"...and Not to Yield": Explorations in English Education

In this post, I want to review my past practices in scoring writing, my newer approach to feedback in workshop, and then articulate some challenges. These blogs are as much for my reflection as they are (hopefully) a guide to some of you who may be facing similar issues or planning to jump into a workshop approach. HOW I USED TO SCORE WRITING Before I began using workshops, my classroom was a bit more traditional: whole-group instruction, engaging lessons (sometimes with technology), whole-class novels, and writing assessments with brainstorming, planning guides, and time to write. For any writing assessment, we had students work from previous short-writes and referred them to models we had read in class of that writing style. We would always have planning guides due before we asked students to start writing, and after glancing over them, we’d give whole-class notes on segments of planning to review. For some shorter, paragraph-length assignments, we would leave comments on p...

Last week, I blogged about furthering developing my conferencing routine in workshop while combatting the “ spectre of perceived rigor .” This week I wanted to reflect a bit on the role of co-teaching in readers-writers workshop. I have recently shifted to “readers-writers” from “reading-writing” after seeing a post by Amy Rasmussen (@AmyRass), as I think the former now better focuses on my students (who are developing readers and writers) rather than their actions (reading and writing). This week’s post provides some background on my specific context with co-teaching and how it has assisted me in transitioning to a workshop model. MY LIFE AS A CO-TEACHER Before jumping into how my co-teachers and I work in workshop, I wanted to touch base on my experiences as a co-teacher, since I know we have all had varying levels of success in collaboration. I began my career as a Special Education teacher and was paired with a wonder Regular Education English co-teacher. Luckily, we ...

Now that I have a working workshop model in my freshman and sophomore English classes, I need to begin re-focusing my conferencing methods to better generate conversations. MY ORIGINAL APPROACH Currently, I hold what I’ve been considering mini-workshops and leaving feedback on each student’s daily Work Log Google Doc (see screenshots and more details from my January 28 th blog post ). I’ll ask if anyone has questions once we begin our workshop portion of the class, check in with those students first, and then make my way through the room, beginning with students I have not touched base with in a while. My approach to scoring also has led me to reconsider how I have been holding my mini-conferences. SCORING PROCEDURES I have generally been using a 5-tiered holistic rubric for scoring (modeled after our State rubric for constructed responses), as that also gets me a bit closer to the four-point standards-based assessment rubric I’d like to eventually shift to in my ...

I will be entering my third full week (twelfth class day) of the semester, where we established workshop right from the start. I feel I am far enough into our intensified block schedule (880 minutes logged with each of my three classes) to have a better grasp on my procedures. But there’s this Specter of Perceived Rigor that is trying to haunt me... What My Workshop Looks Like This blog post contains my first full week of the semester. 1.       Students read an independent novel for the first fifteen minutes of class. See here for the bookmark (edited from @BeritGordon’s NoMore Fake Reading ) that helps students read at least one novel every twenty calendar days. 2.       I (and my co-teacher) teach for 15-20 minutes. This is usually direct instruction, lecture, or us modelling how to analyze a text, annotate a text, plan writing, or actually writing an analysis in front of our students and thinking-aloud. 3.  ...