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Project
#6 September,
1997
This report is given as a story, or rather a series of stories. They tell about a class of northern middle years students as they journeyed through reading and writing in one school year, 1994-95. Each story indicates how the students' perceptions of reading and writing changed as each was exposed to a process approach to reading and writing. The stories are told by the teacher and woven together with the changes that they indicate in the students are the changes that also occurred in the teacher. In order to identify the changes in student's perceptions, the teacher-researcher conducted three personal interviews with eight primary research participants over the year. The input of their parents was also sought through two informal interviews and a more formal interview at year's end in which parents' answers to interview questions were recorded. The students kept learning journals in class to reflect on the reading and writing they were doing on a weekly basis. The teacher's daily planner and personal reflective journal were used as a framework for analyzing the impact of the process. The school's vice-principal, Ted Green, came into the classroom periodically as a participant observer in the project. His role was to observe what students did and said to their peers, and he also interviewed students informally to check for changes in their perceptions. Through these activities, a collection of classroom artifacts was accumulated, including reading response journals and writing folders, that were used to document the work the students did over the year. The stories that emerged show the classroom in a constant state of change. Ashton-Warner(1975), described her classroom or an organism, often chaotic, yet a natural reflection of the ways in which we make meaning within the world. These students' stories show that there were significant changes in the ways that they use and perceive reading and writing that resulted from their experience with a process approach to reading and writing. It is because any description of human experience and perception falls short without a sense of story that this research takes the form of a story about reading and writing. This research takes the form of a story about reading and writing because any description of human experience and perception falls short without a sense of story. Outline and Summary of the Reading and Writing Process The process I employed in my classroom was modelled after the framework presented by Nancie Atwell in In the Middle: Writing, Reading, and Learning with Adolescents. The basic principles harmonize with the foundational objectives of the new Saskatchewan Learning Curriculum. The Language Arts classroom was a student-centred environment where the processof reading, writing, speaking, and listening was paramount. The connection between these elements was also stressed, such taht the students would think of them a different parts of a whole. The essential goal of the Reading Workshop was to engage students with literature, where some students might merely increase the amount they read, others could develop an appreciation of literature, and some might even grow to love it. The Reading Workshop was primarily a time of uninterrupted sustained silent reading (USSR), during which students were free to move anywhere in the physical classroom in any groupings they choose as long as they used the time for reading. Racks of magazines and books from which students could select materials were available in the classroom; no comic books or picture books were permitted. At the end of each USSR period students were given time to reflect upon, discuss, and respond through journal writing to the reading they had just done. Before USSR a brief time was given over to introducing new books, discussing as a group what students were currently reading, and examining journal entries written by students. In this way students connected reading, writing, speaking, and listening within a framework that was student-centred. The Writing Workshop began with the notion that all the students lead storied lives, that we all have stories to tell, based on things we have experienced, seen, heard, or read. The focus of the class was learning how to tell these stories, and in the process, individuals developed socially and personally. The class began with a ten-minute mini-lesson which dealt with a variety of topics, including writing process, genres, vocabulary, syntax, problems, and questions that students raised in attempting to tell their stories. Then, students were given time, during which they could write, conference with peers, think, respond, reflect, revise, edit, and create. Within this environment, students were free to find ways to tell their stories, not in isolation, but within a dynamic organism (Ashton Warner, 1975). The teacher's role during this time was to track students' progress and lead them through the writing process. The physical environment of the classroom provides locations for students to perform writing tasks, e.g., Conference Corners where peers may conference, a "No-man's Land" where a student may work uninterrupted by anyone, and a Writing Centre that includes editing and conferencing sheets, reference books, paper, pens, etc. Students may group their desks in any manner so long as they are on task. The Writing Process The steps of the writing process used in my classroom were as follows:
Tools for a Successful Reading and Writing Workshop Student Tools
Teacher Tools
Time Allotment for Reading and Writing Workshops Reading Workshop: one hour
Writing Workshop: one hour
Jessica's Story Jessica was born in Romania and moved to Canada when she was six. Her father had escaped from communist Romania two years before he brought over his wife and four children. Her mother and father had decided that they needed to leave Romania so their children would have the chance for a better life and education. The plan was to drive to the border of Romania and Yugoslavia at night, slip through the border, cross the entire country of Yugoslavia to the major part of Dubrovnik, seek asylum at the Canadian embassy, and become Canadians. Two years before the planned escape, Jessica's family went to Yugoslavia on holiday, and plans were already underway at that point. While in Yugoslavia, Jessica's dad buried supplies in preparation for the eventuality of his successful escape. When the time finally came, Jessica's dad and three of his friends attempted to escape. Jessica's mom drove the four men from their home city of Craiova to the border of Romania and Yugoslavia. Before they left, they packed the trunk of the car with feta cheese. Near the border where they were attempting to cross, there were many farms that produced feta cheese, so they believed this ruse might give the group an alibi if their car was stopped by the always suspicious police. The point where they were crossing the border was in the heart of the Carpathian Mountain chain that snaked its way along the border between the two countries. Both sides of the border were heavily patrolled by guards, with the guards on one side anxious to keep people in, while the guards on the other were anxious to keep people out. Jessica's mom dropped off the men as close to the border as she dared, not knowing if she would ever see her husband again. The men made it to the border avoiding the border patrols; meanwhile, Jessica's mom was stopped by the patrolling police and questioned as to why she was so far from home. It was the feta cheese in the trunk that convinced the police she was there visiting one of the local farmers. Crossing the border was a daunting task for the escaping men because the border was the mighty Darube River, which was swift-moving and almost a mile and a half wide. All the assistance the men had brought with them was an air mattress. Nevertheless, they managed to make it across the river and slip through the border patrols by hiding in tall grass and hay stacks. Once in Yugoslavia, the escaped men had to avoid people and any major transportation routes as they made their way to the port city of Dubrovnik and freedom. All in all, they covered over five hundred kilometres on foot, mostly walking through mountains, sleeping wherever they could, and eating whatever they could get their hands on. Once in Canada, Jessica's dad worked hard to learn English and raise enough money to get his family to Canada. Needless to say, Jessica's family value education and hard work. The family's Romanian heritage is not forgotten, with Romanian still the first language being spoken at home. Jessica's parents own a convenience store in our town, and over the summer before her grade eight year, construction began on a brand new building in another location that would be the family's new home and store. Jessica has many responsibilities outside of school. She works in her family's store, helps with the construction of the new building as well as taking care of her younger sister. On top of all this, Jessica is a hard-working student who is very self-motivated. She is artistically talented and aspires to be a graphic designer. Before grade eight, Jessica hadn't experienced any part of the reading process. She believed that you read only to get information for homework. She spent no time talking about literature with anyone. She said in her previous classes students "never got involved in knowing what others were reading. Nothing was done with our reading. We did it then we were done....no discussion at all." From the beginning of her grade eight class, Jessica was given time in class to read everyday. She was also free to choose what she wanted to read, and she received a response from me and her peers in group sharing times at the end of class. Right from the start of class, Jessica's reading made her reflect on her own feelings and experiences. According to Atwell (1987), connecting stories about other people's lives to the one's own feelings and experiences is one of the surest signs that a reader is involved in what is being read. Jessica was reading the book, Walkabout, by James Vance Marshall. Her reading reminded her of the difficulties people of different languages have in communicating with one another. She related the book to an experience she had with her little brother when they first arrived in Canada.
