Reading Workshop

Now is the time to understand the rich history of what we have thought books have done for us and what we think digital texts might do differently -  Andrew Piper              I have been reading and writing about workshop approaches to literacy instruction for the past 25 years. One might think that I should have run out of things to say about these instructional approaches and classroom frameworks a long time ago. Alas, that is not to be. It seems I have a few more things to say about the changes that have taken place in literacy education, in particular the changes in technology and digital resources that have affected the ways we teach children to read and write and how we organize classrooms to support this endeavor. Like Andrew Piper (2012) suggests in the opening epigraph, I believe it is time to contemplate the rich history of printed books and the ways we teach children to read them. It is also time to consider th...

Print-based student portfolios have been used, misused, discarded, and reintroduced by many schools and districts over the past thirty years. Keeping track of students’ work, storing these collections, evaluating them, and using them to drive instruction has had its ups and downs in literacy education. Online and digital portfolios have been used with similar outcomes in elementary, high school, and college settings. The biggest challenge for portfolio advocates is whether to apply normative or criterion-referenced standards for evaluating the contents of students’ portfolios by creating rubrics or other grading processes, or allowing individual students to use portfolios to document and demonstrate their learning and development over time. The second approach, a learner-referenced approach, has not been widespread in schools since so many assessment programs are designed to compare children to other children or schools to other schools. Portfolios are collections of one’s work designe...

We come to know those things we enjoy and spend time doing with greater efficiency and speed than those things we despise and those things to which we pay little attention. It's just that simple sometimes. Being afraid to engage with or consider the potential impact web-based and digital resources could have on our teaching ensures we won’t be successful in the digital age. People may still call for a back to basics focus for our curriculum, but we must realize that in the digital age the basics have changed dramatically. To help teachers move forward into the digital age, they need to be given time to explore a wide range of digital resources, time to talk with other teachers about how they have been using these resources in their classrooms, time to play around with them, provide time for their students to play around with them, and visualize new ways to use these resources in the reading workshop. Teachers can’t just read about web-based and digital resources, they have to begin...