Budgeting Time in Secondary Reading and Writing Workshops

Time management is nothing new to English teachers, whether it’s fitting reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, and vocabulary into our courses or finding time to provide written feedback to our students. The Conference on English Leadership’s quarterly journal editor, Oona Abrams (@oonziela), recently wrote on “Tasking Time and Taking Time.” Now that I have shifted to a workshop model with my sophomores (see my initial blog-post), I have new time management challenges that I would like to record and share here as I journey towards a workshop model classroom that embraces conferencing, portfolios, and standards-based learning and assessment.

Students’ Self-Management of Time in Workshop

Knowing that I could no longer not do workshop (as I felt it was the right pedagogical shift for my students), I jumped in two weeks ago by providing time for (1) leisure reading and assigned poems and (2) a list of specific writing tasks students needed to accomplish by a set deadline. After two weeks of working on this schedule, it became apparent that students needed additional guidance in budgeting their own time.

One student even commented that it felt like we were in the “duck pond” before (a term our school uses in its Aquatics class to identify the shallow pool before students can demonstrate they have the prerequisite skills to swim safely in the deep end) and that we had thrown the students into the deep-end with our new model. My assignments themselves had not changed, just the fact that a handful were assigned at one time with more class time to work. However, this was new to my students.

Thus, my co-teacher and I fell back to some work we had done with some of our Academic Support (guided study hall) courses in the past: students must set out a course of action of what they wish to accomplish each day and then reflect on how much they achieved.

We set up a basic chart with five open rows and the following columns: (1) “Prioritized List [do #1 first]”, (2) “What I Plan to Accomplish,” (3) “I Have a Question on this Step [mark with an X],” and (4) “Time Finished with Task.”

We plan to teach our students how to break up each assignment: a student cannot write “complete a paragraph response” as an item. It would have to be broken down as (1) “generate a claim,” (2) “find evidence,” (3) “plan my paragraph,” and (4) “put it all together.” This will then provide students with a better idea of how they attack work and how long each item takes them (just as we do with our lesson plans to gauge future activities). This will also help students in asking for specific feedback from me, rather than the nebulous, “Is this right?” There is a space each day (there are five of these charts per paper for easy weekly reference) where my co-teacher or I can initial that we saw the student that day. At the close of each class, students will create their to-do list for the next class period.

This is not yet a full conferencing format, but that will come in time (where I hope to create a Google Doc where I can leave specific notes on the conference and students can add notes as well). At this point, I am looking to get to as many students as I can in one day and have a record of how students are working. I plan to collect and keep these work logs for reference (for myself, students, parents, and Special Education case managers) as students continue through the semester. We begin this tomorrow and it will be a process to get students accustomed to it.

I do think shifting first to the workshop was helpful rather than also throwing this daily log at my students. They have to grow accustomed to this new approach just like I do.

Budgeting Instructional Time

I first began the workshop model as we explored poetry. I assigned specific poems to read (with some multiple-choice questions for each poem that were modeled off of our end-of-course state exam), which were easier to review. As a full class, I would lead an explication of a poem each day, focusing on structure or poetic devices or word choice. This worked well in the allotted twenty minutes of direct instruction.

However, we are shifting to Julius Caesar and the structure of drama this upcoming week. Inspired by the work of Matt Morone (@MrMorone) in his blog “Death to Fake Reading: Encouraging Engagement in an Era of Avoidance” and Berit Gordon (@BeritGordon) in her book No More Fake Reading: Merging the Classics with Independent Reading to Create Joyful, Lifelong Readers, I decided to provide a SparkNotes summary last week, we viewed the first half of the film version on Friday, and will complete it on Monday. The two days of the film replaced our writing workshop and half of our reading workshop. I was comfortable with this because the poetry writing assessments (writing and analyzing poetry) were due at the end of the week and I had not yet assigned our new projects (where students will retell a scene of their self-selected leisure reading novel in a play format and then retell a section of Julius Caesar as a narrative).

However, once we are done viewing the film to get the full plot of the play, I wanted to return to only twenty minutes of direct instruction. From past practice, many students have enjoyed getting up to read in for (and sometimes fully act) the roles in a play. I know I do not want to read every scene (even though I use a version of the script that I have abridged) and that I want to focus on dramatic structure and do some close reading, but will twenty minutes be enough? The follow questions are gnawing at me:

·       How much should I flex/sacrifice my workshop time?

·       How often should I be allowed to do so?

·       Can I sacrifice some reading or writing workshop time at the start of a longer work, but pull back as we progress through the piece?

·       Should the thirty minutes of reading workshop and the half hour of writing workshop be non-negotiable?

I do not want to break the habits I/we have been developing, but I do want to give myself enough time to share my excitement and delve into the play a bit (and I only want to use about seven twenty-minute periods to explore Julius Caesar once we begin the play itself).

This week, I will give myself a half hour or so the first two days of exploring the play during direct instruction (to draw attention to the language, structure, characters, and conflict) so students have the necessary instruction on play structure before they begin their writing assignments on drafting script and retelling Caesar. This time will be drawn away from the reading workshop. Students will still have fifteen minutes of leisure reading time, but instead of a second fifteen minutes to use their scripts or summaries to work on basic plot recall comprehension questions (so they have a reference when they need to rewrite a scene), we will be entering the play together. Comprehension questions are not a top priority, but we do want them to encourage rereading the play.

I suspect budgeting time will continue to be a challenge as I enter other units (and implement this model with my Honors freshmen class that begins at the semester change in mid-January), but as always, we’ll be “strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”