Later Jessica was reading the story of The Little Match Girl to her little sister. It brought back thoughts about her and her sister's relationship to their grandmother.
The story Ghost Abbey by Robert Westall reminded Jessica of her life growing up taking care of her little sister.
Once Jessica discussed the idea of one good turn deserving another in the short story The Wages of Good by Birago Diop.
At one point Jessica reflected on her own reading rituals and her thoughts on the reading process and responded on this topic in her journal.
Jessica took time to look at how writers write when she reflected on the short stories in the book Tales from the Midnight Hour by J.B. Stamper.
Throughout Jessica's many journal entries, she has shown that we truly lead storied lives. Every time she put pen to paper I waited in eager anticipation for the result. Her sharing of her responses in group shares was a catalyst for change in the whole class. She illustrated to the rest of the class how to do a proper journal entry. In April of the school year, Jessica decided to make a poster for our door so that the rest of the school could see how to do journal entries. She found a rather large audience to infect with her thinking. Jessica truly enjoyed writing for an audience and she wrote well when she was given the opportunity to choose her own topics. Her changes in her approach to the Writer's Workshop began when two things happened in our class. First, she had an opportunity to write for an audience at Christmas time when she decided to write an illustrated children's Christmas story for her sister and a kindergarten class. My
mom just shut my bedroom light, Then, when our approach to editing and conferencing introduced the class to the six elements to writing, Jessica wrote a piece for our classroom newsletter on one of her favorite collections of short stories called Still More Tales for the Midnight Hour by J. B. Stamper. She was impressed by Stamper's ability to create suspense and mystery within his short stories.
Jessica was attempting to build suspense and get other students to read a book that she truly enjoyed. Jessica selected as her best the following poem about her two dogs: I
have a pure black lab, They're
two stupid dogs, They
tug and pull on clothes, Jessica entered this poem in three separate poetry contests, with her piece being published twice, one by Illiad Press and once by Seventeen Magazine. With these successes, she has taken her writing to another level. Jessica was like a bud on a rosebush ready to bloom. She always had the ability to be a great writer and a reflective reader. She just needed time to read and write, response from her peers and teacher, and ownership of the writing process. Once given these, she flowered. The most significant change in Jessica over the year of using the process approach to writing was her internalization of the elements of writing and her growing ability to use them in her work. She was the most successful student in the entire group in her understanding of the reading and writing process and her use of it in her work. Sally was quite possibly the quietest person I had ever encountered. When I found out that she was to be in my class, I tried, to no avail, to spark a conversation with her. As soon as I said anything, she would avert her eyes and quickly move in another direction. This didn't concern me though, because I knew I would get to know her better in the fall when she was in my class. I knew her family quite well. Her older brother and I got together once a week to play basketball, and over the summer he had invited me to fish at his family's outfitters camp on a large northern lake. Sally's father moved to Canada from the United States over twenty-five years ago. He first came to our town on a fishing trip, and he loved it so much that he decided to return and settle here. Soon after his return, he met his wife, a Cree indian from the area around our town, and they decided to open their own fly-in fishing camp. Their family was very close-knit and caring, and when I visited their camp, everyone was out there helping to run it. I thought that seeing Sally over the summer would give us some common ground, but I was wrong. Upon returning to school, she remained as quiet in grade eight as she had been in grade seven. Since Sally was recognized as a special needs student in our school, she had a tutor for all her core subjects. Her tutor, Delores, encountered the same problems with Sally that I did, except that she worked with her one-on-one. Sally would rarely give Delores an answer to any question. This made their relationship tenuous at best. When Delores and I sat down in mid-September to discuss Sally's program, Delores was exasperated and looking for some way to crack Sally's shell. I suggested that the three of us have lunch together. Delores was excited about this idea, so we agreed to both buy pizza for the three of us. The next day we sprang our idea on Sally. She smiled and agreed to join us for lunch so we could get to know one another a little bit better. The next step was to find out what kind of pizza we were going to get. I am a human garbage compactor, so I didn't care what we got, but Delores was a very picky eater. She suggested ham and pineapple. Sally shrugged, so we assumed that this suggestion was acceptable. Apparently, it wasn't. When we got together the next day, we pulled together three desks and opened the pizza box to reveal a steaming, extra-large, ham and pineapple pizza. Delores and I dug in, while Sally sat there staring at the Pizza. "You'd better eat up before it gets cold, Sally," I said. "Yeah, it's excellent. Try it," Delores urged. No response. "What's wrong Sally?" "I hate ham and pineapple pizza." That was the first sentence I had ever heard Sally utter. We all started to laugh. Needless to say, an important lesson was learned that day by Sally: speak up or you won't be heard. When Sally first came to my class, she was functionally illiterate. She had great difficulty communicating any thoughts through written language. She was a very reluctant reader and writer. In fact, she rarely read unless forced to do so at school, and she had never read a book cover to cover. Giving Sally a choice about what she could read really benefitted her. I steered her towards some excellent books that were high interest and easy reading. The Chocolate Touch by Patrick Catling, Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia McLaughlin and Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor are all examples of books she was introduced to at the beginning of the year. Her mother noticed a change at home in her reading behaviour, and told me, "She does a good job of reading on her own, without being told." In fact, Sally went from being a non-reader to one who recorded in excess of fifty hours of reading in her Home Reading Log. She also finished fifteen books, cover to cover, during the school year. Atwell (1987) says that reflection shows real involvement in a text, and, indeed, Sally never reflected within her journal. Over the period of a year, however, she went from writing responses that I could make neither head nor tail of, to detailed plot summaries.
Entries like this were normal for Sally by the end of the year. Often she would write in her journal two or three times a week. The frequency of her entries showed an involvement with what she was reading. Working with two people, benefitted Sally in the Reader's Workshop. Everyday she read and discussed her book with her tutor and then worked in her journal. My responses to her in her journal created a constant dialogue that kept her growing as a reader and writer. We even managed to get Sally to discuss her book through an activity called a Book Sale. Every week students would take little recipe cards and do a brief write-up on a card about the book they were reading. Because of her shyness, this was an incredibly difficult task for Sally, but she would first practice her contribution with Delores and then contribute to the group. One of her recipe cards read:
This was a great
leap for a girl who had struggled to get out "Good morning,
Mr. Caleval" at the start of the year. Sally also began writing stories on the subject that she knew best, her own personal experiences. She selected as her best effort a story called Kathy's Sickness.
