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

This week is our Spring Break, so it’s the perfect time for me to reflect on the workshop practices in my high school English Language Arts classes. For those who have been following my journey into workshoping, much of this will be familiar; however, this blog will also highlight many of the revisions I’ve made since its inception. This is a bit lengthy, but I hope it can be of some assistance. CLASS STRUCTURE I divide my class into three sections, as follows: ·          15 minutes of independent reading time. Students enter the room, rearrange the desks as their class decided upon , and settle into reading their self-selected novel. ·          20 minutes of direct instruction. This may be modeling a reading strategy, modeling writing, lecturing on a new topic, or reviewing the expectations of an assignment. My co-teachers and I may ask questions and engage the class at this time, but often...

Where I am with Workshops Kelly Gallagher (@KellyGToGo) and Penny Kittle (@pennykittle) have plenty to say on engaging students with writing, and many others have much more to say on secondary workshops than I can (see @AmyRass and threeteacherstalk.wordpress.com). However, my focus here is the journey: a transition from a more traditional English classroom to one that engages with a reading-writing workshop. As my new semester (on an intensified block schedule) approaches this Thursday, I have hurriedly been working to rework my procedures and syllabus. This past December, I jumped into workshopping my sophomore English class. To do this, I took two or three larger writing tasks, assigned them up front, and settled into what would become a new schedule: ·          15 minutes of independent reading, ·          20 minutes of direct instruction, and ·       ...

On January 18 th , we begin a new semester at school, and since we are on an intensified block schedule, I gain three new groups of students. That means I need to implement reading-writing workshop from Day 1. I have two different courses: a co-taught Academic (college-prep) English 10 inclusion class (with students I had last year in English 9), and two sections of Honors English 9 (where a Gifted Support teacher will join me about two days each week for the first time in my career). Below are the steps I will take to plan my classroom to best support a workshop model where students are given time to read books of their choice and write in class so I can serve as a learning coach. The following weeks of my blog will detail one of these aspects: 1.       Prioritize standards/objective/targets for each Unit on what skills must be demonstrated to proficiency (as opposed to just explored/introduced). We just revised our curriculum, so these are already ni...