Working Through Workshop Challenges

It is definitely a good idea that I did not jump in right away with workshops, portfolios, and standards-based grading all at once. I need to make sure I get this workshop stuff down first!

While my first two posts reflected on my workshop set-up (30 minutes of reading workshop, 20 minutes of instruction, and 30 minutes of writing workshop) and managing time (student goal-setting and my own flexibility with direct instruction), this post will wrestle with some challenges I faced this week, namely (1) teaching goal-setting, (2) needing to better refocus my mini-lessons, (3) keeping up with outside-of-class reading “homework,” and (4) separating reading and writing workshop.

Current Class Structure

We are currently looking at drama using Julius Caesar. My eighty-minute block sophomore English class currently runs as follows:

1.      First fifteen minutes of Reading Workshop: Students settle in to read their self-selected leisure reading novel. I will read during this time as well, but will also ask a few students how their book is going (informally, not a “true” conference).

2.      Second fifteen minutes of Reading Workshop: Students can use SparkNotes summary (which I copied for them), my abridged Caesar script (of which they each have their own copy), or myshakespeare.com (go check it out if you haven’t yet!). They are to then answer the basic recall/comprehension questions at their own rate, although I gave them a deadline of just over five class days.

3.      Direct Instruction: I have worked hard to maintain only twenty minutes here, but the first three days of Caesar I spent a bit more time (viewing the film and then getting us into the plot of Act I). One lesson focused solely on Brutus’s monologue at the top of II.i (we looked at imagery) and another lesson focused solely on embedded stage directions versus explicit stage directions in the murder of Caesar (near the beginning of III.i) for example.

4.      Thirty minutes of Writing Workshop: Students are to transform a scene from their leisure reading novel into about two pages of a script and then also transform a scene from Caesar into a narrative. Our students tend to have trouble on the state Literature exam regarding questions of genre/medium, so I wanted to provide ways for students to see structural differences.

CHALLENGE 1: Teaching Goal-Setting

I created a five-box handout (two on the front, three on the back) with five rows in each box for students to enumerate their goals for the day, a column to mark what time they complete the task, and another column to place an X in to notify me that they have a question with that step. As I touch base with students, I’ll leave a brief note on what we discussed and initial off that I spoke with them that day.

The challenge came in teaching students to sub-divide tasks (rather than just “I’m working on the writing assignment”). I modeled this and gave full-class suggestions, and I will also do so when I meet with students one-on-one. Implementing this new procedure has been challenging as we only have four or so weeks left of the semester. I printed the work logs on blue paper and asked students to have them on their desk as they settle in to read. As the week went on, students became better at filling them out, but some of our struggling learners were still unsure how to get specific and some of our higher-achieving students didn’t view generating a list as necessary.

I decided to collect them each week so I have a record of student work (and my individualized time with them), and that may help solidify new procedures. I did need to allocate about fifteen minutes the first day to walk through expectations. Then, at the end of each day, I ask students to complete their log for the following school day. I have not been able to check every student’s log to ensure it is complete and thorough before they leave, but the time I would have spent on an “exit card” is now allocated to goal-setting. This also does not account for any work a student may choose to complete outside of class (I have told students to plan for what they want to accomplish the next day, but if they do more at home, they can edit it before working when they enter the room the following class).

However, I know that this will be beneficial for student learning in the long-run, so I will be continuing with work logs.

CHALLENGE 2: Refocusing my Mini-Lessons

I would like to “blame” jumping into this for my lack of stellar lesson plans. I decided to keep some of the lessons I normally do with Caesar and translate them into the new procedure.

Thus, I maintained my comprehension questions but asked students to utilize the various resources to access answers with quite a bit more independence (as we normally read Caesar as a class and get up to block/act)—some go right to the rewritten Shakespeare text, but many surprised me and stayed with the (abridged) original. I do not know if these questions are truly necessary any more, but I wanted something for students to do during reading workshop other than reading their own novels for thirty minutes. This may have been a mistake—of course, since I am not reviewing or given answers, students are far more invested in working through the resources/texts (even though the questions are not for a grade). They will assist students in transforming a scene into a narrative.

