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 #38
Final Reflections as
We Do the Sixth Grade Dance
We're doing the 6th grade dance.
And if you wonder what that means, I'll be delighted to tell you. Leti was
one of the last to pass her benchmark reading assessments to go on to 6th
grade. By that time, rituals had become established, and as she and the
classroom teacher did a jig. Erika exclaimed, "Look, they're doing
the 6th grade dance!"
In class, on the playground and at home, we're all dancing. When someone
asks us what we're doing, we say, "We're doing the 6th grade dance."
No more, no less. Everyone understands.
Our kids are dancing and they can hold their heads high. One of the most
likable, distinctive and ambitious Reading Workshops that I have taught
ends its run on "reading with understanding" -- with this
obligatory knotting-loose-ends finale that mingles schmaltz with a sense
of humor.
Life gets rather ugly at times, but at least happy endings are still possible
in our Reading Workshop.
There are those who would laugh at the mention of dancing and rigor in the
same breath. But that's been the objective of our Reading Workshop: to provide
an engaging, rigorous learning environment that teaches each student at
their appropriate reading level and moves their learning along quickly promoting
high standards for all. What a mouthful!
Backwards and Forwards
Now for a look back at our year. Actually it's "Back to the Future."
Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, in their book, The Understanding by Design
Handbook, discuss the process of "backward design."
We believe that the most effective curricular designs are backward.
Backward design may be thought of as purposeful task analysis: Given a task
to be accomplished, how does one get there? Or one might call it planned
coaching: What kinds of lessons and practices are needed to master key performances?
The approach to curricular design we recommend is logically forward and
common-sensical, but backward by conventional habits, whereby many teachers
typically begin with textbooks, favored lessons, and time-honored activities
rather than deriving them from targeted goals or standards. We are advocating
the reverse: One starts with the end-the desired results (goals or standards)-and
then derives the curriculum based on the evidence of learning (obtained
through assessments) called for by the goals and standards. (p. 37)
By looking back at where we've been and how we arrived at this point, I
hope to make a plan for the future that can take us farther next year and
allow us, in the end, to use the "backward design process." That's
what I'll be working on over the summer.
For now, I'm reflecting with the help of some thought-provoking questions.
So, how did my expectations play out?
I expected that using the Reading Workshop model would encourage students
not just to improve their reading but also the understandings they gain
through reading. This was the case. But even more than that, many of them
grew to love reading. A testament, I believe, to learning how to choose
Just Right books and discovering that reading can be fun, if you get to
read about things in which you are interested, at least some of the time.
Choice reigned supreme! (Read Journal #37 to see what they thought about
Reading Workshop.)
What about my perspective on "good practice" was confirmed
by this project?
Since the nature of Reading Workshop is often that each student is reading
something different and responding in a unique way, "differentiated
instruction" is the natural result. In our Reading Workshop, we collaborated
to differentiate instruction for all of our students whose unique experiences
and backgrounds gave them special consideration in our planning. It worked!
Carol Ann Tomlinson discusses how this works in "What is a differentiated
classroom?" from Chapter One of her book, The Differentiated Classroom:
Responding to the Needs of All Learners.
In differentiated classrooms, teachers provide specific ways
for each individual to learn as deeply as possible and as quickly as possible,
without assuming one student's road map for learning is identical to anyone
else's. These teachers believe that students should be held to high standards.
They work diligently to ensure that struggling, advanced, and in-between
students think and work harder than they meant to; achieve more than they
thought they could; and come to believe that learning involves effort, risk,
and personal triumph. These teachers also work to ensure that each student
consistently experiences the reality that success is likely to follow hard
work. You might say these teachers are students of their students.
What ideas failed to pan out, needed to be set aside, revised....
I introduced Reading Notebooks and used them regularly, at first. However,
after March, I failed to go back to them on a consistent basis. This needs
to be revised for next year. I'm using ideas from Guiding Readers and
Writers by Fontas and Pinnell to rethink how I can incorporate them
so that they are more beneficial to the students.
Teaching "Inference" (Journal #29) taught
me big lessons in how to "follow the students." The books I chose
didn't work for them, and I had to set them aside and move to easier text
and do much more of it. Next year, I'll start with the George and Martha
series, and then do Fables by Arnold Lobel and, ultimately, move
on to books by Chris Van Allsburg and David Wiesner where the use of inference
is subtler.
Also, our Reading Portfolios need to be expanded to include the teaching
of self-assessment strategies to "help students achieve independence"
as readers. (Journal #35)
What were the big a-ha moments?
Perhaps the biggest change in my instruction this year has to do with the
use of classroom conversations to improve kids understanding of what they
are reading. CELA and the research they have done in this area had a huge
impact on my teaching. (Journal #16)
As I watched our students begin to manage these literary conversations,
I was filled with awe. It really does make a long-term difference for kids.
