The Workshop Model for Reading and Writing 6-12: Bringing the OECD Compass to Life Daily

In our two-day workshop, we'll explore how to develop student agency by ensuring students can read and write with a clear purpose, take responsibility for their learning with guidance from a mentor (the teacher and others), and develop the skills they need to make a difference in the world.

The workshop model promotes students as readers, writers, and thinkers as they engage in meaningful and relevant work. Choice, community, time, and response are central to the workshop model. We’ll examine how the daily structure of a class and design of work that matters support the OECD Compass Framework.

CONNECT & ENGAGE

We’ll begin by building community through a shared writing task: writing a Rambling Autobiography. Then we’ll explore the challenges that secondary literacy teachers face including a decrease in student engagement, a concern that students may not be ready for the demands of college reading and writing, and a tendency for students to comply rather engage.

We’ll explore the OECD Compass, raising questions and possibilities for how the framework addresses the challenges many teachers experience. All of this thinking will be done to set the stage for the ways the reading and writing workshop model is necessary to support student agency and engagement.

LEARN

For this portion of the workshop, we’ll engage in a simulation that explores these essential questions: How can teens make an authentic difference in the world? Or can they?

We begin with a reading workshop in which participants have a choice of articles to read and videos to watch in order to build an informed argument. We then move into a writing workshop that includes examining mentor text, drafting, receiving feedback, and sharing publicly.

REFLECT & APPLY

The remaining time will be devoted to participants designing a mini-workshop unit. In their design, they will determine what explicit teaching must occur and what teaching might be needed. Those teaching points will become topics for mini-lessons, conference focal points, and small group work. They will also determine mentor text that students can use as models.

The culminating activity will be creating a concept map which they tie together the many ideas we’ve explored including agency, engagement, relevance, and choice.

OUTCOMES

• Apply the critical elements of a workshop to their classroom: time, choice, response, vision, tools, community;
• Connect the OECD Compass to the workshop model;
• Draft a mini workshop unit;
• Use mentor text so that students learn craft, genre, and conventions;
• Implement robust structures for response/feedback and assessment, including conferring.

VIEW STEVI QUATE'S VIDEO

• Please bring your laptop/tablet to this session.

• Please bring a notebook to this session.

Save paper and effort where possible!

For your convenience, and to support our efforts in being "green", all handouts/files posted here have been notated with an A, B, C or D indicating the following:

(A) hardcopies needed at workshop
(B) electronic version on laptop is sufficient (for viewing during the workshop)
(C) required reading PRIOR to the workshop
(D) file not needed for workshop itself, but simply material of additional interest/reference

(A) The Workshop Model for Grades 6-12