Ep58-Reasons_RW-WW_Isn't_Working.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.
Hey there and welcome to another episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast, I'm Rachael your host. Thanks for joining me today. As we begin today, I want to ask you a question. How do you feel your Readers and Writers Workshop time is going in your classroom so far? Are you happy with the progress that your students have made? Are you feeling like you're spinning your wheels, trying to get something to work and it's just not quite right yet? Are you panicking that it's January and your students still don't have those routines and procedures down and center time is a disaster. Are you feeling discouraged that your Readers and Writers Workshops just simply aren't working? Well, if that's how you're feeling, you are in luck, because today I'm going to share 7 reasons why your Readers and Writers Workshop isn't working, how we can fix it, and get you back up on your feet. A few episodes back in Episode 49, I talked about how it's not too late to press the restart button on the school year. That episode went live right at the end of 2020. I wanted to use that episode as a way to encourage you if you're feeling less than satisfied about how your school year is going. It's not too late to start over, tweak, and revamp and things in your classrooms. One of those things that you may want to restart is your Readers and Writers Workshop.
In today's episode, I'm going to dive deep into how you can restart and get back on track. Let's waste no time and get right at it. I bet you can guess the first reason your Readers and Writers Workshop isn't working. It's the number one reason why most things don't work in our class when we feel like things are getting out of control and that's because we don't have clear routines and procedures. I feel like I can talk about routines and procedures until I'm blue in the face. If you've been with me for a while, you know that I like to talk about routines and procedures because I mention it a lot. That's how important it is to have established and clear routines and procedures, especially for something as big as Readers and Writers Workshop. It's a huge chunk of your day. It's a time of your day where you're likely having students work on their own, being accountable and responsible for their own work and their own time. It's important that they know exactly what your expectations are. If you're like many teachers, my hand in the air too, you may have been tempted at times to skip this portion of your introduction to any Readers and Writers Workshop. You may have spent one or two quick mini lessons talking about your routines and procedures, but that's about it. If that is the case, that is probably one of the reasons your Readers and Writers Workshop isn't working the way that you want it to be. Now, I have an entire blog post over at the website where I talk about how to introduce routines and procedures, the types of routines and procedures that you should be covering in your classroom as a whole. I also have a free checklist that you can download just to have on hand for a quick reference to make sure that you're covering all your bases. However, specifically in Readers and Writers Workshop, the routines and procedures focused mainly on things like, 'Where will students keep their reading and writing materials?, How will they retrieve their reading and writing materials and put them away during Readers and Writers Workshop?, What are students allowed to do and not allowed to do?, If you don't want them sharpening their pencil in the middle of the work period, then you need to have a procedure for when it is okay to do that to avoid any confusion, What are your behavior expectations for centers, independent reading and writing and so on.' You want to outline very clearly what it is that you're expecting, how you want something to be done and then you practice. You practice, practice, practice, review.
The number one thing that I suggest when it comes to routines and procedures is to make your routines and procedures visible so that students can refer to it so that you can refer to it. There are no questions as to what your expectations are. I recommend using a T-chart that says "Looks like" on one side and "Sounds Like" on the other side. I've talked about this multiple times on this podcast but just real briefly, what you would do is, on the "Looks Like" side you would outline what a routine or a procedure for anything in your classroom and on the other side, what that routine or procedure should "Sound Like". If you're talking about the routine of how students are to be getting their reading and writing materials on the "Looks Like" side, it might say something like, "One student from each table group walks over to their designated area where you're keeping the materials, grabs all of the materials for their table, and then returns back to the seat and hands out the materials to each student in their table group." The "Sound Like" side might have things like "The student does it quietly. They don't stop to talk to other people on their way to the designated area and things like that." Keep in mind here, if you feel like you're being over-the-top specific, then you know what? You're doing it right. The more specific and the more detail you can give your students as to what your expectations are, the more likely they are to actually do it in the manner that you are hoping and asking for.
One other little bonus tip here that you may find helpful for some of those students who have a hard time remembering exactly how something is done, have a checklist or a rubric that you provide for students to keep them on track. This is going to be especially helpful in things like centers when you want students to follow a specific procedure for how you want them to complete the center. You might have a checklist at the center that they can always refer to, to make sure that they've completed all the important parts of that center. Again, I'm a big fan of keeping things visual so anytime you can put something visual for students to refer to, the better.