When Sally was a little girl, she had meningitis. Her story was about what she had experienced as a child. She took her piece and submitted it to the school newspaper, where it was published soon after. Her new-found voice was resounding off the school walls. Submitting her work was a big step for Sally. She did it with little prompting from her tutor or me. I just mentioned the fact that the school newspaper was accepting submissions for their next edition. The rest she did herself. At year's end, Sally wrote a letter to her mom about school. In it, she said, "This is probably my most exciting year in school and this made it exciting. When I first came into this class I didn't know as much about reading and writing as I know about it now. Some things I didn't know about reading and writing were plot and the six areas of good writing. I did a lot of writing and reading this year." Her mom agreed with her, "Sally likes to read and write better than she did before." In Sally, I saw a student discovering the joys of reading and writing. She thrived in an environment where she had a choice about what she could do. She worked extremely hard at becoming better at reading and writing, and she used the constant feedback given to her through the writing process effectively. Donald had met with little success in school. He had been kept back in grade two, so subsequently he was a year older and a head taller than most of his classmates. His height and his coke-bottle glasses made him stick out like a sore thumb in class. Due to Donald's previous experiences with school, he was easily frustrated and discouraged. I would often hear him say, "I'm so stupid." Donald was a very reluctant reader and writer. In fact, he would not read or write anything that wasn't forced on him by his teachers or parents. Donald's parents had moved to our town from southern Saskatchewan before he was born. He was born and had lived his entire life here. He really enjoyed two things: spending time outdoors and participating in the air cadet program, which his Dad led. Donald's Mom and Dad were very supportive of school, and in order for Donald to enjoy recreational activities, he had to do well in school. There was a lot of pressure on him. The first writing activity of the year did not spark an interest in writing in Donald at all. One afternoon, while the class, was quietly working, Ted Green broke into the class completely unrecognizable. He was masquerading as the infamous pencil crayon thief. He demanded all the pencil crayons in class. Once he left, all the students had to write an All Points Bulletin so the RCMP could apprehend the thief. A couple of days later, after their pieces had gone through the writing process, I sent our final copies to the local RCMP detachment, and an officer came to school to explain that they had recovered the stolen goods, but unfortunately, hadn't caught the criminal. While I was sure this stimulus to writing would be a hit with those writers who were reluctant, Donald just thought the whole exercise was useless. He refused to finish his work. Fortunately, in Reader's Workshop, Donald's first choice of a book to read was a biography on Mario Lemieux called Mario by Lawrence Martin. Since Donald's favorite athlete was Mario Lemieux, he really got into his book.
My response to Donald's journal entry focused on how good his entry was and who my favorite hockey player was. I was attempting to model what a journal entry looked like, as well as begin a discussion on good books that I hoped would continue throughout the school year.
Donald was already
reflecting on why Mario Lemieux was his favorite athlete. A discussion
about good books began. Donald was learning that reading could be
enjoyable.
One of the expectations in our class was that each student would do at least one hour of reading at home each week. Donald's parents began to get him to read fifteen minutes before bedtime each night. One of his friends, Terry, who was also in our class, challenged Donald to see who would get more hours in his Home Reading Log by the end of the first term. Donald was hooked. The two of them accumulated more hours in their Home Reading Logs than anyone else in our class by the end of the year. Donald documented over 95 hours of home reading, which is outstanding for a non-reader. After Christmas Donald also began to buy books. He became a voracious reader of R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike, something he had never been in the past. This was a sure sign of Donald's changing perceptions of reading. In Writer's Workshop, when Donald was given his own topics to explore and an audience to write for, he had a reason to sit and write. In the spring, a piece of his, entitled The Experience That Will Last A Lifetime, was chosen for publication in a book of writing from our school division. It was chosen for its originality and word choice.
Donald also contributed to our town's local newspaper. He did a news article on our class's study of the spring sucker fish spawn.
Once given the opportunities to write for real reasons and real audiences, Donald grew as a writer. He attempted to strengthen each piece of writing by using our new editing and conferencing sheets, which showed him exactly where his strengths and weaknesses were. Donald's parents' noticed the changes in their son and wrote the following letter about them:
At the end of the year, I asked the class to reflect in their learning journals on what they had learned in the Reader's and Writer's Workshop. This is how Donald replied:
Donald's reflection on his growth as a reader and a writer showed that the changes in him were tremendous, given that he had never before done much reading and writing. He actually connected his success in these areas to success in all his classes. Kate comes from a long line of writers. Two of her grandparents are professors at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College. Her father is a teacher who enjoys writing and her stepmother is a journalist. Even Kate's younger sister is a good writer, in Kate's mind. Kate's family moved to our town from Regina in her grade six year. When she came to our school, she quickly became involved in numerous extra-curricular activities, specifically volleyball, judo, cross-country running and track. She experienced success in not only her athletic endeavors, but in her academic endeavors as well. She had been an avid reader and writer all her life. Over the course of the school year, Kate's attitude towards reading remained highly positive. She was always reading both at home and at school, and she always completed her work on time. Although Kate rarely entered into dialogue with me in her journal, often she would write to her friends about the book she was reading and she would attempt, with great success, to get her friends to read what she was reading. When she did decide to write to me, it was often in an invented code that I would have to attempt to break over the weekend, before the key to the code was handed over to me on Monday. At one point in the year, she wrote her work upside down and backwards, backwards, so that I needed a mirror to read the work. She really enjoyed playing with words. In her journal, Kate simply described the plot of the book she was reading and how the characters interacted with one another. She did not reflect at all in her journal throughout the year. I found this surprising being since she was a voracious reader. It seemed that in her journal work, she would do what was expected of her but little more. In Writer's Workshop she showed she had excellent control of the English language. In mid-September, she wrote a short story entitled Were There Ever Really Dolphins? This piece of work was later published in a collection of northern students' writing called Footprints in the Snow.
