What's New in Literacy Teaching? by Karen Wood

Author:Karen Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

This vignette takes us into Mary’s classroom where, every day, children write within a workshop that allows them to fulfill their agendas as authors. Mary uses a structure that is familiar to many who have read the work of Calkins (1994), Fletcher and Portalupi (2001), Ray (1999), and Ray and Laminack (2001). They advocate for teaching processes that include a small chunk of time for a short lesson that derives from the needs of the writers in the class, a big chunk of time for students to write while the teacher individually instructs or confers with them, and another small chunk of time for students to share for celebratory response or specific suggestions from the Author’s Chair. Mary adds a fourth component—another small chunk of time—for students to self-evaluate or reflect.

This series ponders the question, What’s new in literacy teaching? When we asked ourselves this question, we doubted if the master teachers of yesterday would feel that much has changed at all with the important aspects of writers’ workshops. In our experience working in schools as teacher educators, we know many colleagues like Mary who have always believed in the value of instruction undergirded by student choice in writing, teaching that recognizes students as problem solvers, and instruction that promotes the craft of writing through the art of practice.

We also see teachers showing their students how to read like writers who gather inspiration for their own writing by seeking out mentor writers and mentor texts (Fletcher, 2011). After all, writers have looked to others for centuries. It’s only natural that they continue to do so.

What we see as the sign of our new times are more and more teachers who feel constrained by district-driven agendas that have ushered in more prescriptive writing lessons, more emphasis on assessment, and less consideration for the diverse social, cultural, linguistic, and heritage knowledge of those who write within their writers’ workshops.

Thus, rather than carry forward with what is new in theory related to writers’ workshops, we wish to take a look back at the basic, foundational structure of the workshop as it applies to the burgeoning, diverse, and hopeful faces of the millennial generation. In essence, we intend to go retro.

We wish to look again at minilessons as a place where mentor authors (both child and adult authors alike) take center stage to teach the lessons needed by the students. Then, we look at the conference—a space where the student sets the agenda and the teacher uses inquiry to guide the response. We revisit the Author’s Chair to show it as a space where students direct peer feedback. Finally, we reexamine reflection. We intend to reintroduce the student and the knowledge the student brings as the driver of the workshop, guided through the terrain by the teacher. While these may be aged structures, they continue to be relevant to teachers today as we show methods from the past to teach new generations of students how to engage in contemporary literacies.

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