because they need to be able to to focus on what it is they want to do and and when I get I'm going to do a deep dive into choice because there are three paths they choose from and I want to dive into each one of those and tell you where I came up with these ideas and why they're important to this whole writing program so when I do the lesson so the teacher has their seven minute lesson and then the students can practice that skill in their writing now this is a little pro
(12:36) idea here and some of you might not feel comfortable doing this quite yet but once you get super confident with this you you're like you're like a relaxed driver right you're just like "Hey we can do what we want you're so in control of your class and your kids are just humming along you can you can do this move.
(13:00) " But I tell them um you can practice on the skill that I just taught you or you can pick a different skill that you want to practice on so they're not all doing the same skill but they do have to pick one and then at the end they have to quickly highlight the example of that skill so I kind of let it go a little loosey goosey with that one so the benefit of letting go a little in workshop is that your students will actually write more they're going to revise and write without groaning they're going to develop their own voice and I had one teacher tell me that her students are begging for
(13:34) writing time this is I've actually had many many many teachers tell me that their kids are now begging for writing time which is super cool and someone told me that the kids are now running the workshop like it's a newsroom i love that but to make sure your class is humming along like a newsroom let me get specific into classroom management for just that writer's workshop block and then we're going to look at the bigger picture pull back a little bit so the secret weapon really for for managing your workshop is in those student leader roles that I talked about
(14:08) because they sit up at the front they do they do writing just along with everybody but they're leading the warm-ups they'll call on volunteers did anyone hit a goal today does anyone want to share their whatever um the tone has now shifted and then when there is a student you know when you have kids who are like I don't know what to write about I don't know what to do what's the this what's the that and they come to you and you're like inundated with all these little like I don't know what that sound was but um
(14:44) I've never had a student actually make that sound so then I tell them "Go check in with the captain." So the captain's up there and they know what dare we've pulled for the day they know what digital spinner has been pulled and the student is telling the other student "Hey you could do this or this if you don't want to do that then do path two the letter writing you could write it to me whatever.
(15:11) " like so the kids are talking to each other and what I have found is that students don't like really going to other students and admitting that they don't want to do something or don't know how to do something so if if the case is that they're just trying to be a little you know lazy just come up with a word um just having telling them that they need to go talk to the captain about it is super helpful and you're on your side and you are writing and if you have some other kids who are a little you know they got a little squirreliness in them have your
(15:48) table so that they kind of join you during that writing time it's really calming on the system imagine you have a table to the side or in the back you are there and you have three kids four kids at the most right and you're just saying "Okay you guys are you all ready what did you choose for your path and your skill?" And you're just whispering "Okay are you guys good we're going.
(16:17) " And then so the class is already doing their part but these these kids who tend to be a little drifty um they're working with you and there is a lot of momentum that happens when they see you writing authentically like you want to write something really fun it just I don't it catches on it's uh it's contagious so you've got your leaders answering questions um they can even walk around and answer questions if it's if there is some sounds going on um they could say "Hey guys we're losing time we only have four minutes left everyone.
(16:53) " And and a student is saying that right if if they say something that's not okay that's where we're going to like "Shut up that's not cool i hate that." Um but they know that about me and that's going to go to the bigger idea of how to manage a full classroom okay but you might be saying "Yeah yeah yeah but that still is not going to work.
(17:16) " So we did the proactive stuff you have a table of kids who you know might need a little settling down with their system there but maybe you still have one or two or whatever who are just being and they won't write and they're not doing the stuff they need to do so honestly here's what I do i have a stack of very boring worksheets that are sentence combining practices so they it's the same thing that we do in our warm-up that I tell them how important it is to be able to combine sentences into compound or complex sentences and they have to be punctuated perfectly right they do one of those during that
(17:54) it's good practice so I tell if they cannot handle workshop you can you will still write you'll you'll do this um and I I had to do that one time with one student who got the worksheet and I just quietly do i didn't make a big deal out of it i was like clearly this workshop's not working for you i want you to complete this before you head out the door for the next period today so having a stack of um writing that they still have to do but it's not workshop writing and so think of it as you're being a
(18:28) protector you're protecting the writing time of all of these other students who really need this and who really love this and so having to work with one or two kids and they get that consequence you know I don't feel bad about it i don't yell at them or anything i just I just know that I need to protect this environment for everyone in here so that they can do what they need to do now let's let's pull back a little bit and let's talk about um just getting the attention of the class i'm going to do a bigger classroom management talk here so you may have heard like oh just
(19:07) count to five and you just say I want everyone's attention in five four 3 2 1 and the expectation is that by the time you get to one the class is quieted i almost laughed into the microphone there sorry I don't want to hurt your ears um that worked one time when I was teaching um a small private school here in California and that kind of worked for those kids and then what happens though when that doesn't work you you count down to one and they don't get quiet at one do you do it again do you like what's the deal um a couple of things I want you to keep in mind number one is that procedures procedures procedures is
(19:56) huge and you need to get that all set up and and figured out at the beginning you need to practice the procedures it needs to feel cheesy that's okay so that you always say do it right or do it twice so if they walk in noisily and we say "Oh bummer that's we aren't doing what we were supposed to do when we walk in that was way too loud we're gonna go outside and we're going to do it again again no yelling no freaking out just bummer oh y'all let's do it again and then sometimes if you have to do it three times that's the way it goes so they know do it right or do it twice is the
(20:35) rule now at another school I went to they did the um response and or call response and and they did the clap one clap twice so if you can hear my voice clap once clap twice and by that second clap everyone is quiet every once in a while they had to go to three claps and then you'd see this like shocked look on the teacher's face that worked for the little sixth graders at the middle school so that that kind of worked now what if that doesn't work i'm going to tell you a quick story of something that happened to me
(21:17) um there was a time when I was teaching in a title one middle school um Guadalupe and it was uh like I mean definitely the count the t counting down 5 4 31 never worked like they couldn't even hear one it was just they were so loud and chaotic it i I was like whoa like all of these other things that I've tried in the past are not working i cannot get them to settle down and they weren't my hardest class like actually the hardest class I ever had was um a seventh grade class outside of Albuquerque which was like oh my gosh you know breaking up fights and they'd
(22:03) break into my desk and steal my purse and it was oh wow that was a tough year anyway this group was just very loud and very energized um so I find this wasn't working i finally went to the teachers lounge and I said "How do you all get your kids to be quiet?" And they laughed and they said "Here's what you're going to do.
