How do you feel your Readers' Workshop is going? When I employed this pedagogical approach in my classroom, I thought it was the cat's meow. I had trained at Lesley University in Cambridge Massachusetts as a Literacy Coordinator and I implemented the program in an inner-city public school. It seemed like such a great idea to allow all students to choose their reading. It seemed like the answer to a host of reading difficulties faced by teachers. Finally, our students would love reading because they could choose to read what interested them!
Ask yourself these questions
Then came the reality of the classroom. Let's explore the drawbacks of this approach.
Independent reading: What are your students choosing to read?
Individual conferencing: What are you actually teaching them?
Guided reading: Are you teaching every student every day?
Sharing: What are the kids getting out of it if they're all reading something different?
My experience
My experience with Readers' Workshop in my third, fourth, and fifth-grade classes was unsatisfactory. I took more training, including the CAFE approach from Iowa State University, (which stands for Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanding vocabulary.) I also got certified in SEI (Sheltered English Immersion.) The latter provided the most effective teaching strategies. Combining my years of experience with what I had been learning and reading, I devised five daily steps to foster reading comprehension and to teach every student every day.
Start with one interesting text
The fundamental premise of my approach is that all students are reading the same text. This allows teachers to teach more effectively, enables students to feel connected to one another in their learning, allows students to work in groups, makes student sharing more meaningful, and most importantly, allows teachers to instruct all students every single day.
These are the five steps:
Teach vocabulary pertaining to the text first.
Implement various levels of support, according to need, for students to read a text.
Give students an opportunity to talk about what they just read.
Analyze the text with the students, focusing on one teaching point per day. Again, provide various levels of support according to various student needs.
Invite students to share their work with the whole class, or in small groups, or with a partner.
More details and free download
For more details on implementing each of these five steps, I have detailed them in another blog post here.
There's also a free download on my website called Reading Comprehension Plan. It has everything you need to support and enhance your students' understanding and growth.
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