Sometime last summer, I decided to set my sophomore English students free.
Well, that’s not entirely true–it started earlier than that. Heather Hurst put the thought in my head last year, when I got to read her dissertation based on research in my classroom and it blew my mind a little bit. She had already used a workshop model back when she was a classroom teacher, which made it seem less impossible to me.
And then I spent a couple of weeks communing with Nancie Atwell’s “In The MIddle,” which, as Lehmann put it to me sometime this fall, is the book that everybody reads in graduate school, thinks it has great ideas, and then shelves it in favor of a more traditional approach.
That was me for five whole years. I was exactly like Atwell herself, before she transitioned into the workshop model. And her assessment of that life rang true to me: “I didn’t learn in my classroom. I tended my creation.”
So, after a lot of hard thinking (like, the furrowed-brow-this-hurts-my-brain kind) and sketching out of routines based on the “In the Middle” model, I decided to take the plunge. On the first day of class, I told my sophomores:
This is going to be a grand experiment that we embark on together.
Here are the next four things I told them:
- This year, you will read what inspires you and write about what moves you.
- We (Ms. Pahomov, Mr. Kolouch, and your Student Assistant Teacher) are here to instruct and support…
- …But you are in charge of your own learning and improving as a writer and reader.
- Constant Check-ins = more feedback and help when you are learning, instead of when the project’s done.
Of course, I meant to blog our progress starting in September… but now, in January, I’m happy to report that we are still living in (and loving) reading writing workshop.
If you had told me even two years ago that I would be doing this, I would have unequivocally responded: you are crazy. And yet, here we are. Students participate in independent reading full time. They contribute pieces of writing to their portfolio each quarter, and they decide what genres and topics to tackle. I get to give more individualized, formative feedback that students actually use. More than ever before, I can say that I really know my kids.
Interested in learning more?
A whole group of us will be talking about this “grand experiment” during our EduCon Session this coming Sunday, January 26th at 10:30 AM Eastern. We encourage you to join us in person, if you are attending live, or via the live stream that will go out via the website.
Additionally, we would love to hear what your particular questions or areas of interest are for our presentation. Here are two questions we plan on addressing so far:
- How do you scale this model for a public school classroom of 30+ students, and an overall grading load of 120+ students? (The workshop model is often seen as viable only in a smaller private-school setting.)
- How do you blend digital and analog tools to make the model more meaningful and efficient for students? (The most recent edition of Atwell’s book is from 1998, so reference to technology is minimal–I think there’s a mention of having students word process their final drafts.)
Feel free to send us your thoughts in advance, via this site or the EduCon write up. Or just show up and join in the conversation!
Class Notes 
I love the concept but wonder how I could do this at my level, 5th grade? Or is this a concept really only applicable to older students?
Actually, Nancie Atwell first wrote the book about teaching 7/8 graders, so people often have the opposite reaction — that it can’t be carried up to high school. I think that, as long as you can cultivate some spark of authentic interest in writing and reading in your students, then you can make this happen.
(If you can’t cultivate that spark at all, well, you have a bigger problem to deal with.)