creative writing about teaching

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How to teach ... creative writing

Summer is the perfect time of year for a spot of creative writing. Inspire young imaginations to put pen to paper with our lesson plans and ideas

From birds chirping aloft the trees to sapphire blue lakes sparkling in the sun, the sights and sounds of summer make it the perfect time of year for a spot of creative writing. Getting students to put pen to paper is a good way to spark their imaginations, develop reading and writing skills, and teach about empathy.

To help you and your class get inventive, this week’s how to teach brings you a selection of ideas and resources to inspire the creativity of young wordsmiths.

Primary students

Author Nick Hesketh recommends that before children start writing, you should discuss what makes a good story. He shares this and other advice in his creative writing video series for the Scottish Book Trust . Get students thinking with these “badly written” exemplars , which provide a handy baseline to work from.

Next, capture young imaginations by getting students to think about the story they want to tell. Where is it set? At what time of day? What is the weather like? What can you hear, see, smell or feel? This worksheet by Creative Writing Now will help students get to know their main character, while this plot questionnaire will encourage them think about what is going to happen. Then get your class penning their masterpieces, writing just a few sentences to begin with. Stress that they shouldn’t worry about spelling, instead, just put a wavy line under any words they are unsure of. There are examples of well thought-out sentences here .

Creative writing should be fun, and playing games is good way to help students develop story ideas. Try an alternative word association game in which you think of words that are at odds with each other (such as “boat” and “rock”) instead of words that are connected (such as “boat” and “water”). The aim is to show that good story ideas often involve some sort of tension. We also have instructions for a fun game called The Invisible Book , which involves students coming up with the first three sentences of a story on the spot, which helps them find their writer’s voice.

If ideas aren’t flowing, kickstart things by stepping outside of the classroom and into the playground as suggested in this resource by WordSpace . Give students unusual things to write on, such as the back of an envelope, a leaf, or a rough piece of wallpaper. Or challenge them to write a short story in just 50 words.

A quick way to conjure up story ideas is through pictures. Use prompts such as this image of two boys sitting on the wing of an aeroplane or this one of a dinosaur in the garden , which can work really well. Another tip from writer and teacher Heather Wright is to ask students to start several stories then choose the one they want to finish. This writing checklist will help students evaluate their work when it’s finished.

Secondary students

Challenge secondary students to write a story in just six words or get them to compile a list of objects for an imaginary cabinet of curiosity. These are just some ideas offered by the Writers’ Centre Norwich , a literature development agency based in England’s only UNESCO City of Literature . They have produced an easy-to-use 20-page activity pack for the classroom, which introduces a range of genres and draws on a variety of writing stimuli including photographs and poems.

If students want to get to the heart of a character, ask them to address the audience as their favourite fictitious creations. Writing a monologue is the focus of this key stage 4 resource by the Poetry Society . A second resource encourages students to create a piece of writing based on what they can – and can’t – see out of an imaginary window. The aim is for students to make effective use of descriptive detail as they write short lines of poetry in response to a series of prompts. As a homework task, ask students to repeat the exercise while looking out of a real window.

Students doing creative writing at A-level need to work in a whole range of written forms and genres including creative non-fiction and web content. They should be prepared to share work-in-progress with others, responding to feedback and developing drafting and editing skills. They should also write regularly to deadlines and keep a journal of writing ideas. You’ll find useful advice on approaching the first term of teaching in this guide by AQA . You’ll also find additional ideas to support learning and teaching here .

For those who are eager to take creative writing even further, this resource offers useful information on how to set up a creative writing club.

Finally, remember to encourage young people to read as often and as widely as possible – this is one of the most effective ways to teach creative writing. With this in mind, be sure to set your students off on the Summer Reading Challenge . You’ll find lots of reading and writing activities in this year’s pack .

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How to Teach Creative Writing to High School Students

Creative Writing was forced onto my schedule; I didn’t ask for it. But it ended up becoming my favorite class period of the day. While academic English courses can feel high-stakes and always short on time, Creative Writing can be a refreshingly relaxed elective class. In many districts with loose curriculums, Creative Writing is what you make of it. In this post, I outline six steps to show you how to teach creative writing to high school students.