The format of the Writer's Workshop really suited Kate. She continually generated her own writing topics and often had up to four pieces of writing at one time. The biggest area of growth that I noticed in Kate was in her ability to be an effective peer conferencer. She was looked to by her peers to help them, and she willingly gave of herself. She was one of the main editors responsible for a science newspaper our class produced, called the Paleozoic Press. The Paleozoic Press was a collection of newspaper articles that focused on the grade eight science unit, "The Moving Crust". Kate was responsible for editing the copy from every student in class as well as formatting the newspaper. When this newspaper was produced, it provided the students with a study guide for the final unit test. Needless to say, Kate did very well on that test. Kate felt, "I have the most control over my writing. It is my favorite subject because I think it is fun and I've found that I'm good at it." She was more specific in her learning log at year's end:
Kate's father commented at the end of the year, "Kate's writing has certainly improved over the course of the year, this is due to a number of things; certainly your approach to the material/process, her extended family/oral influences regarding Granny and Grandpa can tell a good story and Kate's own appreciation of the purpose and process involved in writing (researching, refining)." Overall, Kate had a year of growth in grade eight. Her attitude towards reading and writing was positive and remained highly positive until year's end. Margaret is the child of two teachers. She was born in our town, but has spent most of her life travelling through the north with her parents to wherever they could find jobs. When I first met her, she seemed to be a very serious, quiet child. I expected that since she had only attended the school for half of May and all of June in her grade seven year, she hadn't made too many friendships yet. In the first weeks of school, I had to visit her parents a couple of times because Margaret didn't show up on time most mornings and on a couple of afternoons, she decided to not come to class at all. As teachers, her parents both understood the value of education and stressed to their daughter how important it was to be on time and attend school each day. She obviously agreed because it was never a problem again. Margaret had always been a strong student, her parents informed me, and I soon found out that this was true. She worked hard at completing all her assignments and consistently did her best work. However, she rarely wrote or read outside school, and she did her language arts assignments from workbooks and book readers. In fact, she stated in one of her interviews, "I didn't like books very much," and "I didn't like (writing) because I didn't know much about it." She had not been exposed in school to a process approach to reading and writing before grade eight. As soon as Margaret was introduced to the Reader's Workshop, she flourished, quickly developing into a reflective responder to all she read. It was as if she had been a prisoner held in a cave for years and years, and was finally released to see the sunrise. She was drawn to the light, and drank it all in. Given the opportunity to read what she wanted, she chose R.L. Stine, who was also the choice of many of her new-found friends. In late September, she discussed what drew her to R.L. Stine.
She related her reading to real life, showing a real involvement in literature (Atwell 1987).
At one point in the year, Margaret looked at the book she was reading and picked it apart, looking for figurative language, and information about how other writers write (Atwell 1987).
In a letter to her parents at the end of the year, Margaret says, "I disliked reading at the beginning of the year, but now I take time and think about what I'm reading. I now enjoy the Reader's Workshop." She also commented in one of her interviews, "I'm learning a lot more about my own experiences. I'm reading more now and improving in my journal." Margaret also believed that by reading every day that she was, "..... reading books that are for a higher level and I'm better at my descriptive writing because of it." These comments all show the effect that time to read, choice of what to read, and continued response to her reading and writing had on Margaret's attitudes.
Margaret also went from being a non-reader at home to having over sixty hours documented in her Home Reading Log over the period of a year. In writing, Margaret showed strong growth when given the opportunity to choose her own topics. She always attempted to strengthen and validate her own writing through examples of strong writing that she saw in the thirty books she read over the school year. Her voice was validated, too, when three of her stories, Will they Believe, The Long Day and The Black Dog, were published in our school newspaper.
All three pieces of her published writing came from real life experiences, showing Margaret that we, indeed, lead storied lives. At year's end,
Margaret's mother wrote about the changes in her daughter. She saw
real growth in two areas: In Margaret, I saw a student who just needed the structures that the Reader's and Writer's Workshops provide. Given these structures, she bloomed into a reflective reader and writer. Terry's behavior was the root of many of his problems at schools. He was highly disorganized, and he continuously lied to his parents and teacher about school, playing one off of the other. His diminutive size, squinty eyes and squeaky voice also made him the brunt of jokes and negative attention from his classmates. By February of his grade seven school year, Terry began a concentrated resource room program focusing on organization, language and math skills. Soon after, Terry was pulled from school and home-schooled by his mother for two months because he was not progressing. In April, he returned to school and was streamed into the regular classroom for some subjects, but he received his education primarily in the resource room. For Terry to experience any success in school, he needed to be constantly monitored and motivated to get his work done. He was already an avid reader before he entered grade eight, so I hoped this desire to read, coupled with the structure of the Reader's and Writer's Workshop, would keep Terry focused and on task. Terry was immediately drawn to the reading process within our class. He especially liked his Home Reading Log. He began to compete with his friend, Donald, to see who could read more over each semester. When the smoke cleared at the end of the year, he was a voracious reader, both at home and at school. Any free time he got he would spend reading. He recorded almost ninety-eight hours in his Home Reading Log, which was quite an accomplishment for him. He also began to buy more books for a variety of reasons. "At the beginning of the year I didn't like horror books, but now I have books by Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine and I'm starting to get into self-help books for kids." His mother also noted that "his interest (in reading) has been greatly confirmed by this past year. Requests for books to be purchased has certainly increased." Terry's journal shows his tremendous growth as a responder to literature over the year. When he began writing in his journal, his work was extremely messy and disorganized, so disorganized, in fact, that I had difficulty understanding what he was trying to say. The structure I set up for the class to respond to books greatly helped Terry organized his work. Every day I reiterated the rules for responding to reading: date your work; begin with a salutation; your opening paragraph should state the book you are reading and the author, as well as introduce what you will be talking about; stay neat; and end your work with your signature. These instructions, coupled with my responses to his journal entries, created a framework within which he could work. He could also refer to two handouts at the front of his reading journal entitled "Dear Readers" and "Things to Write About in Your Reading Journal"l that I adopted from Atwell (1987). These two handouts further organized him and gave him a framework to work within. By November, he began to respond appropriately to the books he was reading.
Terry continued working within the framework that was given to him. His responses became more detailed, and at times he tried to reflect about his reading by tying it to his real life. He also began a dialogue later on in February with his friend, Donald. At years' end, his mother commented on his behavior at home, noting that "there was a major amount of enthusiasm in Terry with regards to the Reader's Workshop. He was very diligent in filling out his journal from September to January......just from observing, Terry's work has increased since January". The structure of the Writer's Workshop truly benefitted Terry over the year he spent in my class. As a writer, Terry had difficulty in choosing his own topics for writing, constantly needing suggestions from me, but he did use this writing process effectively and was very successful within this framework. At our regional science fair, Terry won an Honorable Mention for his project dealing with spaghetti bridges. He wrote a research paper on bridge design as well as a science experiment looking at "Which Specific Bridge Design is the Strangest?" He went through the entire writing process in producing this paper, and was rewarded in front of the entire school for his efforts. Terry also wrote a newspaper article for our science newspaper, the Paleozoic Press. His article included information on sedimentary rocks and his favorite hockey player turned famous professor.
"The process of going through a number of drafts is very effective," commented Terry's mom after seeing his science fair project and his science newspaper article. Within the framework of our class, any writing that was done always went through this process. Terry internalized the process and became very effective within it. He wrote a letter to a northern mining company requesting a tour for our science class. Once again, he used the process well and was writing for a purpose.