All right. The second reason your Readers and Writers Workshop may not be working is because you're making it too complicated. I've heard it said many times before, and I fully agree that we should always start simple and get fancy later. It's very tempting to look and see somebodies Readers and Writers Workshop up and running and it looks amazing. They've got so many different components and all the students are working beautifully together. We forget all of the steps, the work, and the energy that it took to get the students there. We're looking at their highlights reel and we haven't seen the back end that got them there. It's really important that if you're just getting started with Readers and Writers Workshop, that you start simple and get fancy later. Now, I should mention here that I have two episodes that I devoted completely to how to launch Readers Workshop and how to launch Writers Workshop. You can find those in Episode 29 and 30. I will link to both of those in the show notes. If you're wondering what components should be in your Writers and Readers Workshop, those are the episodes to go back to. Check them out because they go into a lot of detail there. I talk a lot about the different types of activities that students can be doing during the different parts of your workshop model, but that doesn't mean you need to do all of them right out of the gate. You can start simple with just one or two things that you're having your students do during the workshop time and then add on as your students feel more comfortable with the format and the flow. You can simplify, for example, your work period by meeting with one or two guided reading groups and then just having the rest of your students independently reading. Then maybe on Fridays you do centers instead of having your students do centers every day. It can get very complicated to have your students rotating through different activities and centers while you're meeting with a group, especially if you're just starting out. Start simple by just having guided reading groups and independent reading going on at the same time. Then when you feel confident that you've got that part down, then maybe you can sprinkle in a center or two. Do not feel pressured to have it all going on at the same time or right out of the gate. In fact, when I was doing Writers Workshop and I talk about this in the launching Writers Workshop episode, I actually only ever did centers on Fridays. It was too confusing. It was too loud. It was too much going on at the same time. I never made it past just doing centers on Fridays. I had students doing much more quieter and independent work at their seats the rest of the days. I kept it like that because it worked for us and it went well. To be completely honest, I think sometimes teachers think that if their students are doing all these crazy reading activities, they must be better teachers. The reality is, when in doubt, we should just be having our students reading. We don't give them enough time in the day to just enjoy reading without the expectations of doing a reading response with it or some other project to go along with what they're reading. Those types of activities certainly have their place in the classroom, but it shouldn't be the default that if a student is reading, they have to be doing some sort of activity to go along with it. It is completely okay, in my opinion, to just have students read and just have them enjoy it. When in doubt, read.
The third reason your Readers and Writers Workshop may not be working is because you're changing the activities too often. This kind of piggybacks off what I was just saying about making it too complicated because often we can make things too complicated by changing things up too often. This is particularly important to keep in mind when you're doing centers in your classroom. It is okay to keep your centers the same all year if you want. By the same, I mean you have the same types of centers, like a listening center, a word work center, a partner reading center, whatever it is that you want to have your students doing during the center time, keep them the same all year long, or at least for a month at a time before you change it out. That way, students can get really good at one particular center that doesn't mean that they're doing the exact same activity, but it means that they're following the same directions, the same expectations every single time. At your listening center, the students always know that they will have a story to listen to, they'll know exactly where to get it, how to get it, how to listen to it. They complete a similar activity for each story that they listen to. When they're done, they do the same X, Y, and Z steps to finish out the center. If you do that, you're not having to spend precious time reading skills and strategies when you could be teaching or giving them a new direction for a new center that you're introducing. Pick three to five different types of centers that you want your students to get really good at and then go over those directions, introduce them and review them often as your students get acquainted with it. Once the students have mastered those, then they're off and running. You don't have to say what students should be doing at the listening center each time or the word work center or so on. Another thing that I'd like to add to this, I mentioned this in the episodes on launching Readers and Writers Workshop, is that especially at the beginning of the year or whenever you're beginning Readers and Writers Workshop in your classroom, you should only introduce one new thing at a time. If you give your students five different directions, four or five different centers, it's likely that they're not going to remember all the details. Just give them one different center. Maybe during your work period with the whole philosophy of start simple get fancy later as you're introducing the centers, maybe you just have one group do that center each day while the rest of the students are independently reading or maybe meeting with you for guided reading. Then groups will rotate through that center and by the end of the week they will have each had a chance to test out the center. Now I know that it seems like, 'Gosh, this is going to take forever for me to introduce centers to my class'. But remember, if you're doing it right the first time, you're not going to be backtracking later on in the year. If things are getting too complicated, maybe it's because you're changing up the activities too often.
The next reason your Readers and Writers Workshop may not be working the way you want it to be is because you're using centers as a way to teach new concepts instead of using them as review centers. I would venture to say that we should never be asking our students to do something for the first time in a small group setting like a center for Readers and Writers Workshop, without modeling it for them and giving them the support in the scaffolds that they need to have some of that background information they need before going out and doing it on their own. If you do, you're just looking for students to be frustrated which in turn will make you frustrated when things aren't done correctly. I always use my centers as a way to review something that perhaps we have been talking about for a while or even as a way to spiral review and bring back things that we've talked about in previous weeks and have them practice it again on their own at a center. For example, when I would teach a reading comprehension strategy, if you've been with me, you know that I am going through a series all about reading comprehension strategies. I will link to the ones that we already have going on so far in the show notes but I always model, introduce, and practice and practice again these strategies with my students.
