By Jennifer Rupp, University of Kansas

You’ve spent hours creating a new workshop that you are genuinely excited about – it’s both informative and fun! Then, it’s two minutes to go-time. One student walks through the door. You anxiously smile and say, “We’ll just wait a few more minutes to see if anyone else shows up.” They don’t. Now you both feel awkward. All those interactive group activities get thrown out the door. “Okay,” you say, “let’s sit down together, and I’ll individualize the workshop to fit your needs.”

Sound familiar? Most writing centers provide some version of workshops – as many as 84% in Rebecca Jackson and Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s article on the “invisible” work of writing centers in 2011. Yet, workshops are often considered a supplement to other services – a side gig. Individual consultations shine brightest; in fact, workshops can seem to take up more time and energy than they are worth even when they account for large student engagement numbers. At the University of Kansas Writing Center, we facilitated co-curricular classroom workshops to around 1,000 unique students with over 5,000 student engagements across all workshops, class visits, and marketing events last year. 

This marginality is emphasized by the lack of writing center literature regarding workshops. Compared to the work on individual consultations, very little is written about workshops, and usually it focuses on the development of a particular topic rather than program administration or assessment. Jackson and McKinney argue that “much of the writing center’s extra curriculum, or what we call here non-tutoring work, remains hidden . . . writing centers are often conceptualized as merely sites for one-to-one tutoring.” We see this on our campus as well where administrators are much more interested in our consulting data than our workshops.

Despite a lack of attention on the administrative side, workshops continue to be popular on our campus with frequent requests from faculty and staff. We’ve seen a 77% increase in writing workshops over the last two years. As the demand for workshops grows at our center, we have struggled with how to offer them in an efficient and effective manner. 

Are workshops worth it? That’s ultimately up to you. It can be helpful to see how another center has gone through this process. As you consider developing or updating your own workshop programs, here are some questions to ask yourself and how we addressed a few of these in KU’s writing center. 

Benefits and Obstacles

• How would workshops benefit various stakeholders: students, faculty, staff, administrators, the writing center, and even me? Who would benefit the most?
• What obstacles might we encounter in creating or changing a workshop program on our campus? How would we overcome those obstacles?
• Do the advantages outweigh the challenges?

Workshops have notable benefits – marketing value, faculty relationships, and professional development, to name a few. Workshops often introduce new students to the academic support options on campus with many students stating that it was where they first discovered our services. 

Additionally, workshops provide an opportunity for us to develop connections with faculty across all fields. In “Changing Attitudes: Writing Center Workshops in the Classroom,” Holly Ryan demonstrates that working with faculty on workshops “can forge relationships with faculty across campus that lead to productive and engaged conversations about writing. In doing so, writing center directors are positioned to move their centers beyond the image of the ‘fix-it’ shop and into a cultivator of intellectual engagement on campus.” It can be difficult on a large campus (particularly since we are independent of any academic department) to make connections, and the resulting interactions have been some of the most significant touch points for me with faculty and staff. In my experience, workshops have led our center to better partnerships and future collaborations.

Workshops also allow us to engage with students who might not voluntarily use our individual services. We primarily present in the classroom, so workshops are selected by the professor instead of the student. While this has some drawbacks, it does mean getting in front of new audiences who may benefit from these topics but would not seek them out on their own. 

However, we still face obstacles managing the expectations of students, faculty, consultants, and administrators. While workshops provide an opportunity to connect with faculty, those interactions may not achieve the desired results. Speaking about the difficulties of creating true faculty collaborations, Olivia R. Tracey et al. explain that “what we want and what faculty want, what we get and what faculty get, become disconnected.” When campus partners reach out to us for workshops, they often want to fill a gap they are seeing in students’ writing. However, workshops are rarely the magical solution many want. They are a good starting point that provides a quick lesson or overall tips, but we can’t fix all writing issues in one 45-minute presentation. It is vital to create clear expectations for everyone involved, which we offer through guidelines on our website and outreach to faculty with varying results.

Workshops also take a lot of administrative time and effort. Between marketing, scheduling, collaborating, developing, and facilitating, these events can take as much, if not more, time than individual consultations. Compared to a one-hour consultation session, a workshop takes approximately three hours of time between scheduling, prep, and presentation. This is not time everyone has the resources to provide, and a serious consideration is whether you or your center can take on the administrative load. 

Administration and Resources

• What are our resources and funding options?
• How many staff are available to support this program? What is their capacity? 
• What is our relationship to the faculty and/or departments on campus? 
• Is there a Writing Across the Curriculum program on campus? How would our workshops fit into that existing curriculum?
• How could we make this program sustainable over time?

There’s no one way to set up a workshop program, and how you do it will depend on your institution. You might just organize one or two workshops a year for specific groups, host drop-in workshops daily, or anywhere in between. You might also decide that realistically workshops are not feasible for your center. You first need to consider your resources and capacity. 

As requests increased at KU and the writing center became part of a larger academic support center in 2023, it quickly became apparent that we needed to streamline programming to have one process supported by multiple staff. I now oversee the main workshop program with lots of help, including an administrative associate who does the initial scheduling and a graduate assistant who assigns facilitators, sends reminders, and maintains the materials. We spread the facilitation amongst both our student and professional staff. We do not have funding specifically for workshops, but we have limited them primarily to our open hours so that staff can lead them during their normal shifts. Without this staffing, our program would not be sustainable, and we would have to cut back the number of workshops significantly. Yet, even now, I recognize that if this program continues to grow, it will need more dedicated staff support than we currently have. 

