As I near the end of my thirteenth year in the middle school ELA classroom, I can say that my philosophy and teaching style has evolved and continues to evolve and change. I expect that it will until the end of my teaching career. One of the biggest changes over the last few years has been the shift from teaching using a traditional Reading Workshop model to using reading units. I’m going to define what I mean by both. Please keep in mind that the definitions I provide are based on the education I received about Reading Workshop and how I chose to implement it. Also, as you will see by my definitions below, I am still using a Reading Workshop approach during the reading units.
Traditional Reading Workshop: A literacy framework is used daily that involves a teacher-selected interactive read aloud, a reading minilesson, and reading minilesson application/independent reading time where the teacher is simultaneously doing either small group reading instruction (guided reading, literature circles) or holding one-on-one reading conferences. Students select their own independent reading books and read the books at their pace. The independent reading book is also the book students use to complete their reading minilesson application. Reading minilessons are selected based on what students need as readers and can be “process minilessons” or “academic minilessons.”
Reading Units: A literacy framework is used daily that involves an interactive read aloud, a reading minilesson, and reading minilesson application/independent reading time where the teacher is simultaneously doing either small group reading instruction (guided reading, literature circles, reading strategy groups) or holding one-on-one reading conferences. The interactive read aloud and students’ independent reading material all fits into the same theme or genre. There is a start and an end to the reading unit where the interactive read aloud and student texts are finished within that time frame. The reading minilessons are based on priority reading standards, spiral within the unit and across reading units, and are focused on the theme/genre of the reading unit.
Next, I’m going to break down the problems I had while teaching using a traditional Reading Workshop approach and how these problems were solved when I shifted into a reading units approach. Please hear me when I say that teaching reading to middle school students is never going to be a seamless, problem-free experience. However, I truly feel that the reading units approach did drastically improve many of my frustrations I had while using the Traditional Reading Workshop approach.
Problem #1: My Interactive Read Aloud selections were all within the same genre.
I’m a huge fan of realistic fiction. When I make selections for my personal independent reading, realistic fiction it is. Because of this, I naturally chose realistic fiction read alouds and would throw in a historical fiction read aloud every once in a while to really mix it up. Interactive read aloud should be a time where we introduce students to a variety of genres.
I’ll never forget the first year I shifted to reading units and entered into our mythology-inspired fiction unit. I was dreading it. I didn’t know much about mythology, and if I’m being totally honest, I didn’t have too much interest in learning. I read Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters aloud to students while students simultaneously participated in literature circles with the books Argos, Pandora Gets Jealous, Beast Keeper (Beasts of Olympus Series), or Percy Jackson and the Titan’s Curse. The unit was an absolute hit, with me and with my students. It made me a little sad to know that I stayed in my realistic fiction comfort zone for far too long.
Now that I’ve switched to reading units, I love that my students are guaranteed to be exposed to a variety of genres across the school year and have the chance to discover something they may have never tried on their own. It’s also important to practice reading skills in different genres because different students have strengths and weaknesses in reading depending on the genre they’re reading in.
Here is an example of the order to reading units across one school year: Realistic Fiction, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Expository Nonfiction, Myth & Fairytale-Inspired Fiction, Memoir, Historical Fiction, Narrative Nonfiction.
Problem #2: My gradebook lacked evidence of student learning in relation to reading.
When I used a traditional Reading Workshop approach, grading felt so random. I would have students complete some reading responses and grade those, I would grade a reading minilesson application every once and awhile, and I would also grade students’ participation and reading comprehension during guided reading or literature circles every now and then. Pretty much every grade I gave for reading was formative in nature with no summative assessments.
On the flip side with reading units, I have an assessment plan with each reading unit. This involves selecting a formative assessment to go with each priority reading standard that I will assess, give feedback, and reteach on as needed. These formative assessments based on our priority reading standards directly build the end-of-unit summative assessment.
When we started doing summative assessments at the end of reading units, my ELA colleagues and I would joke that we felt like math teachers. It felt weird at first to give the summative assessment, but it also made the formative assessments meaningful because we knew what to help students work toward proficiency on. You know what else it did? It helped us not rely solely on our state test, universal reading screener, and benchmark assessment data to make decisions about our readers.
All of a sudden, we had amazing data based on what we were actually teaching and how students were responding to our universal reading instruction. It seems like every meeting we’re in we’re being told to, “Show the data, show the data, show the data.” It never felt right to show data like universal screeners that students take three times a year that I as a classroom teacher truly didn’t have much control over. Using data from our common summative assessments across grade levels or even within our classrooms was such a relief.
Problem #3: My curriculum didn’t spiral.
When I did traditional Reading Workshop, my curriculum was a “one and done” approach. What I mean by this is I would pick a time during the year to teach summarizing, and then I would spend 1-2 weeks where every day was a reading minilesson on summarizing. After I was done with that, I would take another 1-2 weeks and teach reading minilessons on figurative language. Next, up, I would take the next few weeks to teach reading minilessons on theme. You might be sitting there right now thinking, “Kasey, what is wrong with that?” Trust me, at the time, I thought the same thing, but looking back, there was a lot wrong with it.
