Three Days at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project

Some take-aways from my recent three-day "institute" about student book groups at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. More on some of these later...

• Stickies are a cool presentation tool

• Notebooks are good, and other people are amazing at making their notebook pages look great, even if I'm not

• Reading in class is still a revolutionary act

• We can create the culture we believe in--but it takes real planning and work
• TCRWP believes in a culture of reading, and they have a clear plan for how to create it

• Reading in class for extended periods is very important
• Teachers are incredibly resistant to this practice
• The entire TCRWP "workshop method" can be seen as a clever, round-about way to try to make teachers comfortable with just letting their students read

• * Our culture demands that we back our claims up with "research" or "science"

• * It's hard to come up with good questions about literature
• The "workshop" format the TCRWP promotes seems excellent (it minimizes, and maybe sharpens, direct instruction and group discussion, while maximizing time in class to actually read), but the questions they used in their mini-lessons just weren't that great (level 1 and 2 questions, mostly, if you use the 4QM framework, and, more importantly, not phrased very crisply) 

• * It's hard to run a good class
• The leader of our smaller group, when she was setting up our book groups, said, "It's important not to just put the books on a table at the back of the room and say, Okay, go find a book you like and get in groups" -- but then she did exactly that. Teaching is hard!

• The street food in Morningside Heights is way better now than when I lived there in the late 90s.