PRussell

     In this section for grades three and four, the authors provide additional lessons to expand the students’ skills.  I enjoyed the lessons on beginnings and endings, especially.  The lessons on titles were okay, but not as essential, in my opinion.  This kind of teaching takes as much practice for the teachers as for the students.  I would think that one would absolutely have to commit to the process and then stay committed, perhaps teaching some lessons over and over.  I would probably create a checklist of terms like voice, time focus, etc. for the students to use as they write and for me to use as I confer with them.  In this way we constantly use the same vocabulary when discussing anyone’s writing.  I used one of the ideas about beginnings to help me improve some of my own writing this weekend.

      Fletcher and Portalupi have attempted to walk a line between too prescriptive and not enough information on how to teach the craft of writing to students in grades K-8.  The main thrusts are integrating writing with literature and giving students many opportunities to write.  I love the literature aspect and realize the importance of providing time and guidance.  Having taught middle and high school language arts/English, I remember that the teaching of writing was the hardest part.  I did not do as well as I would like to have done in this area.  The assumption was that if you could speak standard English and could spell fairly well, you could not only write, but you could teach others.  I am looking forward to reading more to find out what I missed as an education student and as a practicing teacher.

Chapters 7 & 8 give even more details about independent reading, chatting, book talks, responding to student reading, choosing books, sharing, flexible grouping, and forms to help manage the program.  There was a full description of what the teacher, students, and other adults would be doing in a session.  It was interesting that they briefly discuss the use of guided reading and the differences between D.E.A.R. time, guided reading and reading workshop.  This will be helpful to some of our teachers who use guided reading as well as those who might try the reading workshop or variations.  As is often the case, I can see how my teachers and I could get some helpful ideas to use.  The two most obvious for me are choosing books and sharing my passion for books.  I am always excited to read to my younger students, but maybe I could do more informal book talking to the older ones.

The authors continue to develop their case for a workshop approach to teaching reading.  There are specific examples of classroom sessions, booklists, and advice to avoid pitfalls associated with this model.  I was impressed by the lesson plans that gave a day-by-day outline to enable a gradual phasing of the workshop’s classroom procedures.  Short of actually observing a reading workshop in progress, this book does an excellent job of promoting it as way of teaching.  The authors also heavily emphasize literature appreciation and writing.  As I mentioned before, I would be interested in knowing from unbiased teachers about how it compares with text-based teaching, especially in the area of preparation.  I would like to know and be able to help secure resources for anyone who is going to try this. 

I am again struck by the fact that the authors seem to have had wide, professional latitude in deciding to use the Reader's Workshop approach(or not).  It seemed to spread from teacher to teacher as they experimented and saw that there were positive results.  They seemed to have time to revise and become comfortable with this approach.  I cannot discern that they were told, "Teachers, this year you will drop your old, bad ways of teaching reading.  You will now have a consultant tell you how to teach using a much better approach for all students.  Everyone in our school system will now be required to teach reading using Reader's Workshop."

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Posted by: PRussell
Modified on February 22, 2006 at 6:08 AM