His mother commented, "As a result of using the Writer's Workshop process, he is learning how to organize this information and put it in a format he can present." Over the entire year I was very happy with the success Terry experienced in the Reader's and Writer's Workshop. It was accompanied by an incredible change in attitude toward school for Terry. "There has not been a day that he didn't want to come to school," his mother stated. Organization and structure were the keys to success for Terry. Without these, he would have struggled through just another year of school. "I feel a lot of these changes as a result of Tim's enthusiasm and ability to keep on top of him and see through his manipulations. This has allowed him to see what he can do," his mother concluded. "My year has been great!" Terry said in his learning journal. When Tyson was in grade seven, he would often be at school before 8:00 a.m. waiting to get into the computer lab so he could work on the school newspaper. He was responsible for the copy and helped with the format and layout of the paper. His efforts to get the copy typed out kept the school newspaper running. Nobody else on the newspaper staff wanted to do all the grunt work; the others would rather report and write. Not Tyson though. He didn't like reporting or writing at all. It was obvious that he was an eager and responsible boy. In his class he was always the one who had his hand up first, and he always came up with the right answers. This eagerness made him the brunt of many cruel jokes from his peers. While Tyson was smaller in stature, however, he didn't back down from the threats and intimidation he received from his peers. During his grade seven year, school was difficult for him. It was easy to see how Tyson's eagerness and sense of responsibility was developed. Tyson's parents continually stressed the importance of education to their son. His family moved to our town just after he was born. His dad did seasonal work, working for a marine dealership in the summer and an auto dealership in the winter. Often he was busy traveling. Tyson's mom worked as a nurse at the local hospital. His parents both had jobs that did not have regular working hours, and as Tyson was the eldest of their two children, he would often spend his time taking care of his little sister and the house. Tyson had not been introduced to the reading or writing process before. In fact, he had not even read a book from cover to cover or written anything more than once. Initially, Tyson really struggled within the framework of Reader's and Writer's Workshop. The only reasons he found himself reading were to entertain his little sister or to get his homework done. Writing was done only at school when he copied notes off the board. The prospect of being forced to read and write everyday was daunting for him. In the Writer's Workshop, he did not see the purpose of writing drafts and had great difficulty getting ideas to put into his writing. Since Tyson had always done well in school, he found the new processes frustrating. One evening in November, Tyson's Mom called, wanting to speak to me about her son. Her question to me was "What have you done to my son?" My mind raced. What had I done? I began back-pedaling, stalling. "Well... hmm...," I replied, trying to think what would cause a parent to phone me at home and complain. I had thought Tyson was actually beginning to feel comfortable within the Reader's and Writer's Workshop, and he was doing well in the rest of his classes. He seemed to be a happy student. I turned the question back to her, asking her to explain. "Perhaps if you could elaborate I'd be happy to explain...." Tyson apparently had begun to read the newspaper every evening and a book every night before bed. He was excited about what he was reading, and he was sharing his thoughts on the book he was currently reading called The Celery Stalks at Midnight by James Howie. His mom was very happy with the changes in her son. Tyson wrote down his thoughts on the book and its main character, Bunnicula, a vampire rabbit.
Tyson's response to literature became reflective. He really blossomed when he discovered the genre of animal stories. The first book he decided to read was Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. He began to reflect on his reading, personally connecting his reading to real life stories.
I found that we both shared some common ground, a love for animals and stories about them. His story reminded me of a story about one of my dogs.
This began a dialogue between us about good books that lasted until June. Tyson also began sharing his reflections on this particular genre with the class, which was indeed a change. He had never done that before in class, and during his first interview, Tyson commented on this sharing, "I find it embarrassing sometimes and I feel shy sharing my work." Later in the year, while reading Where The Red Fern Grows, Tyson demonstrated his involvement in his reading once again.
The stories that came from Tyson's reading always made it a joy to read his work, and they caused me to be reflective about what I was reading, too. When teachers write and tell stories about their lives, whether it be in the Reader's or Writer's Workshop, students really respond. It draws them in and validates that we all lead storied lives. In his interviews, Tyson commented on how much fun reading and responding had become to him and that he was now reading at home a lot. In the Writer's Workshop, Tyson plodded along. He completed the writing assignments I was giving him, but his work had no heart or soul. His response to literature in Reader's Workshop was real, even vibrant, but all the pieces that he wrote for me in Writer's Workshop lacked the same sense of story. However, when our approach to editing and conferencing changed, so did his writing. Tyson really focused on the elements of Ideas and Content and Writer's Voice. Once he was given the opportunity to write what he wanted and to write for an audience, he blossomed. The story of Chris emerged. He wrote about his favorite topic, dogs, and he wrote a piece for a collection of students' writing called Footprints in the Snow.
In his learning journal Tyson commented on the Reader's and Writer's Workshop and how he thought he had changed.
His mom also shared her thoughts about Tyson and our class.
I saw Tyson's love for literature grow. l also saw a young writer emerge who was working hard at internalizing the processes of writing and the elements of writing, especially his writer's voice. I had seen Billy's parents many times before I actually met them, never in person though. Like most couples on their wedding day, they had pictures taken of them as they exited the church. It just so happened on their wedding day, a photographer from National Geographic was in our town taking pictures for a piece on Saskatchewan in an upcoming issue in the National Geographic. He took a picture of the happy couple standing in front of the local Anglican Church, right on the shore of the lake. I had looked at and seen that picture possibly a hundred times. Billy is a boy of Aboriginal ancestry. His family has lived in the the area of our town for generations, settling on a point of the lake. They now live in F... R.... People pass by their house just as they enter the community. Billy's extended family is closely knit, and he spends many hours with his Kookum and Mooshum, or grandma and grandpa. In Billy's house everyone, except his Kookum and Mooshum, speaks English almost all the time. It is Billy's first language. I first met Billy when he was in grade seven. He could be a very intimidating grade seven boy. He was by far the biggest kid in his grade, and he could be the loudest, too. His love was music. As he wrote in his learning journal once:
He would share his musical interests with everyone in the junior end of the school every lunch hour. His classroom ghetto blaster would be turned up so loud you could hear it in the staffroom, five doors down. Of course, he would attract the attention of any hallway supervisor, sometimes three or four times over the fifteen minute lunch period. When I would go down and ask the class what was going on, nobody would say anything. They would all stare down into their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Not Billy though, he would look directly at me with the biggest grin he could manage. Nobody could help but laugh. Billy had never been exposed to the reading and writing process in school before, nor had he spent any time reading or writing at home. "Writing just takes up my time," he believed. At home Billy and his parents enjoyed listening to music and watching a little television. His mom worked for the local Indian Band and she would sometimes bring a computer home to write on. His father was often seen writing and reading for the businesses he ran, but Billy just saw that as work. "I just don't like writing sometimes. Sometimes I'm in the mood for fooling around." Billy's thoughts on reading were much the same. He rarely was given time or had a reason to read or write, and he had no idea of how to get better at either reading or writing. Although he was a student who really disliked reading and writing, he was also the living catalyst for change in our class. A simple question to Jessica about our class's self- and peer-conference sheets began a series of changes that led to a completely new editing and conferencing process. This ultimately led to a change on the evaluation of the Writer's Workshop as well. Billy was also instrumental in the change from a Writer's Workshop where I generated the topics for writing, to a Writer's Workshop where students generated their own topics for writing. I had been battling with the idea of letting the kids write what they wanted to, but I had many reservations. Like Nancie Atwell (1987), I liked the advantage of my big desk. I liked setting topic and pace and mode, orchestrating the process, being in charge. From the beginning of the school year, I had told the students that soon they would be able to pick their own topics for writing. Meanwhile I had planned out an entire year's worth of writing topics, right from resources to brainstorms to time lines for completion of their final copies. It was late fall, and I had just begun a thematic study on mythology when Billy came to me and told me he didn't want to write a myth right now. "You said that we'd get to write our own topics. Well, I've got something I want to write out and I'd much rather do that." Billy wanted to prepare a questionnaire to see if there was any interest in starting a video store in F...R.... I reluctantly agreed, hoping that his little venture might settle him down to writing for a while and he would get a break from the icy glares I regularly directed his way. In my journal, I had commented that "most of Billy's time was spent chatting with his neighbours about everything but his writing. The problem is that he isn't getting his work done and he was taking others that were on task to the land of being off task."
