Bandying about catchphrases is one of the favorite past-times of educators. Drop a term or a name, and everyone is suppose to understand your meaning. The trouble is that this doesn’t give anyone an accurate idea of what is happening inside your classroom.
One of the most popular terms for an English teacher was popularized by one teacher, Nancie Atwell, who founded her own demonstration school in Maine, the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Her term: Reading and Writing Workshop.
If I mean anything by this term, I mean this: the student’s interests in reading and writing should be placed in the middle of the class as the “curriculum”; students need to write for real-life audiences and purposes; students need a teacher who is also a writer himself to teach and mentor them.
Atwell–the honoree of the first Global Teacher Prize from the Varkey Foundation–perhaps never envisioned moving her concept of reading and writing workshop into an urban school. That is, into a racially and economically isolated school that is overwhelmingly black, with all the socially engineered disadvantages that come with this situation. Nevertheless, I’ve always found her classic In The Middle to be one of my best resources when teaching writing.
This past year our middle school ELA curriculum was split into two classes: “Reading” class (Success For All) and “English” class, which was to focus on writing. The problem was, there was no writing curriculum, no plan, for this class. Enter opportunity.
I therefore began the school year with a question: What would happen when I gave students the choice of what to read and how fast, and the choice of what to write?
My students were regular-track kids in our segregated district, and their school habits ranged from a very few who inhaled books and wrote their own stories or journaled to a few who roamed the halls, never brought a pencil nor book to class and bent my patience on a regular basis, with the overwhelming majority in between.
What follows is my appraisal of “what happened when”:
The positives:
— A few kids finished stories they were proud of (comics, fantasy) or letters (letters to parents, letters to younger students) and shared them with friends. I would catch them reading these instead of the required texts during class.
— With some books, kids passed them around, exhorting each other to “Read this, it’s nice!” Sometimes these books disappeared for weeks as they were passed without my knowledge from one student to another until they’d been consumed by an entire clique of friends.
–I finally hit on something when we created “Recipe” wall lists for certain genres of writing by inspecting exemplars as a class. When kids were missing an “ingredient” from the genre, I simply pointed them back to our list: “Well, what ingredients are you missing for a film review?”
— I personally learned more about new methods and modes of writing than I ever imagined existed. A few kids in each class both read and wrote stories or fan fiction using apps on their phones. Some would ask permission to use their phones first, some would just do it and I’d “catch” them while making my rounds of desks.
The negatives:
— Plenty of kids (the majority it seemed as the year wore on) either started something and dropped it to goof off, or went from one beginning to another without ever finishing or re-writing anything.
— Far too many books were lost because kids were careless in returning them.
— I couldn’t always keep kids quiet during independent reading, so the kids who were really trying to read got pissed off and quit reading in class.
— I didn’t have enough writing examples of different genres and kids hardly ever referred to them, though they were available at the back of the room.
— Too many kids said they were “conferencing” with each other, while in fact they were just gossiping, despite the fact that I taught conferencing and developed a standard reference form in the fall.
— We didn’t share much as an entire class, and therefore the good writing that one student had completed died a lonely death on the page, without receiving its due time in the spotlight as a learning opportunity for other kids.
New challenges for the fall:
In the second year of the Success For All curriculum (per the administration’s request), the English department has developed a writing “curriculum” that will supplement the reading-heavy SFA schedule.
Two challenges that this poses to my plans: one, this curriculum follows the state-assessed genres of writing without much deviance, and two, our new schedule only allows for seven or eight “writing days” per Quarter. I and several other teachers raised the obvious objection that a kid won’t remember what they’ve been writing from two weeks ago, to no avail.
No one publicly raised an objection to the edict from the district curriculum coordinator that our goal should be to help kids score better on the State-mandated tests in the spring.
So if I want to follow the prescripts of Atwell’s “Reading-Writing Workshop”–with plenty of time set aside for independent reading and writing, with tons of teacher and peer conferring, with almost unlimited choice of writing genre, and writing for an audience and a purpose beyond the teacher and the test, then I’ll have to be more careful about how I do that.
I don’t want to go it alone too much.
That’s not only unhealthy for a new(er) teacher’s job, but I also have to work with the people with whom I’ve developed this curriculum. Despite the misgivings I have about the institution of schooling as usual, I have to admit that I’ve chosen to be a part of that institution.
What I resolve to do…
— Use every available moment on the shoulders of SFA class time to have students work on their chosen writing project.
— Continue to create “Genre Recipes” from real-life exemplars to show them how an adult writer approaches a new genre (I have never said to myself, “I’ve never written that before, let me go find a graphic organizer that fits”).
— “Explode” the three assessed genres (narrative, expository, argumentative), stretching them to their limits, rather than mirroring the State’s bleak and unrealistic assignments.
— Incorporate independent reading into weekly class time.
— Continue building our classroom library (especially as we’ll be losing our full-time librarian position this fall).
— Find some way to allow students to share their work with their class and beyond.