In addition, we have been able to increase our capacity by decreasing customization – we offer a select menu of general workshop options that are standardized with existing materials and scripts. Outside the classroom, we try to collaborate with campus partners instead of replicating existing workshops. These choices allow us to provide around 100 writing workshops plus many more study workshops, class visits, and events a year. 

Audience

• Who are our workshops for? Undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, staff, the community, etc.? What topics are they most interested in? 
• How large is the student body? Are they typically involved on campus and engaged with similar events?
• Can someone guarantee an audience for the workshop? Will this be in collaboration with a group with a built-in audience?
• How will we set expectations? What will we do if those expectations are not met?
• How will we market it?

I’ve led drop-in workshops at three different institutions now without much success, except for a small number of topics like personal statements or cover letters. At KU, however, we operate a primarily class-based workshop program where we go into both undergraduate and graduate courses to present. The obvious downside is that students aren’t always engaged in the workshop because they didn’t choose it, but at least we know students will attend.

This is not to say we never conduct drop-in events. For workshops outside the classroom, we usually partner with a group on campus that has a built-in audience, such as a student organization, orientation event, or program with a large listserv. Even then, those audiences tend to be small, and we’ve considered cutting back on repeat workshops if the first one does not reach a certain number of attendees. 

Staying focused on classes and campus collaborations also makes marketing easier since we are mostly advertising to faculty and staff. Surprisingly, I’ve found marketing to students on a larger campus more difficult than a smaller one because there isn’t just one place where all students go for information. On the other hand, you might be on a campus where direct marketing is easier and, as a result, have more success with drop-in workshops.

Facilitation

• Who will lead workshops? What training do they need? How much time and money will this take?
• What times should they be offered? When are students available?
• How much time will facilitators need to prepare? Is this something we can set aside and/or pay them for?
• What do students or faculty need to prepare in advance?
• Does the faculty member need to be there?
• What are the technology requirements and are those met in most spaces on campus?

One of the biggest changes we had to make recently was to the facilitation of our workshops. In the past, only a small number of staff led workshops. Training a small group is easier, but scheduling was an issue with our course-based system and classes all day. We decided to spread out the responsibility so that any writing consultant can lead workshops, allowing us to assign someone who is already on shift at the time the workshop is requested. 

Initially, not everyone was excited about this change, but we added training and a shadowing system where consultants observe, co-lead, and then, if comfortable, move on to leading themselves. We built workshop facilitation into the job description and interview, so new consultants are not surprised by this responsibility. The process does take administrative effort as there are many variables to consider. Yet, it has allowed us to provide a high number of workshops at many different time periods. We additionally ask faculty to request workshops at least two weeks in advance so that we can assign consultants before they have appointments scheduled and to remain present during the workshop to provide connections to the class content, answer questions, and manage the class as needed. Lastly, with so many people facilitating the workshops, standardized materials became very important so that any consultant could step in to present with an hour of preparation.

Development

• What other workshops are being held on campus? How do our topics relate to what other areas on campus are doing (career center, grad studies, libraries, etc.)? Would it be better to cut out some of our options or collaborate with these groups?
• Who will prepare the workshops? How much time will this take? 
• How far in advance do workshops need to be planned or requested?
• How specialized and/or interactive should they be? 
• What topics will be most popular? 
• Will there be standardized materials? How are those shared with facilitators? How are they updated?
• How long should each workshop last? Will each one stand alone or are they a series that build on each other?

At one time we were able to tailor each presentation to the specific needs of the professor, but that preparation took too long, and we didn’t have enough staff to maintain that level of individualization. We now offer a menu of 21 workshop topics plus class visits for marketing. These topics change each year as we learn which ones are most popular and introduce new ideas. We also have standardized each workshop with an existing slideshow, handout, and script. We then ask professors to add their own expertise throughout workshops to connect it to the field or assignment. 

As one can imagine, many faculty would prefer we adapt the workshops to their classes more, but that is neither sustainable nor scalable right now. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from previous staff that customization still rarely met faculty expectations. Tracey et al. confirm we are not alone. Even after years of running a very collaborative workshop program with faculty at the University of Denver, there were still many challenges: “Individual faculty partnerships and workshops may be meaningful for some faculty partners, and perhaps also for their students, but we find ourselves wanting to move toward a model that achieves our goals in more intentional and sustained ways, even if it means discontinuing and rebuilding an offering we’ve had in place for 15 years” (Tracey et al.).

Assessment

• How will we assess the success of the program? Who will we request feedback from: students, requesters, facilitators, all of the above?
• How will we track attendance? 
• How will we present workshops to administration?
• At what point will we evaluate if the program is working and/or needs adjustment?

One of the advantages of working with classes is that we can pull the rosters instead of having to make students sign in during presentations. However, this isn’t possible for workshops we do outside of the classroom. For simplicity, we just count numbers in these workshops but are contemplating fast ways to collect more data in the future. 

We also have multiple versions of a survey. At the end of each workshop is a QR code for a quick student survey. We then send out a separate survey to the professor afterwards. For one more perspective, we ask consultants about workshops in an end-of-semester survey. While there’s certainly more data we could collect, this process has given us useful information both to internally make decisions about future programming and externally demonstrate that workshops are popular and well-received.

Ultimately, despite the time and logistics, the assessment is what makes it all worth it. Running a program with so many different stakeholders can be challenging, but it is exciting to see our workshops continue to grow, gain recognition, and get positive feedback. Just yesterday, I received an email from a faculty member gushing about how their workshop facilitator had done a wonderful job. These interactions make my day! Perhaps workshops on your campus can make a difference as well.