Writer's Workshop and Book Choice

The biggest takeaway from the readings and in class discussion with Ms. Eckburg was plan and you will succeed.  If there's one major point that was driven home it's that planning is an absolute essential to making the workshop a good use of time in the classroom.  When done successfully, writing workshops can lead students to meaningful creation and huge advancements in writing abilities.  Planning plays an essential role at every level.  Cris Tovani talks about the necessity for planning the actual workshops themselves in order to keep students on target and direct learning in meaningful ways.  Ms. Eckburg reinforced that it not only took significant planning throughout, but also a very organized approach to documentation in addition to clear and well-adhered to procedures. 

The other big takeaway is culture.  Culture is an absolute necessity to success in writer's workshops.  First, the classroom culture must respect reading and writing, valuing it as a pathway to meaningful life experiences.  Second, students must respect one another and the teacher, understanding that sharing writing and providing feedback to one another is an extremely sensitive and vulnerable experience and that treating peers and their writing with a fair amount of reverence is necessary to carry such a weighty responsibility.  Ultimately, fostering this culture means knowing your students and letting them know you.  This kind of culture can only be built out of a reciprocally respectful and trusting relationship.

One of the most interesting pieces for me to read was the article about book choice from the New York Times.  I really believe strongly in book choice, however, I think it's unlikely that many of us will start out jobs in high schools where we will be given limitless freedom to choose the texts we assign our students.  I have been placed for student teaching recently and already my cooperating teacher has emphasized that at no time in her 10 year career in teaching has she been given a choice of what to teach her students outside of occasional supplemental or short texts.  It seems to me that a great deal of the success that Ms. Eckburg has in her classroom getting her students to read a great deal of texts has to do with her freedom to allow the students to read whatever they choose.  A big goal for me once I have my own classroom will be to find a healthy balance of student choice reading along with required texts.  I believe strongly that an incorporation of student directed reading is an important element to cultivating a lifelong love of reading.