Why Teach Creative Writing

Before we get into the how , let’s first address the why . Why bother teaching Creative Writing in the first place? Students’ basic skills are lower than ever; is now really the time to encourage them to break the rules?

If you want to get really deep into why you should teach Creative Writing, I have a whole post about it here.

But think about why you love reading. Is it because you were made to annotate or close read a bunch of classic novels? Probably not. You probably fell in love with reading while you were reading something that was fun. And because it was fun, you read more, and your skills as a reader grew.

The same principle applies to writing. If we can make it fun for our students, perhaps we can foster a love for it. And passion is what leads, eventually, to mastery.

Giving our students the opportunity to fall in love with writing is a gift that might help them grow in their academic writing later.

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #1: Decide on Your Standards or Goals

Your school or district may have a mandated syllabus or curriculum. Mine did not. 

Whether you’re given student goals or have to create them, you must have an overall vision for what your Creative Writing class will accomplish. 

Is this a laid-back, engaging course designed to help students discover the fun in writing? Or is it a supplement to rigorous academics for college-bound high school students? 

If you know your school’s student population well, I encourage you to think about their needs. Some students just need to write more–more of anything, but lots more. Some students are high achieving and ready to write their first novels! If possible, design your course around the needs and interests of the general student population in your school or district. 

Regardless of how rigorous your Creative Writing course will be, deciding on these goals first will help you in backwards planning. 

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #2: Choose Your Final Assessments and Big Projects

Before we can start planning our lessons, we have to decide what skills or knowledge our students will need. And to know what they need, we have to decide on their summative assessments.

Will your final assessment be a short story? A collection of poetry? Are you required to offer a final exam?

Once you know what students will need to do, you can make a list of the skill they’ll need. This list will become a list of lessons you’ll need to teach.

Fairy Tale Retelling Project

My Fairy Tale Retelling Project is a great Creative Writing assessment. For this project, students had to first choose a fairy tale. Then, they rewrote the story from the perspective of the villain.

This project works really well because students have structure. They can pick any fairy tale they want, but they can’t write about just anything.

Secondly, students already know the story, so they don’t have to worry about a beginning, middle, and end. The open-endedness of writing a story completely from scratch has paralyzed my students before. Structure allows students lots of creative freedom without the excuse of “I don’t know what to write.”

Author Study Project

If you’d like your Creative Writing class to help beginner writers have fun and just get some practice with fiction writing, a Fairy Tale Retelling Project would probably be perfect for your class.

Another project I’ve done with my students is an Author Study . In this project, students choose one author to study in-depth. Then, they attempt to replicate that author’s style in an original work.

If you’d like your class to also include lots of exposure to other writers or classic literature, then this might be a great assessment for your class.

Learn more about doing an author study in this step-by-step post.

Test or Final Exam

I also gave my students a final exam focused on literary terms.

This Literary Terms Test allowed me to test students on the academic knowledge they gained throughout class instead of their writing ability. This test also helped me fulfill my district’s requirement of having a final exam at the end of each course.

Once you’ve decided on your class’s major projects and assessments, you can begin designing the rest of your class.

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #3: Backwards Plan

Now that you know what your students will need to do at the end of this class, you can list out everything you need to teach them in order for them to be successful.

For example, if you opt for an author study as a final project, you know what you will need to cover. You will need to teach students some literary terms so that they can describe an author’s style. You’ll need to show them how to analyze a poem.

During the course of your class, you’ll also want to expose students to a variety of authors and mentor texts. Students will need to practice basic writing techniques in order to replicate those of their chosen authors.

If you need some inspiration for what kinds of lessons to teach, check out this post on essential Creative Writing lessons.

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #4: Decide on Your Class Structure

Once you’ve decided on the end goals for your Creative Writing class, you can use them to help create day-to-day plans. 

