Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading Workshop Journal
A MiddleWeb Listserv Project
Self-selected members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List are joining
together to explore the Reading Workshop and other ideas about supporting
young adolescent readers. Juli Kendall, a reading teacher/coach in Long
Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Juli is also keeping
a weekly journal of her own Reading Workshop initiative. Find out more about
our project at our Reading Workshop homepage.
You'll find Juli's background article here.
Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin
to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
Week #8
The Critical Connection
Between Reading and Writing
If I have read a lot of it, it lives inside of me. If it lives
inside of me, then I can write it.
--Mark Hardy
Teachers College Reading and Writing Project
This week I did something a little different. Our school brought in
a trainer from the Columbia University Teachers College Reading
and Writing Project to work with our entire staff on Writing Workshop.
But even though we were talking about writing, I spent the whole week thinking
about our Reading Workshop and the connections we are seeing between reading
and writing.
The schedule was designed to allow for Talk Time (grade- level or content
area teachers talking with the trainer) and Teach Time (grade -level or
content area teachers watching our trainer teach). Since I was fortunate
enough to be able to attend all the sessions, I decided to take notes on
my laptop. This provided us with a unique opportunity to record (script)
the demonstration lessons that he did as he worked in the same classrooms
overtime (for 2-4 days). While we also have a record of the teacher conversations,
it is the script of the classroom lessons that is most helpful.
These scripts of his lessons show us how he begins implementation in different
ways and in different classrooms. They give us the language he uses as he
explains things and what he says to encourage students to write in different
genres. These scripts also show us how he adapts what he does over time
based on the students' work and his conferences with them. They lay out
his individual and group conferences, so we now have an idea of what that
looks like at our school, in our classrooms and with our kids.
What was remarkable was how much he talked about reading. He spoke often
about The Art of Fiction, a book by novelist John Gardner, and what
he says about reading.
It creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in
the mind. We read a few words at the beginning of the book or the particular
story and suddenly we find ourselves seeing not words on a page but a train
moving through Russia, an old Italian crying, or a farmhouse battered by
rain. We read on - dream on - not passively but actively, worrying about
the choices the characters have to make, listening in panic for some sound
behind the fictional door, exalting in characters' successes, bemoaning
their failures. In great fiction, the dream engages us heart and soul; we
not only respond to imaginary things-sights, sounds, smells - as though
they were real, we respond to fictional problems as though they were real:
we sympathize, think and judge.
--John Gardner, The
Art of Fiction, 1983
Our students seem to be making the connection
With so much quality time to think and process, I found myself recalling
the good progress in writing our Reading Workshop students have shown. Their
writing has more volume, better sentence structure, and more of the paragraphs,
introductions and conclusions that middle school teachers expect. Interestingly,
our focus with them has been almost entirely on Reading. We are working
with them on building reading stamina, getting them to read a lot of easy
books with understanding at school and at home, and helping them learn as
much as possible about what a "Just Right" book is for each of
them. We have definitely been focusing on Reading with them, and yet they
show improvement in their writing.
I can only conclude that it is the volume of reading they have been doing
that has helped our kids to put more "understandings" in their
writing. On a daily basis, they have been participating in easy Read Alouds
plus 30 minutes of Independent Reading and an additional 15 minutes of Partner
Reading with lots of talking about what they are reading.
If reading is all about understanding what the writer is saying,
then that must be a part of why they can better put more understandings
for readers into their own writing. They have a better understanding
of "what writing is," based on the different kinds of genres they
are reading.
As a result of this week, I cannot speak strongly enough about the power
of this kind of professional development. We learned so much from our time
with him as he gave us a window into what Writing Workshop could look like
in our school. My hope is that he learned from us, as well, about the power
of primary language support (Preview-Review Method)
for beginning English Language Learners and how teachers from different
cultures, speaking many different languages, can work together for the academic
achievement of all students.
See Juli's November curriculum map.
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Read Juli's previous journal entry
Read Juli's backgrounder about her work
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