In the Renewal Workshop model, "Your 'supplier' is actually not interested in supplying you, per se," Lee said.
This would be a modification to the way we had been organizing work, which was more of a 20th century workshop model — craftsmen build complete projects by themselves.
And the reason for this is that, even in the best-intentioned workshop model, the writer's greatest asset – honesty – is placed in the hands of her critics, and of herself as a critic.
Like many creative-writing instructors, for most of my teaching career I've led classes based on the workshop model: a student brings in a draft, and we talk about how to make it better.
Ms. Calkins's "writer's workshop" model is based on the idea that children are natural writers; the job of the teacher is to coax stories out and help them use language to push more deeply into their experience.
The workshop model, where students critique each other's writing, "is so dependent on the generosity of the people involved," she says, "and if everybody is generous, dedicated, and fundamentally a good person – which does sometimes happen – it's brilliant.
