Reading Workshop

In her seminal book In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning, Nancie Atwell made the case that students need but seldom experience authentic reading in traditional English curriculum. She explains the myth of the good reader as a set of characteristics that teachers often teach their students about reading, without realizing it. According to Atwell, some of the powerful lessons that teachers inadvertently teach about reading include:

#6 "student readers aren't smart enough to select their own texts"
#14 "rereading a book is cheating; so are skimming, skipping, and looking ahead"
#17 "teachers talk a lot about literature, but teachers don't read"

Her list includes a total of 21 "lessons". What these lessons show us as teachers, is that students need authentic reading instruction. In part, Atwell's solution to this problem has been the reading workshop, which is a space where students self select the books that they read.

Another teacher, Lorrie McNeill attended a workshop lead by Atwell, and reconfigured her classroom based in the reading workshop approach. Read the New York Times article, A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like for more one McNeill's approach to the reading workshop.

One of the first steps in implementing an effective reading workshop is to be sure that your students have access to a variety of engaging, and quality literature. One of the steps that I am taking in my classroom, is to build and organize a classroom library. I have recently downloaded an application called "Booksource's Classroom Organizer" in order to create an easy environment for managing, checking out, and returning classroom books. So far, the app is very useful.