Lisa Pang ’27
Contributor

Writing Workshop Reimagined: Craft Essays and Find Voices

Loomis Chaffee’s enriching writing program has become the hallmark of the school’s rigorous academic experience. The writing workshop, which all sophomores are required to take, has honed students’ writing skills and led them to find their voices for years.
“One of the major reasons I applied to Loomis is because of the writing program,” Cara Dai ’25 said.
Building off of English classes, the writing workshop meets once per cycle. Through the 13 sessions spanning the entire school year, the workshop covers a wide variety of topics in writing — such as idea generation, evidence integration, and essay organization, all of which serve to help students develop their critical thinking skills and ability to articulate thoughts in an organized and coherent manner.
“The [writing workshop] … recontextualizes some important aspects and gives students this low-stakes space to practice those skills as a community,” English teacher Kathryn Diaz said.
“A lot of the time you wouldn’t make good essays because you don’t have the foundations to do that … but writing workshop helps us build it,” Temi Ogundare ’26 said. The solid foundation built from writing workshop serves students for the rest of their Loomis career and beyond.
This year, the writing workshop program has gone under significant changes. Instead of offering a completely lecture-based curriculum, it has been redesigned to create more opportunities for interactive and engaging learning.
“In its current iteration … students are learning not necessarily as passively as they might have in previous years,” said Ms. Diaz. “Even though they are in an auditorium, what I’m noticing that the leaders are doing is trying to build small learning peer communities where [students] are practicing and learning alongside and with their peers.”
Through peer editing, sharing, and cooperation, sophomores extend their original thinking and share their thoughts with a broader community. And on top of facilitating more classroom discussions, the English department has also integrated freewriting into the workshop.
“With the increased emphasis on focused freewriting, students see writing as a process of thinking, not necessarily [as] the production of an end product,” Head of English Department Steven Colgate said.
Every session includes freewriting time, where students are encouraged not to take their pencils off the page and to jot down whatever ideas come to mind. Students have felt that doing such exercises has helped them analyze the text and extend their understanding to a deeper level.
“Exercises like this help us to deconstruct writing,” Ogundare said.
Instead of treating writing as a complex unit, freewriting helps break writing down into manageable and approachable pieces, all of which, organized together, contribute to the end product.
Through the freewriting process, students have felt that they have been able to pause and reflect on their thoughts, while still being able to delve deeper into their creative ideas. This technique has allowed students to discern and appreciate small details that nuance their life and allow them to be more imaginative.
“The process also helps us to be more creative,” Ogundare said.
“The act of writing is a way of putting a piece of ourselves on display, and the ability to write in ways that are genuine and true to the individual is a way of understanding who we are. The ability to communicate what we think and feel through writing is part of the very fabric of what makes us human,” Mr. Colgate said.
Ultimately, the goal of the Loomis English curriculum is not solely to foster great writers but to hone students’ abilities to think critically and communicate clearly. Learning to access different sources of information critically and enhancing awareness and sensitivity to one’s feelings and identity are highly valuable in this time of rapid technological advancements, blooming social media and misinformation, and increasing diversity, and the writing workshop program’s new changes will most definitely aid in this pursuit.