The change in Billy's work ethic in class was dramatic. He no longer was the focus of my icy glares. After he had been quiet for a couple of days, I headed over toBilly to find out what he was up to. He had brainstormed a number of questions and was trying to figure out some sort of order for them. I helped him polish his piece, then he took the questionnaire back home and distributed it to people in his neighbourhood. By the end of the school year, his father had started up his own video store there. Billy had found a purpose for his writing, and also an audience. It was evident in the Reader's Workshop that Billy had always been a reluctant reader in the past. By mid-November, he had not completed one novel. He simply decided on most days that he'd rather fool around than work. I decided to take drastic action in his journal. I wrote:
Billy did abandon A Wrinkle In Time and began reading The Chocolate Touch by Patrick Catling.
The focus of this entry was on describing setting and characters. Throughout the year, Billy focused on the elements of novels. However, he was concerned about his marks and this sparked a turnaround in his journal writing and his response to the literature he was reading.
One of the biggest changes in Billy was the fact that he began buying his own pocket novels. As he really enjoyed the T.V. show, Saved by the Bell, he began buying the books based on the T.V. show by Beth Cruise. This showed a big shift in Billy's attitude towards reading. He really began to enjoy the reading he did. During his second interview Billy stated, "I used to always hate reading, but now I'm starting to like that too." Now that Billy had finally begun to write, he wanted to continue choosing his own topics. Since one of his loves was music, I suggested a song. He decided to write a rap song for a kindergarten class at the elementary school. He worked extremely hard trying to get this piece to sound like a rap song, redrafting his piece six times before he was finally satisfied. Billy was given what he needed for his work in class, namely time to do his work, response from his peers and me, and ownership, i.e., the opportunity to write what he wanted to. Even more important, he had an audience. The day before Christmas holidays, Billy stood in front of a crowd of kindergarten children, who had all had one candy cane too many, and sang his rap song. The kids gathered around and hugged him when he was done. He grinned all day long. The Jolly Man The
jolly man's got the big bass bumpin', By: Billy C... The living catalyst struck again in April when the class was in the final stages of preparation for the Regional Science Fair. Billy came to me and told me that the new self- and peer-conference sheets based on the book Creating Writers by Spandel and Stiggins didn't have anything to do with writing reports. The sheets needed to be changed. As a class, we developed criteria for research reports and essays in the areas of Ideas and Content, Organization, Writer's Voice and Word Choice. In the last interview, Ted Green, as our project's outside observer, asked Billy, "Overall, think of the Billy at the beginning of the year and the Billy now. Has he changed?" "Yeah. I guess. Lots." "I read more, I write more, I enjoy school more. I don't get into as much trouble as I used to. It keeps me busy and keeps me out of trouble." Enough said. "Where's the meat in the sandwich?" Billy asked Jessica while they were peer-conferencing about each other's Christmas writing. "What do you mean?" replied Jessica. She was writing an illustrated children's Christmas story for her little sister as a Christmas present, while Billy was hard at work writing a rap song about Santa to present to a kindergarten class at the elementary school. Both had worked hard at developing the ideas within their respective pieces, and they were proud of their work, passing their pieces to friends to look at and reading them aloud to others. Jessica had redrafted her piece three times, once conferencing with me, and she had made revisions twice when working collaboratively with her mom. Billy had had five quick conferences with me to date, continually concentrating on the content of his piece. What both of these students were doing wasn't just writing; it was a labor of love for a real audience. It had to be perfect. They had taken over the writing centre, spreading their work out between the two of them in haphazard piles, so each could see the changes their work had gone through to date. I had just settled down at my desk after completing a status of the class. Billy's question to Jessica piqued my interest because I found it somewhat confusing. He was obviously referring to a poster I had put up above the writing centre after a mini-lesson I had recently done on writing paragraphs. The poster showed that paragraphs were like meat sandwiches, with the meat in the sandwich being the main idea the writer wants to express to the readers of the piece. Neither Billy nor Jessica needed to write their pieces in paragraph form. I was intrigued so I continued to listen. Billy looked down at the peer-conferencing sheet he was filling out and continued, "These (self- and peer- conferincing) sheets have nothing to do with what we're trying to say. They just focus on spelling and sentences." (See Figures 1 and 2 among the ten forms and worksheet referred to in this section of the report and appended to the back of the section.) I'd spent many hours thinking the same thing as Billy. The more time I spent talking, listening, reading and writing with grade eight students, the more I realized that many of them could write and do it well. The more conferencing I did about writing, the more evident it became to me that I was primarily editing and conferencing about the surface features of their pieces. My conferences focused on spelling, punctuation, grammar and legibility, just like the student self- and peer-conference sheets did. I tried my best to spend time during the first teacher conference focusing on content, but looking back I realized that it was easy to slide back into comments on grammar and punctuation. There was little thought about what students were trying to say or what they were thinking; there was no meat in our sandwiches. A change was needed in the way the class experienced conferences. I began to think about the structures of the teacher conferences I had. I asked myself a few questions: Who did the talking? Who did the writing? Who did the listening? Who came up with the ideas on how to strengthen writing pieces? I realized I was guilty of dominating teacher conferences with my ideas and thoughts on students' pieces, hardly stopping to listen to their thoughts or concerns. When I stopped talking, I wrote down what I said on the teacher conference sheet and asked the students not to interrupt me. I believed I was helping with not only their grammar, punctuation, and spelling, but with what the students were trying to say in their pieces. This realization overwhelmed me with a sense of failure and frustration. The failure lay in my knowledge that the students had no say in what they were trying to write in our Writer's Workshop. I rarely gave students the opportunity to talk about their pieces in teacher conferences and the structure of their self- and peer-conference sheets gave no opportunities either. The frustration arose because I often had between eight and twelve writing pieces that needed to be teacher-conferenced each day. Many times I did not see the piece of writing until it was handed to me by the student at the beginning of a teacher conference. I only had the time it took to read the piece to think about it. I was flying by the seat of my pants. Although it seemed I was always inundated with teacher conferences, there were a few students who always seemed to fall between the cracks, only conferencing with me when I demanded it. I also noticed that the conferencing workload seemed to grow greater as the due dates approached. Conferencing was necessarily short, sweet and to the point. I was the drill sergeant controlling, dominating and demanding what be done with each piece of writing I was seeing. I needed to manage conference time within the Writer's Workshop better so I could see each student regularly, give quality feedback, and get students discussing what they were doing with their writing. Better time management was where I was going to start. Upon reflection, I realized that I spent between five and ten minutes on each conference. I had twenty students in my class. Everyday we had Writer's Workshop for one hour. My mini-lesson and status of the class took up the first ten minutes of class. Once I had completed that, I would move throughout the clusters of desks, ensuring that everyone in class was on task and focused on their writing for the day. This was the chance for students to ask me quick questions about their work, because once a teacher conference began, interruptions would not be cool. After I had finished circulating throughout the class, there were forty-five minutes of class time left. Closure and Author's Chair took up five minutes at the close of class, so when all was said and done, forty minutes of class time was available for teacher conferences each day. I broke my twenty students into five groups of four. On a piece of bristol board I made a chart called Daily Teacher Conferences (see Figure 3). There were five columns and five rows. Each column represented a day of the week, and under each day four students' names were written, with a blank space left at the bottom. During the daily status of the class, I would refer to the chart and inform the class of the students I was going to conference with that day. Other students who needed to see me would write their names down in the blank space left at the bottom, and if time permitted, I would conference with them as well. This procedure gave me the opportunity to see each student in my class each week and track each one's progress through their pieces (see Figure 4). To make the process even smoother, after each