Background about Juli Kendall
and the Writing/Reading Workshop

A MiddleWeb Listserv Project

Juli Kendall has completed her third year as co-moderator of our Writing/Reading discussion group. Here's some background about Juli and her Reading/Writing Workshop activities in the Long Beach (CA) Unified School District. Visit our Reading/Writing Workshop Project index page for more links to this ongoing collaboration among members of the MiddleWeb Listserv and other interested teachers. And browse Juli's weekly journal from her Workshop classrooms.

I live in Long Beach, California. "Iowa by the sea" is how it was affectionately referred to for many years. Even though we have lots of coastline, we have no surf. This is because the Navy installed a breakwater during World War II. So, many of our beaches are sadly empty even on hot summer days.

Of the 30 years I have been teaching, the last 17 years I have worked in Long Beach. While our district motto is "Teach by the beach," the reality is that we are a large urban school district. Long Beach students and their families speak over 50 different languages. Faced with California's high stakes assessment program, we are challenged to keep our focus on helping all students achieve proficiency on Content Standards. All content areas emphasize literacy.

Some background about myself

I began teaching in an elementary school in San Diego. My BA is in English, and my master's degree is in Multicultural Education. I also have a Bilingual Specialist Credential in Spanish. Along the way to middle school, I taught in a variety of positions (Special Education, Preschool, Spanish Bilingual Education, Title VII Resource Teacher for Khmer/Cambodian Students, and Language Arts Specialist).

Perhaps the unifying thread in my career is English Language Learners. I am trained in Reading Recovery and in Descubriendo La Lectura, the reconstruction of Reading Recovery in Spanish. I have extensive training and experience teaching reading to students whose first language is Spanish as well as students whose first language is Khmer (Cambodian). This is what I have done the most, and this is what I love the best. "Do what you love; love what you do."

For six years I taught reading and writing in a centers-based program in middle school. As English Language Development and Reading Department Chair, I participated in writing District Content Standards and developing performance assessments that measure students' proficiency. I also had the opportunity to be a Literacy Standards Coach providing on-going staff development in reading strategies, collaborating with other teachers and assisting teachers in looking at student work.
As a result of working in middle school, I am much more self-reflective. Looking at students' work has become the driving force behind my instruction. It is the kids who show us what they need and where we need to go next. "Follow the child."

Working with struggling readers and writers

Each year adds new opportunities to my job. I currently work in 5th grade as a Literacy Specialist implementing Reading and Writing Workshop at Whittier School. We focus on students who were held back from 6th grade, or are in danger of being held back. These students have not yet passed the end of 4th grade level reading benchmarks for fiction and non-fiction text. That's a requirement for moving to middle school in our district. I'll be working on strengthening their writing skills, giving them strategies for improving their reading comprehension and providing in-class support for teachers. As a result of our state's new standards based assessment in science, I'll also focus on content literacy by integrating science into literacy instruction.

At Whittier, 100% of the students receive free lunch and 90% are English Language Learners, primarily Khmer speaking (Cambodian) and Spanish speaking students. Because of the high numbers of students in this attendance area, many are bused to other schools. To accommodate as many students as possible, the school operates on a year-round schedule with five tracks. Our scores on standardized tests in reading, language, and math continue to improve.

The staff consists of a highly trained and enthusiastic group of primarily new teachers (five years or less in teaching). They are deeply committed to providing the best educational opportunities for their students. There are several Khmer teachers who had experience teaching in Cambodia and have provided mentoring and invaluable assistance to the newer teachers. I have learned from them that what we do in education is "for the Children."

Here's the big picture

Students who do not achieve at least 4th or 5th grade level reading proficiency can actually lose ground as they move into middle school.

There is a reading level below which the child may lose his skill when he moves out into the community rather than maintain it. It falls somewhere around the average 10- to 11-year-old achievement level. If our reading skill is not sufficient for us to practice it every day by reading the paper or notices or instructions, then we seem to lose some of the skill in much the same way as we lose a foreign language which we no longer speak.
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-- Marie Clay, An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement, 1993, p. 13

As a result of their work with students and their analysis of student data in writing and reading, Whittier has decided to make an all-out effort to improve their students' writing achievement, reading comprehension and use of higher level strategies on text.

Here's how the staff got to this point. They started by reading Mosaic of Thought. Then they had regular book study groups with Strategies That Work, as well as Guiding Readers and Writers, 3rd-6th Grades. This led them to investigate the concept s of Writing Workshop and Reading Workshop. They heard Lucy Calkins speak and read her books, The Art of Teaching Writing and The Art of Teaching Reading. In July 2001, a team of teachers and the principal attended the 8th Summer Reading and Writing Institute at Columbia Teacher's College in New York City.

During the last two school years, Whittier School provided staff development in Writing Workshop for all teachers. Each year, Mark Hardy, a trainer from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, lead three separate one week staff trainings during October, January and April. (See Reading Workshop Journal # 8, "The Critical Connection between Reading and Writing.") Working in classrooms, he focused on helping teachers launch Writing Workshop, teach minilessons, confer with students, teach a genre study and create grade level curricular calendars (units of study) for Writing Workshop. After his lessons, teachers had the opportunity to meet with him by grade level, ask questions and debrief the classroom observations. Between visits, staff worked together to look at student writing and make teaching decisions. During the coming year, Mark will continue to work with us as a Writing Workshop trainer.

The staff recognizes that even though their school is making progress they need to address the literacy needs of students going on to middle school. As a result, they have decided to incorporate inquiry based learning, content literacy, and Writing Workshop in their classroom instruction.

Some of the things we will be working on in the first month:

1. Assessments of students -- running records, writing samples, developmental spelling levels (Donald Bear, Words Their Way), "listening" to students talk about their writing and reading

2. Curriculum mapping - (Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Mapping the Big Picture) and curricular calendars

3. Reading Fluency and a Reading Fluency Rubric/Scoring Guide -
"Reading Fluency," Susan K. Strecker, The California Reader, Vol. 34, No. 3, Spring 2001.

4. Independent Reading and an Independent Reading Rubric - The Art of Teaching Reading, Lucy Calkins, pg. 78. Download the Independent Reading Rubric (PDF file)

5. Launching of Writing Workshop

6. Learning how to read informational texts

This is where the journey begins!


READ this 1997 story about Juli Kendall's ESL classroom.

Back to the Reader Workshop Index Page

Go to Juli Kendall's journal index

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