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

This year, I began seating students in pods so we could better implement turn-and-talk opportunities during our mini-lessons (rather than asking questions and having students raise hands and answer individually). A couple years ago, I tried having students choose the classroom arrangement . We have had a few exercises where we had students work in their “pods”: reading and responding to short articles, locating examples of literary elements in a text, and working through a sample standardized test. My classroom set-up with pods at the start of the 2019-2020 school year. However, while the turn-and-talk is generally working (as I find best how to facilitate and teach that procedure), the short group work activities have been met with less success. THE CHALLENGES I have found a handful of challenges with pod seating: 1.      Off-Topic Chatter During Mini-Lessons . There tends to be more chatter among groups during our 15 to 20 minutes of mini-less...

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 ...