WORKSHOP - CRITICAL APPROACHES TO CREATIVE WRITING

(DECEMBER 19, 2022)

 A workshop for all language teachers, was held online by G D Goenka group of schools on 19 December, 2022. It was attended by about 217 teachers from the G D Goenka schools all over India. The workshop was conducted by Ms. Neeta Rastogi.

The objective of the workshop was to improve the creative writing skills of the students in the junior as well as the senior classes.  The creative writing skills could be used very effectively in all the subjects for making the assertion reasoning answers in Science and Social Sciences as well. 

The first three elements of the creative writing was - Structuring, Use of Lexical Devices and the Sandwich Strategy. The structuring involved a claim followed by a justification and a counter claim.  The lexical signposts like generalize, causation, summarization, alternatives, adding and words used to signify qualification should be made available to the students during the regular days of the school; perhaps on a chart. The structure of CLAIM - SUPPORT - QUESTION must be made a regular practice for the creative writing exercises in languages and applied to the other subjects as well.  This would encourage the student to think out-of-the-box questions to support their arguments.

The feedback from the peers should be encouraged to help both the writer and the reader to articulate their thoughts better to each other through the usage of constructive and polite language.  Since cohesion plays a dominant role in creative writing, Ms. Rastogi reiterated that all the teachers need to ask themselves if they have given adequate inputs to their students to formulate a creative answer to their questions.

Overall it was an interesting and very informative workshop.