Do you think it's a problem that my students do their best writing during indoor recess?

It was the end of a long day and yet there was a bit of an urgency in the plea to stop on my way up the hallway.  As usual when teachers talk, the conversation started with small talk about student progress but quickly drifted to a more pressing issue, "Do  you think it is a problem if my students write better stories during indoor recess?"  The teacher showed me some amazing drafts from indoor recess to support her question!  Great realistic fiction and fantasy stories about planes that looked like birds and animals that acted like humans.  There were characters, settings, problems and solutions.  There was great voice in each of the pieces.  They were the kind of writing we want kids to do!

My mind raced back to the days before writing workshop....back before writing gurus such as Donald Graves, Nancy Atwell, and Lucy Calkins proposed students needed dedicated time and space to write about personally meaningful topics for real audiences.  They called such times, writing workshops as they were places where students could work like real writers in supported environments.  It was a seminal idea that changed the way writing was taught in our schools.  It empowered a whole generation of writers; however, there were a few problems. Most students wrote more and more and became better and better writers; however, others needed more guidance and support to create the kinds of writing valued in schools.
So, those great minds suggested we needed more models and more teacher control over the writing workshop. The writing gurus softened their stances on student choice, a bit, and proposed lots of mini lessons modeling craft.  Slowly, ever so slowly, as curriculum demands for consistently and the added demands of high stakes assessments have wafted into our classrooms, writing workshops have become places where students produce more and more required documents - the kind of writing valued in our schools. 

Let's talk about how you can have more student choice during writing workshop, I responded before I left for the day; however, I continued to think about the dilemma. Perhaps we need a student takeover of the writing workshop in order to return the power to write about personally meaningful topics to our students!  Perhaps the really good news is that students are confident enough and love writing enough to want to write during designated "free times."  Perhaps, we can hope for lots of rainy days so that students have time to write down the stories that churn inside of each of them!