day's Author's Chair, I would ask the students scheduled for the next day's teacher conferences to hand me the writing they wanted me to see, so I could read it over and prepare myself for our conference. This one idea smoothed out many bumps I had experienced to date in conferencing in our class. Students no longer fell through the cracks. I met with each student at least once a week and I got to spend quality time with each student. The time I spent this way was longer and much more effective. I had already read the students' pieces and my response was planned out. Interruptions during teacher conferences became fewer as well, because each student knew there would be an opportunity to conference with me at one point during the week. I now needed my teacher conferences to actually become conferences, not one-way lectures on how to do it right. Just before Christmas I came across a statement by Donald Graves that really illustrated for me an idea of great importance: a conference is not a conference until the student speaks. My dilemma was to get the students to speak and to get me to listen and not speak so much. I thought a good way to begin would be to get the students to sit down and read their pieces aloud at the beginning of every conference. I also thought of a number of open-ended questions to ask each student as soon as when the reading of the piece was done. These questions were: Tell me what you think you did well in this piece? What do you want me to comment on in your piece? What part do you like best in your piece? Why? Tell me your ideas as to how you're going to strengthen your work. I was really impressed with the shift that these changes made from a teacher-led conference to a shared conference. Being expected to read one's piece was difficult for many at first since their piece was laid out right in front of the teacher while they read. Yet it soon became second nature to the class. Both the students and I settled into this new process, with me listening and the student reading. The reading of pieces just before discussing them really added to the teacher conferencing process. Students often found problems within their pieces which led them to stop reading and fix them on the spot. The reading also refreshed our memories with the contents of the piece and prepared us for the following discussion. If the reading of the piece was good, the open-ended questions were great! I was astounded at how many students just wanted clarification from me as to what they needed to work on. I became a sounding board for their ideas or a resource to strengthen their work. I continued to focus on identifying for them three strengths and three weaknesses. In comparison with previous conferences, the difference lay in the students' ownership of what they needed to do in their next drafts. At this point, I also found that the rushed feeling I had experienced in past conferences abated. I could really concentrate on student work, which facilitated the creation of the Things To Do sheet for mini-lessons (see Figure 5). Quite simply, I made a sheet in my Writer's Workshop binder that I brought out during teacher conferences, and after each conference, I filled it in with any ideas that had come to light during the preceding conference. Before creating the Things To Do sheet, I would often be looking for and trying to think up generalities within students' writing as topics for my mini-lessons. Now my mini-lessons became more specific and valid to what we were covering as a class at that point. Over the Christmas holidays I read a book that was the final catalyst for change in our class's approach to editing and conferencing and my approach to assessment and evaluation. The book, Creating Writers by Spandel and Stiggins (1990), stated that teachers can do better, but we'll have to give up cheering over correctly used semicolons and formulate an assessment process that shows real respect for students as writers. Our standards in the past have been too stringent and alarmingly limited. Conventional correctness is a shiny veneer covering many faults. We've settled for it because it looks good, but our student writers are capable of more than providing shiny veneers. Also, we're capable of providing guidelines for more than just sentence revision.....if we want to see real writing improvement, we must begin demanding it of them and of ourselves. This book was a revelation to me, a joy to read, and exactly what I was looking for; it would put the meat in our sandwiches. The book identified six traits of writing that could be used to assess student writing analytically. Over the next month our class learned about the six elements of quality writing: writer's voice, ideas and content, word choice, organization, sentence fluency and conventions. As we read and learned more about each trait of quality writing, we began preparing reference posters on each trait to be hung in the room. Each poster highlighted the various characteristics of each trait with examples of student writing that illustrated the quality of writing on a scale of one to five. Our new peer-
and self-conference sheets reflected our new found knowledge (see
Figures 6 and 7). Instead of conferencing and editing on just the
surface features of a piece, students now had to score the piece
on a scale of one to five, write why they rated it the way they
did, and then use an example from the piece itself to justify the
rating. Later in the year, as the class was in the final stages of preparation for the Regional Science Fair, a student in class, Billy, came to me and told me that the new self- and peer-conference sheets based on the Spandel and Stiggins book, Creating Writers, didn't have anything to do with writing reports. The sheets needed to be changed (see Figure 10). As a class, we developed criteria for research reports and essays in the areas of ideas and content, organization, writer's voice, and word choice. These criteria were to be used by everyone when conferencing about reports and essays. Figure
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I truly believed in the writing process, from brainstorming on through to final copy, but I was thoroughly convinced that I had to generate ideas for students to write. I believed that my creative writing ideas would stimulate student creativity, making writing fun and easy. I also believed that an entire year of generating writing ideas would be impossible for a grade eight student. Perhaps students could come up with a couple of ideas, but no more than that. Like Nancie Atwell (1987), I liked that advantage of my big desk. I liked setting topic and pace and mode, orchestrating the process, being in charge. Secretly, I was afraid that giving the students choices to read and write what they wanted would cause chaos. It would be impossible to track everyone, and students wouldn't be able to follow my nice, neat time lines. From the beginning of the school year I had told the students that soon they would be able to pick their own topics for writing. Meanwhile, I had planned an entire year's worth of writing topics, right from resources to brainstorms to time lines for completion of their final copies. It was late fall when one of my students, Billy, came to me and told me that he didn't want to write myths like everyone else was doing. He wanted to write a questionnaire to see if there was any interest in starting a video store near his home in F... R.... I reluctantly agreed, mostly in the hope that his little venture might settle him down and keep him from distracting other students. Billy got down to business and really wrote, for the first time all year. Soon Billy wasn't the only one asking to choose his own topics for writing. After Christmas, in my journal I reflected, "The true Writer's Workshop doesn't occur here. Through my continued metamorphosis as a teacher, I have realized the need to begin to empower students by having them focus on what they are experts on, their own experience. I feel they need to begin to write about their own topics just as Atwell has said. Students need to write about what they know and have learned, a sort of collection of who I am, where I was and where I now am, a place to show change." From then on, my students chose what they wanted to write. I helped them within the process, and I found them reasons to write, places to be published. Clustering - A New Perspective Jeni Mayer, author of The Mystery of the Turtle Lake Monster, was doing a workshop in late March called "Beyond the Writer's Workshop Approach." I decided to attend, hoping that I would be able to take back to my class some ideas as to how real writers write. She began by discussing a technique called clustering. I had used and read about this technique under a myriad of other names: brainstorming, webbing, scaffolding and authoring. At first I thought to myself, "Nothing new here. Why did I come?" Her approach was different though. Not only did she use clustering to organize her thoughts before she wrote a piece, she used it to organize her thoughts each day. This was such a simple idea. When I returned to my class, I adopted it and used it in our Writer's Workshop each day. Right after our mini-lesson and the status of the class, those who were working on a piece from prewriting to second draft were expected to cluster for five minutes before they began to write. Not only were students working from their prewriting activity, they now also planned out their daily journey through a guide cluster. This addition to the writing process was a difficult one for students to internalize that late into a school year. Everyone in class reflected in their learning journals that the introduction and use of clustering each day was hard and a waste of their writing time. Nevertheless, I believe if this concept is taught to students from the start of a school year, it will become a highly effective tool for students to plan and organize their writing each day. I have already made it part of my assessment by including it in my Writing Process Checklist (see Figure 11).
