About Reader's Workshop: Building a Frame for Reading

In less than two weeks I'll be presenting my first professional development on Reader's Workshop. I'm fighting a bit of an uphill battle with it - I teach gifted and talented, and the upper end of the school, so a lot of people think that whatever I say, won't be applicable to them because they're lower school/learning support/special education etc. Also, there's the fact that Reader's Workshop is not particularly well known in Australia (though there were Australian books published about it a couple of decades ago), making it harder to explain where I'm coming from.


So I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading about Reader's Workshop, and trying to get my thoughts into some sort of presentable shape. I thought I'd try sharing them here first!


Reader's Workshop is a Frame

Reader's Workshop shouldn't be thought of as a program, or a set of unmovable steps, or something you can buy which will solve all your reading problems. Primarily, it's a framework, within which you are free to make alterations, changes, swaps and bends as you see fit.

The frame is a typical rectangle, with four sides - extended time for students to read, a range of books for students to choose from, student response to reading and a workshop structure. When the four sides are 'nailed' together, they hold something pretty powerful - a community of readers.

Why do we want children to be readers?
Students who are good readers

• ain an understanding of people different to themselves
• gain knowledge of places different to their places
• gain an understanding of people who are like them 
• can always amuse themselves - as long as they are carrying a book
• can explore history and the future
• perform better in all aspects of English, as well as better in maths, science and history
• develop better vocabularies - even if they're not always sure how to pronounce those big words . . .

I'll go into this a bit more next time - in the meantime, please let me know if you have any information on how Reader's Workshop works with early-childhood/learning support/special education students - I need all the evidence I can get!