(22:38) " It's so cute you can count down 5 4 3 2 1 do the normal thing that you do and if they don't quiet by one you're just simply going to put your hands in your pocket and you're going to quietly count back up so if they're not quiet on one I then put my hands in my pocket i'm super chill i just start going 1 2 3 4 5 and what these are is how many seconds they are going to lose um to either if it's like going out to recess or um if they're changing classes that's how much they would lose you would keep in your mind you don't really want it to be longer than 60
(23:22) seconds ever cuz that would be a problem but so they don't know that though and so you start counting back up quietly and then once they get quiet you put that number up on the board they're able to to get that number back down lower as they earn stuff back and so when I started doing this here's the funniest part is I heard one of them lean lean over to another one and she said "Oh no they told her about the counting thing.
(23:54) " They knew it they knew that this is like the trick that the teachers use so you count back up and then however many many seconds are on the board when the bell rings or whatever um they have to get to complete and utter silence and then I start the timer and that's how much time they owe me now that might feel a little bit you know I don't know I didn't care it worked and then we also built in a system for them to earn some chill out time so every Friday I had a chill Friday and they got to earn the number of minutes as a class they had to do things as a class so we would put up
(24:32) goals of what we would like I want everybody to get in the classroom and seated within you know 90 seconds and we would someone would time it the whole thing and we would graph it we would check it we'd be like yay we did it and so I would put at one point I did just tallies on the board and then I also switched over to marbles in a jar so you can do whatever you want but the tallies on the board are minutes they're not seconds but they're minutes that you earn toward chill Friday and they have to earn these as a group so they'll be able to get it up to you know typically
(25:11) even just 10 minutes chill Friday but sometimes we got 30 minutes on chill Friday because they were amazing and when we had chill Friday here's the key to that too is we didn't really have like you can just sit and and do and like get in trouble um we had hands-on things like we had Uno cards we had battleship games we had plastic cups that they would stack up into um they would make pyramids out of them they had like a bead making section we had ribbons where they just uh braided them and they made bracelets like it was all very tactile and then one kid could pick
(25:50) the playlist for that week so we would listen to the music while we're all just kind of doing like chill stuff and now all of this is as a group right so they they lose time at recess or their or their passing period because the group needs to be quiet and again they're not allowed to say shut up i automatically added like five more on there if anyone said the word shut up you could just we we talk about this as a procedure too like kindly just tap your neighbor sh quiet listen to her you know something and if they if I noticed that they were getting the attention of their neighbors in a
(26:32) really positive and productive way I would add more time back to them so they got to you know I really really wanted to reinforce all the good behaviors and the communication skills between them that would give them more classroom you know minutes and seconds so at the same time this also applies to individual things like if you need to give a consequence to one particular kid if the whole class owes me um 45 seconds of their recess time but you have one particular kid might owe you a little bit more time then they need to stay at the end so the rest of the class goes that kid stays
(27:13) and you can use your regular you know restorative just justice techniques whatever your cl your school uses there same thing on chill Friday if I had some kids who did no work or we had big behavior problems or whatever I have a spot back here and you're going to do um get your work done so they had to get um all their assignments done until Friday so to recap that basically instead of constantly correcting correcting correcting um you're rewarding for the behavior you want to see the behavior you don't want you're not emotional you're just saying "Well that's a bummer you know here's my
(27:56) procedure and you didn't do it so here we go." And so it you don't they don't ruffle you they're not going to get you all kurfuffled here um they can earn things as a group so think of like all of your classroom management and your workshop management as we are a team we are building a classroom culture here um I'm not just managing i'm not standing outside like I'm a bouncer at a nightclub just saying you can do this you can do that um we're we're every part of this classroom is team culture so when you're setting goals for writing
(28:34) you can make that visual you could post a tracker and it's not um grades you're just tracking like did I write did I hit my writing goal you could post that you could make you know the timing of did they get quiet in the 90 seconds like whatever your goals are i would set maybe three classroom management goals that that your top three of what you want them to do and make it a visible tracker of when they hit it final thought in here that I want make sure I say before I forget um as you're doing your proactive setup your
(29:11) of your procedures within your workshop make sure that you take a little bit of time at the beginning of the year and train those first that first set of leaders cuz everybody else will watch what they do and they'll learn it just from that but the first time you do it train them so have them come in during lunch or at a time when you can please and show them the scripts and show them I want it to look like this now let's practice it i'm going to be a kid outside i want you all to walk in get it set up i'm going to walk in like a kid
(29:42) and like saunter in and like fall in your desk and have them do a little we'll do a run through first before because they're so nervous they've never done this um but just make sure you keep it simple repeat that routine and always focus on keeping the ownership as much as you can on the students within that workshop so that it doesn't create chaos but it it creates buyin and when you have buy in as when they're all buying in then you're really really starting to create a classroom culture so thanks for listening and I will see you in the next
(30:22) one be sure to follow Beyond the Paragraph wherever you get your podcast and share this with a teacher bestie they will love you for it and so will I to go deeper and learn more about the structured writing method go to structuredwritingteer.com [Music]