Anyone like to share their creative writing class format?

[strawberryjelly]

I am thinking of advertising and running a creative writing class.
I'm a writer (published) and an ex- teacher of English.

I've done some online creative writing courses, with the OU, but wonder what people expect of a class based course.

Would you expect a kind of free for all, sharing your work, or a theme each week such as poetry, dialogue writing, plays, novels- or basics such as creating imagery etc?

And how much input do you expect- how much do you want to be left to get on with it?

In my MA (three hours per week) we spent the first half either with a guest speaker or looking at specific topics. However, I thought it was badly planned and knew the lecturer was winging it. I would have liked that half of the lesson to cover eg dialogue, plot, characterisation etc and for us to have had a week to come up with good examples and read the theory books relating to that topic.

In the second half we were split into groups of about five and did workshops whereby two people's work was discussed each week. We were given the work the week before (if we were lucky - some were dreadful with regard to that) and critiqued one person's and then the next.

One way around people not having work ready is to say that if someone else has their work with them all ready for the group, then that should be read instead - I don't think they'd be late, then.