Middle School English Language Arts

Why Reading and Writing Workshop?

Our approach to instruction recognizes that “one size fits all” does not match the realities of classrooms and schools. When you walk into a workshop classroom at any given moment, you’ll see instruction that is designed to:

help teachers address each child’s individual learning,
explicitly teach strategies students will use not only the day they are taught, but whenever they need them,
support small-group work and conferring, with multiple opportunities for personalizing instruction,
tap into the power of a learning community as a way to bring all learners along,
build choice and assessment-based learning into the very design of the curriculum,
help students work with engagement so that teachers are able to coach individuals and lead small groups.

Units of Study in Reading

We want our middle grades students to become flexible, resilient readers who read for pleasure as well as for academic purposes. We want them to have a toolkit of strategies for dealing with difficulty, and we want them to know when and how to use those strategies. To accomplish such ambitious goals, we must reconsider how we think about our classrooms and our curriculum. We can no longer conceive of the curriculum as a few books kids will master. We now recognize the value and importance of teaching a repertoire of skills and strategies to help students be more powerful in any book.

Units of Study in Writing

The writing units of study help teachers provide their students with instruction, opportunities for practice, and concrete doable goals to help them meet and exceed any set of high standards. Each writing unit represents about five to six weeks of teaching, structured into three or four “bends in the road.” Rather than tackling the entire journey all at once, it’s easier to embark on this series of shorter, focused bends, pausing between each to regroup and prepare for the next.