Finding a Reading Workshop within my Writing Workshop

I was able to co-present at the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English (@PCTELANews) Conference last weekend (October 19-20) with my good friend, Dr. Jen Toney (@JENTONEY). We presented on Writing Workshops in K-12. Jen is a third grade teacher, and as I teach ninth and tenth grade, we divided the session into elementary and secondary sections after an overview. As I explained my journey to my group—including my daily class schedule (15 minutes of independent reading, 20 minutes of instruction, 45 minutes of workshop)—I got many questions on the independent reading I allow my students.

In considering how the session went, I had to inquire more with Jen on her elementary reading workshop approach because I realized that my class has independent reading as a central component (especially when students are asked to write about their writing in writing workshop), but that I do not have a true reading workshop approach.

Most of my instruction leads my students to writing about their reading—analyzing the setting, rewriting a page in a different point-of-view, critiquing the author’s subjectivity, comparing and contrasting a myth in two different retellings, rewriting a scene of a narrative as a script to explore structure, and so on. This works well for writing workshop: I model how to identify and analyze different elements, I write and think-aloud in front of my students, and then they write and I am there to assist and clarify and reteach.

While I provide time for students to read each day—and we work to match students up to books that they will fall in love with—I don’t do as much explicit teaching of strategies (such as Probst and Beers’s signposts). While I do ask students to look for literary elements and devices (definitely something to increase their reading comprehension and analysis), I realized I do not have a full reading workshop.

 

That being said, I now know where I can improve. I do want to begin using Probst and Beer’s signposts at some point in my curriculum. For my freshmen, we have an explicit Evidence-Based Writing unit. As I work to include more multimodal composition or brainstorming there with pre-selected articles (similar to Document-Based Questions, or DBQs) to generate a multi-paragraph paper using citations, exploring different article with different signposts may give me room to explicitly teach reading strategies beyond text annotation (talking-to-the-text). I have a process established already of modeling and then having students practice individually (with guidance). I think since I always open with independent reading (so I would always make time for it), my lessons inherently focused on the writing processes and products. I am hesitant to move the reading from the start of the class to later, but we can still be reading other texts during workshop rather than just revisiting our independent reads. This is an area I aim to improve upon.

I have elements of a reading workshop in place. I have developed a strong culture of independent reading, utilizing the goal of a novel every twenty days (with help of a bookmark). I describe the bookmark process (inspired from Berit Gordon’s, @beritgordon, No More Fake Reading) in this blog-post for those interested.

As always, this is a process, and a journey: thus the title of my blog: We must be “strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”