Then one of the ways that I have them practice it on their own in a center is to use a LINKtivity interactive learning guide where they again see the same type of information that we had been talking about and I had been modeling for them in a mini lesson setting. Now they're seeing it again in digital activity where they can practice it on their own. The activities, if you're familiar with them, they all follow the same format so if you've been doing activities with your students all year, this one will be no different. They'll just pick up and they'll be able to know exactly what to do because they've done it before which ties back into keeping your activities the same so they know the directions and how to do them on their own. I will link to some of the LINKtivities that I'm referring to in the show notes so you can check them out and potentially use them with your students as well.
All right, let's move on. I have two more reasons why your Readers and Writers Workshop may not be working the way that you had hoped. The sixth reason is because you are not giving students enough choice. As teachers, it's very tempting to want to take control of everything that goes on in our classroom. When we do that, we kind of stifle the creativity from our students so it's important that we don't dictate everything that our students do. We don't want to tell them exactly what to be reading. Of course, we want to give them some guidelines so that they can choose appropriate books and we want to give them some guidelines in writers workshop, where we give them some guidelines as to how to write a specific writing genre. But we don't always want to tell them exactly what to do. Choice boards come in really handy here because it gives students a variety of ways to illustrate a specific skill. If you want to incorporate choice boards into your Readers and Writers Workshop, that's a great way to give students choice and to hold back from telling them exactly what to do. I talked a lot about the importance, the implications, and the applications for how to give students more choice in the classroom over at Episode 25, which I will link to in the show notes. It's got lots of great ways that you can start to incorporate more choice in your classroom that I think will translate really nicely into your Readers and Writers Workshop as well so make sure you check out that episode if you missed it or if you want to review it.
The final reason why Readers and Writers Workshop may not be working in your classroom is because we're not celebrating enough or the small wins that are going on in your classroom. This is important and I kept it last for a reason because so often, and I'm guilty of this myself, is that we have our checklist, we have our standards, we have all those things that we need to check, check, check and cover in our classroom that we are so focused on that that we don't stop to really assess and really see what students are doing well and point it out so that students can feel good about what they're accomplishing. When we do this, students are going to enjoy the things that we're doing more. They're going to be motivated to do a better job. When you start to celebrate those small wins both academically and behaviorally and you let your students know the great things that they're doing, they're going to want to do more of it. Never underestimate the power of an 'atta girl' and 'atta boy' in your Readers and Writers Workshop and, of course, in any area of your classroom.
There you have it. Seven reasons why your Readers and Writers Workshop isn't working and how you can get back on track with some small tweaks. Let's run through them one more time. The first reason your Readers and Writers Workshop may not be working is because you don't have clear routines and procedures in place for your students to refer to. The second reason is you're making it too complicated by trying to do too many things at once. We're going to start simple and we're going to get fancy later. The third reason is that you're changing up your activities too often so that students don't get a chance to get good at one particular type of center or activity that you're doing in your workshop. The next reason is you're using centers as a way to teach new concepts instead of using them as review. Therefore, students are frustrated and feeling like they can't complete the task that you're giving them. The next reason is you're not giving your students enough choice and therefore students aren't enjoying the workshop time in your classroom, which of course leads to all sorts of issues. That leads right into the last one, which is that we're not celebrating those small wins in our Readers and Writers Workshop. When we do that and we change to incorporate more celebrations, our students are going to perk up and they're really going to want to perform at their best.
I hope you can look at some of these reasons and see where maybe your Readers and Writers Workshop is falling short and what you can do to get back on track and finish out the year strong. It's never too late to get those results that you want to see. I hope some of these tips will get you there faster. I also have two resources that I've put together over the years. One is for how to successfully launch Readers Workshop, and the other is for how to successfully launch Writers Workshop. So in addition to the podcast episodes that I've mentioned that kind of walk through how to launch each workshop successfully, I have the printable and digital resources to help support you even more. If you want to check out either of those resources, I will link to them in the show notes.
All right. I hope you have a great rest of your day. I talked about a lot of episodes and resources in this episode, so be sure to head over to the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/58. All of the links and resources will be right there waiting for you so be sure to check it out. Have a great rest of your week. I will be back again next week, as always. Same time, same place. Bye for now.
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