That doesn't just involve getting the words right. It involves establishing a productive relationship between each writer in the class and each reader. It means making it clear that the audience is both listening and willing to talk back so that what it is given can be made better. It means giving the student writers an experience that will inform, perhaps change, them so that when they leave the room for the last time, they want to continue to write and read and improve their work for both its sake and their own. Although the Creative Writing Workshop is established within the college or university system, its paradigm is found less in that of the other classrooms than in the social relationships writers have set up for themselves in the wider world.
Writing is said to be a lonely art.
But that time is itself supported by peer review, discussion, editorial commentary, time that more experienced writers might offer, publisher-writer relationships, and sometimes even family and friends. The Creative Writing Workshop is itself modeled on the doubled way in which writers have formed groups around themselves for centuries. The Creative Writing Workshop imports these two into the setting of the classroom. Students can learn from their teachers, but they can and sometimes do learn even more from each other. The chief virtue of the Creative Writing Classroom is that it uses the already present social and material structures of the educational institution to frame the society of writers within the student body.