What will your class look like? Will it be full of lots of quiet and independent work time? Will it be full of frenetic energy with students working in collaborative groups? Are students writing in notebooks or on laptops?

Of course, a successful class will most likely include a mixture of all of the above. But it’s up to you to decide on your ratio. 

Again, I encourage you to think about your school’s population. If you’re on ninety-minute blocks, is it realistic for students to be quietly writing that whole time? If you have high-achieving students, might they benefit from working independently at home and then getting and giving peer feedback during class time?

Use your goals to help decide on a general class structure. 

Warm-ups for Creative Writing

You’ll need a consistent way to begin each class.

When I initially began teaching Creative Writing, I just wanted to provide my students with more time to write. We began every class period with free writing. I gave students a couple of prompts to choose from each day, and then we’d write for about ten minutes. 

( Those journal prompts are right here . Every day includes two prompts plus a third option of freewriting.)

Students were given the option to share part of their writing if they wanted to. Every couple of weeks I’d flip through their notebooks to make sure they were keeping up, but I only read the entries they starred for me in advance. 

Later, I wanted to add some rigor to my Creative Writing class and leverage more mentor texts. I created a Poem of the Week activity for each week of the course. 

This gave students the opportunity to study professional writing before using it as a mentor text for a new, original piece. 

(You can read more about using these Poem of the Week activities here.) 

As my goals for the class and my students change, so did the way we began class. 

How can you begin your class in a way that supports the end goals or teaches the desired standards? How often will peers work together?

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #5: Focus on Engagement Strategies

Now you can actually start planning lessons and projects!

But as you do so, focus on creating engaging ones–especially if your class is meant to be a fun elective.

Need more tips? Check out this post full of Creative Writing teaching tips!

Use Mentor Texts and Lots of Examples

Have you ever tried putting a puzzle together without knowing what the image was going to look like? It would be pretty difficult! Similarly, students need lots of examples of strong writing to aspire to. 

Without clear models or mentor texts , students will happily turn in unread drafts. They’ll choose the first word that comes to their mind instead of searching for a better one. 

But if you surround students with great writing, highlight strong technique when discussing the writing of others, and challenge them to notice the details in their own writing, they’ll naturally become better at self-editing.

I don’t believe that you can provide students with too many mentor texts or examples of strong writing. As you teach Creative Writing, keep or take pictures of strong writing samples from students to use as examples later. 

Nearly all of my lessons and projects include an example along with instruction.

Model and Create with Your Students

You can even use your own writing as an example. When I had students free write to creative writing prompts, I always wrote with them. Sometimes I would then put my notebook under the document camera and model reading my own work.  

I would cross out words and replace them or underline phrases I thought were strong enough to keep. Model for students not just great writing, but the process of strengthening writing.

And then give them plenty of time to edit theirs. This is when having students engage in peer feedback is a game-changer. 

Without great writing to aspire to, however, students easily become lazy and turn in work that is “good enough” in their eyes. Don’t let them get lazy in their writing. Keep throwing greater and greater work in front of them and challenge them to push themselves. 

(This is another reason I love using Poem of the Week warm-ups –they expose students to a new writer every week!)

Set Clear Expectations

Creative writing causes a lot of students anxiety. There’s no “right” answer, so how will they know if they creatively wrote “correctly?”

Help them out by setting clear expectations. Offering a rubric for every project is great for this. If you can, give them specifics to include. “At least 500 words” or “three or more similes” are nice, concrete guidelines that students can follow.

Give Students Choice

Offering students choice always boosts engagement. It lets students take charge of their learning and pursue something that interests them.

For example, when I teach odes , students are given the opportunity to write about something they love.

With an author study , students can study a writer whose style and work they admire.

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #6: Use Clear and Structured Expectations

While showing students excellent prose or perfect poetry should help inspire students, your writers will still need some hard parameters to follow. 

Academic writing is often easier for students than creative writing. Usually, academic writing follows a structure or certain formula. The rubric dictates exactly how many quotes need to be included or how long an essay needs to be. MLA or APA formats tell students how to punctuate quotes and citations. 

