My Journey Toward a Writing Center

Let me start by saying this story has a happy ending. But it begins in a very stressful way.
The school year began like any other. I was blessed with an amazing group of sophomores to teach this year. They are kind, funny, and hard-working students. Unfortunately, they also qualify as the most anxious group of students I’ve ever taught. Nearly every homework assignment was resulting in at least one panicked e-mail, student visit, and even an Instagram DM asking questions.

Fast forward a month into the school year to our first big writing assignment. Even though we spent several class periods going over proper MLA citations and research integration, I found myself swamped with students seeking help. At one point there was a literal line of students holding laptops which led out my door.

Exasperated, I sought the advice of my work-life partner and classroom neighbor, Sydney. Syd commiserated and felt my pain, as she had seen similar dilemmas in teaching writing with her own students. Unfortunately, like me, she had no idea how to help students other than being available almost all the time.

Annoyed, I said aloud, “I wish we had a writing center like we had in college.”

The comment stayed with me and later that night I researched ways to improve writing in schools beyond the English classroom. My research led me to discover the Minnetonka Public High School Writing Center, a nationally renowned writing center staffed and designed for high school students.

In November I was able to schedule a time to check out the center and meet with the coordinator. To be honest, I wanted to cry. The idea that there was a space designed for students to seek help with writing outside of class time seemed too good to be true. And even better, the writing help was being given by other students. This created a community-building mentorship opportunity that I hadn’t conceived of before.

I was so impressed with my visit to the Minnetonka Writing Center and became obsessed with forming a writing center at my own school. I’ve included some pictures of Minnetonka’s Writing Center below.

After my visit (ok, I’ll be honest, it was during my visit) I texted my principal begging for a meeting to pitch the Writing Center. Long story short, we met, he fell in love with the idea too, and the Writing Center was officially approved.

Which led me to the next step: choosing and training a staff. And I had absolutely no idea where to begin.

I had no budget. No stipend. And no idea where to start. Ok, I wasn’t completely clueless. But I was definitely feeling overwhelmed. Luckily, around the same time as my observation at Minnetonka, I began drafting a survey to give out to the student body on how (and if) they would use the Writing Center. I didn’t want to be completely disappointed if we opened and no one showed up.

Here are main results of my survey, and thanks to Survey Monkey for their free survey tools to help me in this process!

After the data was in, I was convinced: our school was ready for a Writing Center, and I was pretty sure our students would use it.

I also created a faculty survey to assess what kinds of writing was being assigned, and how many “big” projects we needed to prepare for. Later I presented the Writing Center concept to the staff at a faculty meeting and explained how they could help get the word out in preparation for our opening. I love my colleagues, and they were obviously very supportive.

Now on to the next step: finding a staff.

After talking with our guidance counselors, I decided that to start out the Writing Center in our “beta-testing mode,” the best staff would be comprised of our National Honors Society students. The NHS students are generally among the most gifted writers and are usually student leaders at the school, which might make them natural writing coaches. They also have a tutoring requirement, which the guidance counselors were actually struggling to meet for each tutor. I sent out some e-mails, scheduled a training, and boom, I had a staff!

Over Christmas break, I was tasked to create the training in preparation for a 3-hour session on the third day of the second semester. The writing coordinator at Minnetonka had sent me with a few articles to help me train the staff, so I figured that wouldn’t be too hard to sort out. I spent the majority of my time shopping for supplies and researching best practices in Writing Centers (both in high school and college).

As it usually does, Christmas break was over instantaneously, and before I knew it the training was upon me. The night before, I set out to finalize the powerpoint and organize the training presentation. At least, that was the goal. For almost an hour I simply moved papers around and stared at a blank screen.

My husband walked past me, making an innocuous comment on what was on tv. His presence was enough to push me over the edge and I broke out in ridiculous, almost infantile sobs. As my husband rushed over, I repeated over and over, “I can’t do this.”

It wasn’t that I couldn’t create the training. I knew I could, and I had the materials to do so. What seemed impossible to me was the actual likelihood that I would be able to get such a big program off the ground, and in just a short amount of time. Also, I was doing this almost entirely by myself.

I’ve had a lot of experience leading things, but never ideas that were 100% my own. I’ve led drama productions before, but usually in an assistant role. The best part about being an assistant is that when something goes wrong, the “blame” is never on me. But this Writing Center was my baby. I had the idea, I sought out the answers, I created the workspace, I organized the staff and the training, and I was responsible for the results.

The bottom line was this: If this Writing Center failed, it meant that I failed. 

