Motivation:
One of the greatest challenges I have faced as an educator is motivating my students to read. As in most classrooms, I always have a hand full of students who are adamant readers - while the remainder claim to despise it. As an English Language Arts teacher, encouraging my students to find a love of literature has been a motivation for me. But how do I motivate my reluctant readers to see that reading is not just important for school, it is important to become a successful member of society?
To begin this experience, I conducted a survey to determine where students derived reading motivations from. The comparative results are indicated in the chart at the right. |
Collaborative Reading Workshop Defined:
Reading workshops have long been practiced in elementary schools. Generally, they include a mini-lesson, silent reading, and task responses with all instruction provided by the teacher. However, in a collaborative reading workshop, student choice as well as a variety of opportunities for interaction enhance the reading workshop practice in the middle school classroom. In the literature review and case studies presented below, 7th grade students were able to participate in a variety of interactive strategies such as Socratic seminar and reciprocal teaching in a workshop style environment.
Ivey (1999), in her article Reflections on Teaching Struggling Middle School Readers, identifies four generalizations that should provide insight for teachers into the necessity of addressing the root of the problem, “Struggling middle school readers like to read when they have access to materials that span the gamut of interests and difficulty levels (p. 373), want opportunity to share reading experiences with their teachers and their classmates (p. 375), need real purposes for reading (p. 377), [and] want to be and can become good readers (p. 378)” (Ivey, 1999, pgs. 372-380). The use of Reading Workshop as a collaborative approach in the classroom allows for and accommodates each of the generalizations presented by enabling teachers to assure success, afford choice, arrange collaboration, emphasize the importance, and empower a high reading volume. “It is a structure that allows what really matters to happen. It allows students to improve,” (Ellis & Marsh, 2007, p. 6).
ECI 523 - Teachers as a Researcher enabled me to identify an area of interest, create a research study, and follow through with the implementation of said study in order to better understand my own learning as a process. By creating a Reading Workshop for my students, I embraced the elements of choice I previously determined worked well for my student body and integrated a strategy that would allow me to identify specific areas of need in my students.
ECI 523 - Teachers as a Researcher enabled me to identify an area of interest, create a research study, and follow through with the implementation of said study in order to better understand my own learning as a process. By creating a Reading Workshop for my students, I embraced the elements of choice I previously determined worked well for my student body and integrated a strategy that would allow me to identify specific areas of need in my students.
All student images were published with written permission.