These rules don’t apply to creative writing. And while that’s exactly what makes creative writing awesome, it’s often overwhelming. 

So do your students a favor and give them some clear expectations (without, of course, entirely dictating what they need to write about).  

The project also includes a rubric, so young writers know what should be included in their stories.

Don’t give your students so much creative freedom that it paralyzes them! Your writers are still students; give them the same level of structure and organization that you would in any other class. 

Engage your students in more creative writing!

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Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #7: Give Students Choices

So how do you give students frameworks, requirements, and uphold high expectations without stifling their creativity?

Give students choices. You can write about A, B, or C, as long as you meet requirements 1, 2, and 3. 

Offering choices works with small one-day assignments or lessons as well as bigger, longer-term projects. 

The previously mentioned Fairy Tale Retelling Project is a great example of offering a narrow selection of choices that uphold expectations without dictating what students write. 

Another one of my favorite examples of offering students choices is my “Show. Don’t Tell” Mini-lesson . This lesson touches on everything students need to successfully learn creative writing. 

First I teach them the concept of showing vs. telling in writing through direct instruction. I show them lots of examples of expanding a “telling sentence” into a “showing paragraph.”

Then I model for students how I would write a paragraph that shows crucial information, rather than telling it. 

Lastly, I have students pick a strip of paper from a hat or a bag. Each strip of paper contains a “telling sentence” that they must then write as a “showing paragraph.” Students are limited by the sentences I provide, but they still have complete freedom over how they achieve that detailed paragraph. 

If you wanted to give students even more freedom, you could let them pick their sentences or trade with a peer rather than blindly choosing. 

Any time you can give students a choice, you give them permission to use their creativity and allow them to take some of the initiative in their own learning.

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #8: Encourage Peer Collaboration and Feedback

We can tell students something a hundred times, but they won’t listen until a peer says the same thing. Us educators know the value of positive peer interaction, so don’t limit it in a creative writing class!

There are a ton of ways to implement peer interaction in a creative writing class. I often do this on the first day of class with a writing game. You’ve probably heard of it: everyone writes a sentence on a piece of paper, then everyone passes the paper and adds a sentence, and so on. 

I highly encourage you to use peer feedback throughout the class. I usually start having students share their work from day one with my free “I Am” Poem Lesson so that they can start getting used to having their work read by others immediately.

Make getting feedback so routine in your room that students don’t even question it.

It’s really tempting to let students get away without sharing their work. We don’t want to make shy or anxious students uncomfortable. I mean, what better way to completely ruin creative writing for a student than to make them feel embarrassed all the time, right?

But keep trying to encourage shy students to share. Even if that means you share it anonymously or read it aloud for them. 

I recommend including some kind of peer feedback with every writing assignment . Yes, even short practice assignments. This will work as a kind of “immersion therapy” for receiving feedback on more involved work.

After some time, you might find that your students even begin to share their work without your prompting! 

I like to organize the desks in my Creative Writing class so that students are in little groups. I’ve found that at least half of my classes will begin talking and sharing with one another in their little groups while working on projects. 

They’ll ask each other questions or to remind them of a word. They’ll read sentences aloud and ask if they sound right. Personally, I would much rather hear this kind of chatter in my class than have a dead silent room of boring writers!

However you decide to allow students to work together, be sure to provide the opportunity. Reading and getting feedback from peers could possibly teach students more about writing than any of your instruction (sorry!).

One of the truly great things about teaching creative writing to high school students is that there often isn’t a rigid curriculum. Of course, this is also sometimes one of the worst things about teaching creative writing to high school students!

You have total freedom over the assignments you give, the standards you teach, and how you organize and structure your classroom. After a few years of teaching Creative Writing, however, I’ve found that sticking to these six steps is a great way to have a successful semester.

If you’re excited about teaching your Creative Writing class, but are running low on prep time, check out my complete 9-week Creative Writing course ! Included are two different types of warm-ups, poetry analysis activities from well-known authors, mini-lesson, projects, and more!