After a good cry and some bucking up from my husband, I finally (somehow) finished preparing the training. The next morning I got some help from some students I had identified as my best leaders in the Writing Center and we began.

Our short training consisted of the following agenda:

• Purpose and Functions of the Writing Center
• Coaching Training (tips on peer reviewing, step-by-step guide for conferencing)
• MLA Research Review
• Sophomore paper brainstorming

During the MLA review, half of the students were taken aside and asked to fill out some writing coach biography cards I had created, which are available for download on my TpT store (they’re free!). Our photography teacher was also gracious enough to take quick headshots of each coach to accompany the cards.

The last thing we did was go into my sophomore English classes and work on coaching. I wanted students to learn how to conference about writing, in a way that was beyond simple peer review. My students were just beginning writing a pretty extensive research project called position papers, and they had just chosen their topics. The great thing about having upperclassmen writing coaches is that every student had written this paper before. This meant that they were able to relate to the journey the sophomores were beginning and could give tips from experience as well as general writing advice. The sophomores reported later that this conference was very useful, as it made them talk through their choice of topic and bounce ideas off of another student.

The Writing Center was set to open in just a week and there were two things left to do: prepare our workspace and inform the school community.

I’ll be honest, the decorating was my favorite part. Because we had literally zero budget, the Writing Center would be operating out of my classroom. But I still wanted it to have a special space that we could call our own. Over break I had bought a chalkboard calendar, a corner bookshelf, and some desktop organizers. With the coach bio cards finished and the headshots printed, I decorated the entryway of my classroom and organized some writing resources for coaches to access. It didn’t take long for our Writing Center to look cute, even though it wasn’t technically a “center.”

I put out some e-mails to the faculty and made some postings on Schoology to get the word out. I had also asked a student to design a logo for us (see below) and I blew it up and had it posted on my door. It also serves as our watermark and logo on our paperwork.

Finally, I had to face it: there was nothing left to do. It was time to see if the Writing Center would be successful.

Here’s a quick recap of the process to opening a Writing Center, for anyone else interested in starting one at their own school. Feel free to message me for resources and training materials mentioned in this post.

After four months of observation, preparation, and prayer, the day arrived to open our school’s writing center. And despite our modest beginnings, we had six different visitors on our first day alone!

We opened at the beginning of January, and in the four months we’ve been open we have had over 150 different appointments. For a school with only 325 secondary students, that is astounding!

So much of our success is due to our amazing faculty members. Several teachers have offered extra credit for visiting the writing center, which is a wonderful promotion, as long as we know ahead of time! We learned quickly that when students are given this incentive oftentimes we have more visitors than writing coaches. But if I know to expect many students ahead of schedule, I am able to schedule extra coaches on for that day, and everyone is taken care of. So far this semester we have had 3 different “all-staff” days, where almost every coach was utilized due to our flood of traffic.

Some ways I’ve kept the writing center a well-oiled machine are through organized binders containing writing resources.

I have a file box containing writing handouts given out in our school’s ELA classrooms, including quote integration, italicization vs. quotation marks, MLA formatting, and more. When a writing coach is stumped or I see them struggling to remember a concept, I can easily grab a handout from this box and bring it over to them. Receptionists often do this on their shifts as well.

All of our writing center resources are contained in these two locations: a shelf at the entrance of my room and a wooden organizer on a table near the entrance. The shelf holds the writing resource box (see above), binders containing assignment details and rubrics, sample essays, dictionaries, thesauruses, and other resources. Oftentimes the receptionist on shift will distribute these resources once visitors are checked in, and they know to re-file them when students leave.

The other container holds highlighters, post-it notes, a list of all writing coaches and skills (for receptionist use), scratch paper, and most importantly, the tutoring session form.

This document is the most important in Writing Center success, in my opinion. It tells me what brought a student into the writing center, and gives feedback on each individual experience. The coach notes at the bottom are also very valuable. For example, one visitor gave positive feedback, but the writing coach noted that the student sat back and seemed to expect the writing coach to make all of the changes for her, which directly contradicts our policy. She even became angry when asked to do the work herself. This feedback was very useful to share with the assigning teacher, who was able to speak to the student directly about taking more initiative over her own assignment, rather than asking others to do the work for her.

Overall, the experience was grueling but incredibly rewarding. Our attendance is strong and so much of the work is done to implement an even stronger writing center program next year.

One benefit of going through this process is the ability to share what I’ve learned. I am so grateful to anyone who has taken the time to read this, especially if you read all three posts! To any teachers or administrators interested in forming their own writing center I have bundled all of my resources for training and running our writing center into a Writing Center Starter Kit, available at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.