Anyway, my mini-lessons became my “best hits” of my original teaching unit. I did work to refocus some of them: imagery in Brutus’s monologue and stage directions in Caesar’s stabbing (as mentioned earlier). However, I should have decided upon these at the start of the unit rather than just the weekend before last (or this weekend for this week). I am still worried about teaching the text rather than teaching reading (but I allowed my personal fascination with Portia’s plea to Brutus to be a lesson on the role of women in Caesar more than anything more specifically literacy-related—but come on, stabbing herself to prove her mettle is just too enticing not to show students!).

I will need to continue focusing on strategies first and then looking to the full literary work to find those examples (as I did a bit with the explicit versus implicit stage direction lesson). I am still working with Berit Gordon’s No More Fake Reading (@BeritGordon) and have Mary E. Styslinger’s Workshopping the Canon on deck (check out her blogpost). In my transition, I have held onto some of my former activities and instruction (including those dreaded comprehension questions).

As our semester is coming to a close, this will need to be something I more heavily consider over Winter Break in preparation for next semester when I gain Honors English 9 courses and another Academic English 10 class. I need to aim to provide the plot upfront and then provide close readings or analyses of specific segments of what used to be a course text as students analyze their own leisure reading novels and worry less about the full novel. Maybe?

CHALLENGE 3: Reading Homework

I really like the idea that the only outside-of-class work that I will require (unless students fall behind or choose to work ahead in their workshop assignments) is twenty minutes of reading. However, I have not kept up with this amidst everything else. I really enjoy the bookmark logs Berit Gordon spotlights on page 65 of her book. I don’t assign grades for formative assessment (standards-based grading is on my radar!), but I need to insist on the outside-of-class reading.

My co-teacher and I began gamifying our class a few years ago where ungraded homework assignments counted as experience points (XP), which caused a student to “level up” and receive cards (standard collecting card concept, like Pokemon or Magic: the Gathering). Each level allowed for an “ability” (a formative homework pass so a student could still earn XP a day they missed homework, a seat change, a bonus point on a summative test, etc.). We had a hard time maintaining this system (transferring our checklist of homework to students’ Avatar sheets), but I think I could just mark their Avatar sheets where they gain XP (100XP per formative assessment) as I check their reading logs (and attach new ranks as necessary after the check). The students liked the gaming aspect (we’d also have an on-going story we’d read at the start of each new unit in second-person point-of-view that would send our class on quests (with my co-teacher and I as mentors for the Order of the Veil). We really enjoyed the gamification aspects, but refocusing it to daily reading outside of class may be a good way to maintain it and encourage student participation/buy-in.

(If there is any interest in hearing more of our gamified approach, please let me know and I’ll add a blog post outline our journey with that.)

With the goal-setting sheets to newly manage, I lost track of insisting on, checking, and holding students accountable for their nightly reading logs.

However, the heightened participation in class during workshop has been stellar, so I’ll take my failings in stride.

CHALLENGE 4: Separating Reading and Writing Workshop

During our reading workshop, as students work through Caesar and the recall/comprehension questions, I allow them to use our Chromebooks (and there are a couple students who do their leisure reading on the Chromebooks). However, some students then begin their writing assignments during this time. Also, there are some students who continually want to read through writing workshop. Now, the push to do work is fantastic. However, I liked the clear delineation to help ensure my students are reading and writing each day.

When I surveyed my two classes on Friday, a few students said they’d prefer more time to write since those included the graded assignments. I know there are issues with students wanting to do things for points, but since the writing may be a bit more intensive (and higher-level than the comprehension questions anyway), I agree with my students.

I think I may try fifteen minutes of leisure reading, twenty minutes of mini-lesson, then forty-five minutes of writing workshop (which may also include reading Caesar). This may indeed then begin to blur the lines between reading and writing workshop as two separate entities. If students are goal-setting however to reach deadlines, this may not be a problem. This may mean that there may be a day a student chooses to read all day—which is allowable, I think, so long as I conference with that student and ensure that he or she budgets time to accomplish the writing assignments during other class periods.

I was so worried about establishing and maintaining a routine (and I’d like to think rightly so) that I nearly forgot to ask students how it was going. Once we were three weeks in, however, and I began seeing these challenges arise, asking the students made sense. Students are enjoying knowing what they need to do to prove what they know and being given the time and personalized attention to complete the tasks.

After a rough start to last week, by Friday, I was ready to “push off” once again to “be strong in will / to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!”