The best example I saw was in the peer tutoring that we began at the end
of May. Kids helping kids by using the language of literary discourse that
they had learned in class. Now that's an a-ha moment!
All year long, I was fascinated by the connections I saw between Reading
and Writing. (Journal #8) Although we had not started
to implement Writing Workshop yet, after just a month of Reading Workshop
there was striking progress evident in the kids writing. It seemed as though
the volume of text they were reading during Read Aloud, Shared Reading,
Independent Reading, Partner Reading, Books on Tape and Reading at Home
helped them become better writers.
Additionally, the concept of immersion in a genre for Writing Workshop struck
me as "the way to writing is through reading." For several weeks
before we asked students to write in a particular genre, such as nonfiction,
we immersed students in the genre by reading and discussing numerous nonfiction
books and articles. This had a big impact on their reading and their ability
to write in the genre when it was assigned.
Personally, as I wrote this Journal, I discovered the importance of reading
when you are doing writing. It's like Mark Hardy, our trainer from Columbia
Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, said when he paraphrased John
Gardner, "If I have read a lot of it, it lives inside of me. If it
lives inside of me, then I can write it." A-ha!
What would I do differently next year? What would the ideal month-by-month
curriculum map look like?
At the end of this year when I reviewed the curriculum
maps, I found very little that I would add. However, I want to clean
up the curriculum maps and take out some mini-lessons which I never had
time to teach or that didn't work. Replacing books that weren't available
with other titles is also a priority.
The teaching of "Making Connections" (Journal #11)
and using Think Alouds (Journal #30) both need to
start sooner. I've looked at the curriculum map for September, and it's
all about getting ready to do Reading Workshop. I certainly don't want to
shortchange that. So, it will take some rethinking. "Teach for Independence"
keeps running through my head.
Unbelievably, vocabulary never made it onto the curriculum maps. Although
it was a focus of my instruction and I wrote two journals (Journals #13
and #26) about learning new words, vocabulary wasn't
anywhere on the maps when I went back recently and checked. Oops!
Then there is the important question about where to fit in the "Guiding
Questions" from CELA's Improving
Literary Understanding Through Classroom Conversation. This year I began
using them in January, next year I want to build them in much sooner.
Finally, the connections between Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop need
to be clearer for our students. I think there is a way to build on the reciprocal
gains between reading and writing and maximize this instruction for our
kids. This will take some time to think through. Oh well, I guess you could
say, "Confession is good for the soul."
Our moral purpose
In the "Preface" to Change Forces, the Sequel, Michael
Fullan describes, strange as it may seem, how I feel about what happened
in our Reading Workshop this year.
We will see that the concept of moral purpose -- improvements
designed to make a difference in the lives of students -- is not as straightforward
as it seems. We will unlock the black box of why collaborative cultures
really work, and what it takes to sustain them. We will see that break-throughs
occur when we begin to think of conflict, diversity and resistance as positive,
absolutely essential forces for success. We will probe deeply into the role
of knowledge inside learning organizations, as well as knowledge and outside
connections. We will learn from chaos and complexity theory, and evolutionary
theory that learning occurs on the edge of chaos, where a delicate balance
must be maintained between too much and too little structure.
The concept of moral purpose -- "improvements designed to make a difference
in the lives of students" -- this is what I hoped for from our Reading
Workshop this year. For many of our students that is the case. It made a
difference in their lives. But for a few of them this instructional setting
did not get them as far as I had hoped. They made progress but not enough
to meet the absolute standard. That's my goal for next year, to teach so
that everyone can meet that "standard."
And now this year is ending, and our Reading Workshop is coming to a close.
Earlier, using a paraphrased story from Loren Eiseley, I wrote about "Making
a Difference" for students in Reading Workshop (Journal #18).
This selection from Eiseley's original story "The Star Thrower"
(The Unexpected Universe, 1964) seems appropriate for the end of
our journey.
I picked up a star whose tube feet ventured timidly among my
fingers while, like a true star, it cried soundlessly for life. I saw it
with an unaccustomed clarity and cast far out. With it, I flung myself as
forfeit, for the first time, into some unknown dimension of existence. From
Darwin's tangled bank of unceasing struggle, selfishness, and death, had
arisen, incomprehensibly, the thrower who loved not man, but life. It was
the subtle cleft in nature before which biological thinking had faltered.
We had reached the last shore of an invisible island -- yet strangely, also
a shore that the primitives had always known. They had sensed intuitively
that man cannot exist spiritually without life, his brother, even if he
slays.
Somewhere, my thought persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks,
because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat.
[Editor's note: Juli will return in the fall with a new journal,
focused on her work with struggling writers, and will also continue to share
new learnings from her Reading Workshop experience.]
Read Juli's graduation update!
Read Juli's previous journal entry
Read Juli's backgrounder about her work
Back to Juli's journal index
Back to the Reader Workshop Index Page