SEA Middle School Literacy Collaborative

"STRENGTHENING THE CORE"

Welcome to the first annual SEA Literacy Collaborative!

"Proficient readers carry a set of reading skills and strategies with them when they approach any text. In order to make meaning of a text, readers make use of strategies and decide when a given strategy is appropriate. [Our] goal is to make sure that each reader is not only using strategies, but also using them independently and with confidence."

- Jennifer Serravallo and Gravity Goldberg

Reader's Workshop is an opportunity to foster agency, build stamina, and develop a love of reading that students can carry with them for a lifetime. It is also an opportunity to personalize reading development, and to meet students wherever they are and to help them grow in their abilities to be strong readers.

STRENGTHENING THE CORE is an invitation for us to develop that core of reading strategies in our students, to deepen our practices around the core elements of Reader's Workshop, and to examine opportunities for greater integration of the strategies and skills embedded in the Common Core into our independent reading programs.

Guiding questions for the Collaborative 2020:

• How can we help students strengthen their reading skills through their use of reading strategies?
• How can we strengthen our practices around the core elements of workshop (mini-lessons, mentor texts, student choice, conferring, etc)?
• How can we more fully employ the workshop paradigm to reach our learning targets as outlined in the Common Core standards while continuing to foster choice, agency and a love of reading?
• What assessment tools can help us guide the learning during workshop?