Shifting to a Reading-Writing Workshop Model

After much reading, research, and collaboration, I have decided to shift to a workshop model for reading and writing in my high school English classes. While I still am aiming to implement standards-based grading and portfolios (as well as improving conferencing), transforming the instructional model within my classroom feels like the best first step (rather than changing everything at once).

In late November 2017, I attended my second National Council of Teachers of English conference and my second Conferenceon English Leadership. I went with the aims of discovering more about these practices (after having read about them the previous year since the 2016 NCTE and CEL conventions), and many other educators shared what they were doing in their classroom. I got some ideas on where to go, but the process is always a bit fuzzy. How do I get to where I want to be from where I am?

My goal in this blog is to document my shifts.

Previously, while I believe I have found engaging ways to strengthen my students’ literacy skills, my classroom was very teacher-centered in that I planned and led instruction. I had begun utilizing Connie Moss’s concepts of “learning targets” and making learning a bit more visible to students. I incorporated music, video, and images. I supplemented our main readings with other pieces of fiction and nonfiction, and aimed to broaden the canon. However, I still led whole-class lessons for the most part.

Upon returning from the convention, on Tuesday, November 28^th, I redesigned my instructional delivery.

Within an 80-minute block schedule, I now allot the first thirty minutes to reading workshop, then twenty minutes to direct instruction, and finally thirty minutes to writing workshop.

Reading Workshop. I had been providing about ten minutes of SSR (silent sustained reading) to my students earlier, and had also been building up my classroom library with contemporary young adult literature. In my updated model, the first fifteen minutes are now reserved for leisure reading. Then, the poems I was going to read as a class became (mostly) independent readings (with accompanying multiple-choice questions as I need to accustom my students to the question types they will see on our end-of-course state exam). These poems were from the anthology UnsettlingAmerica: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry. My special education co-teacher and I are able to maneuver around during this time to chat about independent reading novels, review answers to the multiple-choice questions, or help students explicate a poem. To my surprise, students moved through these poems more quickly than I would have if I directly taught two poems a day (as initially planned): and they answered the questions correctly, demonstrating some level of comprehension and analysis.

Mini-Lesson. I reserved a few classic poems to teach as a whole-group lesson, including some by Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. Here, rather than explicating an entire poem, I decided to focus either on repetition, or simile, or rhyme, and so on. This focusing would provide students more detailed strategies to utilize when analyzing or writing poetry in their writing workshop.

Writing Workshop.  I provided students their writing assignments up front: two comparative constructed response paragraphs (of poems of their choice, which could be from the assigned readings during reading workshop) and three poems (one in response to current events, one in response to their leisure reading novel, and a third of their choice). We had provided notes on poetry forms and poetic devices so students could refer to them as necessary. We do have one-to-one Chromebooks at school, so students retrieve a Chromebook and start writing during this time. This allows us to drop into their documents or conference one-on-one. I am not organized yet with a way to record my mini-conference—but I don’t know if I’d even count them as conferences yet. I try to get to as many students as I can in one day to at least see where they are, ask if they need assistance, request to see their work, or offer feedback. Eventually I will need to informally note my conversations, especially as I’d like to shift more towards standards-based grading and feedback. In my inclusion classes, this time (and reading workshop) allows for my co-teacher and I to pull small groups or provide individualized assistance. This is what learning is all about: we’re becoming coaches rather than teachers.

So far, I’m enjoying this new model. By the end of this week, we will shift to drama and students will have to (re)read some of Julius Caesar on their own (or utilize https://myshakespeare.com) during reading workshop (after we close-read, act out, and view some segments in class) and then work to transform some of Caesar into a narrative and some of their leisure reading novel into a script (focusing on structural elements of narrative and drama).

I look forward to seeing how students settle into or challenge this new approach, where they are doing more reading and writing rather than having me drag them through it.

Informal questioning on how students are responding to this model so far have proven positive. I may be entertaining, but they don’t want to hear me talk for so long. Now I just need to make sure we’re making progress during the allotted time.

This is an exciting venture, and we’ll be “strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!”