Originally published September 7, 2015. Lesley Roessing has been an invaluable resource for Ethical ELA, and her contributions on the Facebook page Teaching Teens and its book groups are just priceless. Thank you, Lesley.
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In Losing the Fear of Sharing Control: Starting a Reading Workshop, Lesley Roessing candidly talks about “the control issue” of teaching and how she developed a reading workshop in her middle school classroom to share control. She writes,
First of all, where did I get this idea that I needed to control all aspects of my classroom, especially reading, afraid that students would not learn what they needed, that the product would not remain sacred? Through writing workshops, I had somewhat successfully turned over responsibility of writing to the students. But reading was a different matter.
This 2007 piece is Roessing’s story of shifting her practice toward a reader-centered classroom, sharing control of what students read, where they read, and why. Now in a university position and working with pre-service teachers, Roessing reflects on the reading workshop model and suggests it offers today’s students two very important experiences: time and choice.
An Epilogue by Lesley Roessing
I continued teaching in this way until I left the classroom to teach at a university. I followed this yearly format—whole class shared short stories and a novel moving to book clubs, and then to individual self-selected reading. Sometimes we fit in two book club cycles and sometimes we acted out a play or two, but basically we followed the same release-of-responsibility format throughout the year.
Each reading workshop began with a read-aloud of a picture book, poem, or novel excerpt (or an article if we were reading nonfiction) that I merged into a 15-minute focus lesson—a procedure lesson, a strategy lesson, a skill lesson, or a literary content lesson. The focus lesson was always taught in a gradual release of responsibility manner, ending with an invitation to apply the lesson, “if appropriate,” to workshop reading. During our 25-minutes of reading, I held small group lessons or one-to-one conferences, grateful for that personal teaching time. And then we shared our reading and our use of the focus lesson.
I began to think of myself as a coach. Coaches do not lecture for an hour, using PowerPoints and notetaking, and then send their players home to practice alone for Friday’s game. Coaches explain and demonstrate a technique or strategy, have their players try it, and then send them onto the field to practice, walking around, supervising, observing, instructing, and re-teaching when needed. The game becomes the formative assessment as to what to “teach” the next week.
I did expand our repertoire of before, during, and after-reading responses and created scaffolded response lessons, published as The Write to Read: Response Journals that Increase Comprehension (Corwin Press, 2009). I found that response took my students deeper into the text without ruining the text with leading questions; reading student journals each week was tantamount to holding personal conferences with individual students. Through their journals, I could follow what and how each reader was reading and have personal “conversations” with each.
Following the same format in writing workshop, students fell into a routine, were cognizant of expectations, even though each day was different enough to keep their interest. And I had 180 lessons I could teach, one each day.
Reading workshop is not only an effective way to teach but gives kids two important things they no longer have—time and choice. Many of our students are overextended with sports and music and dance lessons and jobs or are unsupervised or living in chaos. Workshop gives readers time to read in optimal circumstances, time to put into practice what they have learned, time in a quiet, safe, collegial, supervised, supportive space. In this way workshop builds community as the class becomes a community of readers. When teachers give time to read, they are letting students know that reading matters.
And choice is the strongest motivator there is, especially for adolescents who feel like they have very little choice in their lives. When teachers give students choice, they are letting them know that they matter.
Lesley Roessing was a high school and middle level teacher in Pennsylvania for over 20 years before packing up, moving south, and becoming Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project and Lecturer in the College of Education of Armstrong State University, Savannah, Georgia. She has written four books for educators and students: The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension (Corwin Press, 2009); No More “Us” and “Them”: Classroom Lessons & Activities to Promote Peer Respect (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); a picture and song book, Comma Quest: The Rules They Followed; The Sentences They Saved (Discover Writing, 2013), and Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically & Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).