Three Curriculum Designs for the High School Creative Writing Class

Today is the first day of school in the county where I live, and I’m struck by how busy the neighborhood feels. Everyone seems sad that summer is over, yet poised to launch into the social experiment of school with new teachers and new learning.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been busy working with a half dozen districts throughout the commonwealth delivering professional learning on writing strategies for the Kentucky Writing Project. Talking to teachers and working with administrators to design meaningful sessions always makes me consider my own pedagogy and my own curriculum design. 

In most high schools, Creative Writing is a class taught as an elective through the English or Fine Arts department. It’s almost always taught by an English teacher who is a poet or writer themselves and who has some experience at teaching writing. Because most English teachers feel familiar with designing instruction around helping students extract meaning out of literature by reading, the idea of designing a framework around helping students create meaning by writing literature can be daunting.

I’ve designed my Creative Writing classes a dozen different ways throughout the years, and I thought I would share three of the more successful designs here. I will present them from easiest to most difficult to design, and I will share the pros and cons of each of them.

Design by Genre

Pros: Easy to design and plan; students exposed to different genres.

Cons: Students don’t have much choice. 

This design is the easiest and requires the least planning because everything is built around seven different genres: memoir, vignette, flash fiction, short story, novel, screenplay, and poetry. Unfortunately, this design offers the least choice for students because everyone is writing basically the same genre at the same time. This design is great for an 8th grade or 9th grade class as it introduces them to the different craft moves of each genre which allows them to immerse themselves in that genre. While I supplement the texts with model samples of each genre, each of the main texts are craft books.

Design by Essential Question

Pros: Easy to design and plan; students have more choice of writing.

Cons: May be difficult to find mentor texts that match your questions

This design is also fairly easy and requires a smidge more planning, but designing around questions allows students to occupy the big questions in a way that feels more authentic than a curriculum driven by genre. The units are driven instead by two elements: one essential question around identity and one or two broad spectrum writing concepts. Students also have the option to choose what genre they want to write, which can be either prose or poetry in any form. This design was great for 10th grade students who were more mature; sharing and discussion is a large component of the essential question design.

Design by Project Based Writing

Pros: Students drive the units by their own visions, projects, and self-selected texts.

Cons: Requires the teacher to have a deep understanding of how project-based writing works

This design is the hardest of the three to implement, but is the most authentic creative writing class model I’ve worked in. Students pitch their own writing projects to the class, then write proposals as well as create a personal time-line and project “library” for completion. They participate in a critical inquiry groups within the classroom and write reflections and a personal rubric that serves to assess the work. They also find a place to perform, present, produce or submit their pieces for publication outside of the classroom. Project based writing was the subject of my first book, Project Based Writing: Teaching Writers to Manage Time and Clarify Purpose and the design that I used for the last eight years of my teaching career for junior and senior creative writing classes.