Figure
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Spelling is an integral part of our Reader's and Writer's Workshop. "The spelling curriculum should be viewed as an interwoven component to students' total experiences with language" (Sask. Ed., 1990, p. 50). Each student in our class kept a Personal Dictionary in which personal spelling words were organized according to subject and alphabetical order. Our spelling words came from two places: core subjects and personal writing. Once every two weeks a test was given on new spelling words and the spelling words that each student had previously spelled wrong. By generating spelling from students' own writing and other core classes, the words learned were ones used in the context of the classroom. Spelling became, not a simple memorization task, but rather a complex, cognitive process (see Figure 12a and Figure 12b). Figure
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From Modelling to Roving and Talking When I first read Nancie Atwell's In the Middle, she discussed the importance of modelling reading to students through Sustained Silent Reading. I couldn't believe it! I was actually to read for enjoyment so my students would see the importance of literature in my life, and therefore take after me as a model. During the class' Sustained Silent Reading, I would gobble up young adult novels. Having never been exposed to this genre of literature, I couldn't believe how thoroughly enjoyable it was. Often I would be so enthralled that I didn't even notice we had read well into our math class. It suddenly dawned on me one night in late November that I often had no idea whether or not the students in my class were really reading. Of course, every once in a while I looked up and would notice some off-task behaviour, whispering or perhaps jotting down a letter to a friend, but the possibility that students weren't reading at all didn't click until I really thought about it. In my journal I reflected, "I think I'm going to perhaps poll the students at the start of Reader's Workshop to see what books they are reading. That way I will have a better idea as to what everyone is reading before we settle down to our SSR." I began doing an informal poll of the students just before SSR began. I would ask, "What are you reading today? Hold up the book so I can see it." Just by doing this, I had a better idea as to where the students were in their reading. I wasn't satisfied though. In Living Between the Lines by Lucy McCormick (1991), I found that just modelling wasn't enough. The only way to find out about students' perceptions of the literature they were reading was to talk to them. I began to think that if I was to be roving and talking to individuals about their reading, I should keep track of it. After all, didn't I track students through the Writer's Workshop daily through a Status of the Class Sheet? This thought led to the development of the Reader's Workshop Status Sheet (see Figure 13). As I moved through the clusters of students reading throughout the class, I carried my clipboard with my Reader's Workshop Status Sheet. Every day I touched base with each student in our class. We discussed where students were in the books they were reading, and I planted seeds for students to reflect on. As closure for each class, a quick status was done to find out how far everyone had progressed in their reading that day. This change in procedure had a drastic effect on the quality of the Reader's Workshop in our class. Students were being much more reflective in their journals because of our discussions, and our Sustained Silent Reading was really just that - sustained silent reading!
Figure
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Tracking through the Reader's Workshop At the end of our second semester, I found I was spending unbelievable hours reading back through each students' Reading Response Journal to evaluate it. There had to be a better way to track student's weekly journal responses than what I was doing. Looking at the criteria on which I was basing my marks for the evaluation of the Reader's Workshop, I developed a Reading Response Checklist for each student for each term (see Figures 14 and 15). Each week after I had responded to all the journals, I would go back through each response and use the checklist to see if students were meeting the criteria set out for the evaluation of the Reader's Workshop. This made the next semester's reporting period a lot less stressful for me. One of the criteria for evaluation of the Reading Response Journals was growth. Once again, Creating Writers by Spandel and Stiggins helped our class. Within the book, it discusses holistic assessment of writing. Our class decided, at the end of our second semester, that we would read through our entire year's journal responses and mark our overall best journal entry, the one entry that as a whole looked best. Once the anchor entry was selected, a huge A was written above it, and each week each student looked back at this anchor entry and tried to grow from there. This gave students their own benchmark on which to base their own work and from which they could see measurable growth. It also helped with evalution at the end of each semester, when students looked back to consider whether or not they would change their anchor entry. Of course, one hoped that their new anchor would be the best journal entry they had written that semester. Often it was. Figure
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Figure
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This year-long study of students' changing perceptions to reading and writing has shown that teaching students reading and writing through a process can not only help them grow as language users, it can actually change their thoughts about reading and writing in a positive way. Action research in my class has also changed my perceptions of the teaching of reading and writing. I believe I have become a facilitator, providing opportunities for students to read and write and let their voices be heard. The movement of the Saskatchewan Department of Education towards teaching language through this process will benefit the youth of our province by giving them time to read and write, ownership of their reading and writing, and opportunities to receive a response to their reading and writing. I believe it is the responsibility of each and every language arts teacher in our province to provide students with the opportunity to experience language through a process. Make it your own. Read about it. Take the time necessary to provide your students, Saskatchewan's youth, with the opportunity to find their own voices.
Appendix: Within this appendix is a collection of tools that I have either made up or adapted from other sources to fit my Reader's and Writer's Workshop. The materials from other sources are reproduced here with the permission of their authors, while general permission is extended to other teachers to use and adapt the tools that I have developed, giving appropriate recognition where it is due.
Writer's Workshop Contract
Things to Write About in Your Reading Journal
The Home Reading Log
The Books I Have Read
Peer Evaluation - The 8A Booksale
Reading Long Term Projects
In-Class Library Sign-Out Sheet - 8A
In-Class Magazine Sign-Out Sheet - 8A
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