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

I have been focusing on implementing a readers-writers workshop in my secondary ELA classroom, utilizing (mostly) independent reading of self-selected novels. Last year, as I taught ninth grade, all of my classes read Romeo and Juliet together, and my Honors class and I also read Antigone together. We read each of these plays over the course of four to eight block periods. This year, my Special Education co-teacher and I “looped” with our students to tenth grade. We decided to review the elements of fiction utilizing Of Mice and Men rather than modeling with excerpts or short stories. Our workshop approach is normally divided as follows: ·        15 minutes of independent reading ·        20 minutes of lecture on a mini-lesson ·        45 minutes of workshop where we can confer with students THE PROBLEM Our students selected novels on the second day of school. We implemented ind...

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...