Doug,

The first bit of the title is a back end of a quote from Albert Einstein– I added the question mark. And it’s funny you should mention Nancie Atwell, since my last post on reading workshop here roused her to leave a personal, supportive, and critical comment on my blog a few weeks ago. Surprised, delighted, and scared the hell out of me. It left me with– well– more questions. They center, as always, around how workshop should and must be modified for the diverse needs of kids in public schools.

The homework component is a major concern for me, which is why I asked you about it in our latest round of emails– and thank you for putting forth your answer here. Me, I continue to be thoroughly stuck.

You know from reading my blog that I am an intrinsic motivation freak, and as such, I get the willies from commanding my kids to do anything– even things I legitimately must encourage, such as speaking respectfully to one another, or choosing independent books that are not walks in the proverbial park (or mall). This is the heart of the matter. As you so beautifully demonstrate, the aim of reading workshop is to help kids find the joy of reading– so making homework an extrinsically imposed requirement is a problem.

Or is it?

Let me lay out my observations, and tell me what you think.

a) By 7th grade, my kids are soaked in the extrinsic behaviorism of school– such that when I presented workshop to them in the first quarter, a disturbing proportion of them did not take it seriously precisely because it did not have a patrolled home reading requirement. Even if kids were enjoying their self-selected books in class, these students still did little to no reading at all outside of the classroom. “I’m too busy,” was the common response. (This is middle school code for, “If there isn’t a grade attached, it’s less important than my soccer game.”) It was only when I switched the schedule around to include a daily page check of 30 minutes a night that the students finally started to complete books at a pace appropriate for their abilities– and yes, via my conferences and their reading journals, I know the vast majority of them are actually reading those books. I am getting other substantial anecdotal evidence that they are reading more, and enjoying reading more, than they ever have in their lives.

b) I’ve administered the outside reading with as light a touch as possible. (I have to. Even if I were a behaviorist, I’ve blogged on Marzano’s research-based homework guidelines so publicly that I’d be a hypocrite to do it any other way.) It’s daily, but only for 30 minutes, and under any circumstances the child deems appropriate (at the dentist, on the bus– you know, the way real people read.) It’s graded, but only on completion. “Completion” means the most individualized, loose, and generous sense of “completion” as possible. And so on.

c) I meet my middle school kids so little– for a very rare maximum of 80 minutes of in-class reading time per week– that even with the most focused, flow-y, artful reading workshop in the world, I fear my kids are still not meeting the quantifiable amounts of pure sit-down reading practice in school that they require to improve. (See Stephen Krashen on this here.)

This is a structural problem, not a pedagogical one– but since I have little to no control over structural answers, it requires a pedagogical one from me. So far, the only thing I can come up with is homework.

But I still feel like the book police. Kids still greet the page check with that mix of apprehension and fear that haunts me at night. I still find myself hounding, calling home, expressing concern or disappointment that makes a kid’s face fall. It stinks.

So what do I do? Any thoughts?

Yours,

Dina

Attribution: Scott Ableman

Dear Doug,

Finally– in so, so many ways. First “finally”: finally climbing out of the thicket of familial and school challenges to get back to blogging in general. Second “finally”: finally answering your first post here, Doug, and once again, thank you for agreeing to this exciting joint venture. Third “finally”: I think it speaks to the inherent quality of the workshop model that even with the craziness of the last few weeks going on, I finally feel like I am doing something worthwhile with my students’ precious time.

Precious, as you know, because our classrooms are not the delightful white and yolk cradled so carefully by Nancie Atwell’s own school, where she has designed the schedule around the model, and not vice-versa. Consider, for example, that she sees her students– no more than nineteen– for at least 90 minutes every single day for language arts instruction. Consider also something that I just learned from our literacy coach, who studied with Nancie in 2008: kids have Friday, Saturday, AND Sunday to complete substantial reading and writing at home. Consider also that although clearly the Center for Teaching and Learning does not seek out gifted students or discriminate financially, its population still self-selects for involvement, commitment, and “standard” students by a) being a private school that has a detailed application process; b) not having the financial means to address special needs, as they themselves state on their website; and c) requiring substantial parental involvement from the get-go.

So, then– precious, because we see our kids for so much less time. Precious, because our kids leave our rooms and enter a swift, unforgiving current of school culture to the very contrary of the principles we espouse through workshop. Precious, because our kids are so massively diverse in their needs, and so large in their numbers, and so often unsupported even at home.

And this, I would argue, is precisely why workshop is so important in the public schools. A public school does not make workshop unfathomable and unworkable. It makes itself the place where an oasis of personal choice, differentiation, meaningful instruction, and physical comfort like workshop is needed the most of all.

We’re five weeks into the model now, and I had my 100+ students rate themselves on a rubric to assess how successful they felt at the work. I reviewed each rubric with the student, and made adjustments to their self-assigned percentages in conference with them where necessary. I could count on one hand the times I did this. No student rated themselves below a 70% on one or more of the rubric elements, and those students were only a handful.

And I AGREE with them, Doug! They *are* silently sinking into their self-chosen books. They *are* producing 3-5 pages of draft on personally meaningful topics every week. They *are* engaging in daily, lively discussions of poetry. My high-needs IEP kids are working up to snuff. My ESL and former ESL students are indistinguishable from their peers.

Now, all that being said, we are now jumping into the far more instructional (versus procedural) form of workshop, and things may be very different in another five weeks. But I don’t think so. And here’s why: because workshop has let these kids know that their choices matter; that their voices mean something; and that workshop curriculum which is more arbitrarily taught still has a rationale.

In otherwords: workshop has bought their trust. And once you have the kids’ trust, I am discovering you can do nearly anything you like with them.

Could your next post reflect on how workshop and trust intersect in your classroom?

I’d also like to hear about the top major challenge you’ve got going. Actually, maybe we could make this a regular part of our posts back and forth: the workshop Challenge Du Jour. What do you think?

Yours,

Dina