[LIT] Workshop Approach

[Cristy Weggelaar]

Hello! I am new to this board and am excited about all the discussions that are going on here.  I am a fairly new teacher who has absolutely fallen in love with Atwell's approach.  I taught high school and middle school English at a small private school, so I had free reign to experiment with it.

Reading workshop: I can't imagine an approach that garners as much enthusiasm and motivation among students for reading.  The results of my workshop were truly amazing and the difference in student motivation as a result of the workshop approach were visible almost immediately. I attempted the new approach in the second semester of the last school year and in that semester I had several middle school students who read close to 40 books each.  Although I did not calculate it, I would guess my class average to hover around 20 books in one semester. If I'd had another semester of workshop with that group, I would expect the semester average to increase slightly.  My whole-group lessons using short stories and poems to study literature on a deeper level were not nearly as effective as the individual reading component of the class, so that's something I need to work on. Also, I had a hard time finding response activities that excited the class.  Reading
 workshop was not quite as popular at the high school level, although I would still consider it a success. I am currently scouting for books that describe what reading workshop might look like at the high school level, if anyone has any suggestions!

Warm success story. I had a student who never read and had a hard time completing regular assignments. He much preferred video games to school work, so I guess you could say that he is your typical middle school boy.  A few weeks into the workshop, he discovered the Artemis Fowl series and we literally could not pull him away from books from that moment on.  I think he read close to 40 books last semester and he even told me - seriously - that books are actually BETTER than video games!!  He got in trouble for reading under his desk in other classes!! I can't imagine that happening in any other class situation and I had similar results with other students.

Writing workshop: This was also successful, but not nearly as successful as the reading workshop. For writing, choice is not enough. Students NEED to know how to write essays, but for the workshop to be successful, the teacher needs to form a community of inquiry in which the students are motivated to write essays about their own interests.  That was the hard part for me. My students had a hard time producing work in bulk and I had a hard time getting them to produce even two pieces in a quarter - I would love some advice on how to get them writing more prolifically.

Laura - I would LOVE to hear more about your experience at CTL!!