Reading Workshop

Whether I was helping children choose books from the classroom library, facilitating a literature study group, demonstrating reading strategies to a small group of readers or offering advice in a one-to-one reading conference, I was teaching children how to make sense of what they were reading. I wasn’t necessarily standing in front of the classroom when I did it, but I was teaching reading. Not a day went by in my years of teaching where I didn’t teach a specific lesson, to some particular readers, explicitly and directly. As an intermediate grade classroom teacher, I taught reading everyday, it just didn’t always look like the traditional instruction we have come to associate with the teaching of reading. During my reading workshop, I allocated approximately twenty-five percent (25%) of the total workshop time to reading lessons, a time when I stood in front of my students demonstrating many of the comprehension practices and strategies that proficient readers utilize. The remaining ...

Some implications for instruction from my book on classroom talk: Students make more interpretive moves when teachers demonstrate such moves in advance. In other words, we learn from the company we keep. If we want students to talk about books in particular ways, we have to show them this preferred way of talking and support their efforts as they move in this direction. If we want students to construct sophisticated interpretations, we need to construct more sophisticated interpretations during our discussions, and explain our interpretive processes so students may internalize them as they construct their own interpretations. The traditional interaction pattern (IRE) does not support students’ thinking. Our discussions should look more like (I-R-R-R-R), where an initiating move by the teacher is followed by a series, or chaining, of students’ responses. Our discussions should not be back-and-forth ping pong matches. We need to...