I taught a reading skill, like summarizing, one time in isolation across an entire school year. I then expected students to automatically apply that reading skill again months later without any instruction or even worse, I never revisited the reading skill again during that school year. Students only had the chance to apply the reading skill to the read aloud book and independent reading book we were reading at that time. Summarizing a chapter in a realistic fiction book is a totally different skill than summarizing a nonfiction article from a magazine. By teaching a reading skill at one point during the school year, we are robbing students of the opportunity to try that reading skill out across different texts and genres throughout the school year.
In reading units, I teach every priority reading standard (I’ve selected six of them: R.1, R.2, R.3, R.4, R.5, R.6) three times throughout the unit during EVERY unit across the school year. Because I do 6-7 units during the school year, this means that every priority reading standard gets taught 18-21 times through different reading minilessons designed to teach that standard. Students also get a chance to try out the same reading skills again and again but to different reading genres.
I am from Wisconsin and still live here, so bear with me as I explain this analogy. I picture all of my students as little minnows in a bucket. The first reading unit when I teach a reading skill, I take a scoop and get a few minnows. The second unit I go into the bucket and take another scoop. By the time the last reading unit rolls around, I’ve taken 7 scoops into my bucket of resilient minnows. There are some students that won’t learn a reading skill until the very last time around. There are some students that will be able to apply the reading skill to one genre but struggle applying it to another. The beauty of teaching in a curriculum that spirals though is students will have a lot of chances to learn a reading skill and reach proficiency while applying the skill to a variety of genres. Because it’s not about when a student learns something, it’s all about if they learn it.
Problem #4: I lost perspective of grade level reading standards and what student proficiency on these standards should look like.
In traditional Reading Workshop, I was very reactive to my students’ needs with my universal instruction. Because of my role as literacy coach, I alternate the grade level of ELA that I teach every year between 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. I started to realize after a few years that it seemed like we retaught the same thing again and again and again without our curriculum getting progressively more difficult (as it should when students move up a grade level). I spent a lot of time designing my universal curriculum to address my most struggling readers, and in the meantime, I think a majority of my students lost interest, acted out because of boredom, and suffered because I was slow-playing things way too much.
We can’t continuously reteach and reteach and reteach the same thing year after year. We also can’t start with what we want to teach and hope it lines up to a standard. We have to begin with the standard, decide how we want to assess it, and THEN decide how we want to teach it. My struggling readers need me to utilize other things like UDL principles, reading intervention outside of our ELA block, and guided reading/reading conferences to address reading gaps during our ELA block.
When I switched to reading units, the sequence of reading minilessons within each reading unit is designed to address grade level reading standards. It is also important to be matching reading units with grade-appropriate texts in interactive read aloud and student texts so that students experience an increasingly difficult gradient of texts across grade levels.
Problem #5: I didn’t understand the need for common instructional practices AND common curriculum in and across grade levels.
The training I received to become a literacy coach focused heavily on providing professional development and coaching teachers in common instructional practices. When our school transitioned to using a traditional Reading Workshop format, all of the teacher training and coaching involved around the instructional practices we would need: interactive read aloud, reading minilessons using the gradual release of responsibility, reading conferences, guided reading, and literature circles to name a few. This is what we focused on. We had common definitions for what guided reading was and used the same framework for it. As students went from one grade level to the next, these instructional practices were common throughout our middle school.
This is a great and beautiful thing, but what I quickly realized as I spent time with each grade level is while our common instructional practices were firmly in place, our common curriculum was not. In other words, we were very clear on the how, but we were all over the place within and across grade levels with the what. In order to truly be a system that works efficiently, we needed to have both the how and the what in place.
Reading units provided an opportunity for us to do that. We continued to use the same Reading Workshop instructional practices we had learned about and worked years on implementing consistently, but now we were also focused on having common reading units and common reading minilessons within those units.
Problem #6: I spent too much time on “process-based” minilessons.
Another shift that I made when I switched to reading minilessons is the removal of “process-based” minilessons from my reading curriculum. I used to focus an entire lesson on reading minilessons like:
-How to use my classroom library.
-How to read quietly during independent reading time.
-How to do our independent reading check-in.
I still definitely teach students how to do these things, talk about them, model them, revisit how to do them throughout the school year, etc., but I do not take an entire instructional day to do it. It’s just built in through the processes and routines we establish and practice day after day. I now make it a priority to do an “academic-based” reading minilesson daily.
This also relates to the “First 20 Days” concept. If your students have never done Reading Workshop before, it may be beneficial to strategically establish routines and expectations. However, if your students have done Reading Workshop before, it is not necessary to do the same minilessons year after year. Still spend time the first weeks of school establishing how class will be structured and what students’ expectations throughout different parts of the class period are, but do this while students have an academically-rigorous, moving curriculum.
Problem #7: There was no starting or stopping points. It just was a continuous blob.
When I used traditional Reading Workshop, I just kept teaching and teaching and teaching reading minilesson after reading minilesson day after day after day. I would switch out my interactive read aloud and start rounds of guided reading and literature circles sporadically, but it all just ended up blurring together. It was hard to plan a scope and sequence because it seemed like an endless, impossible task.
Reading units provided me with the opportunity to plan a start date and an end date for a given unit. I could then plan my interactive read aloud and students’ independent reading to start and end as well. It helped with pacing, and it helped keep the Reading Workshop format feeling fresh and new as we used it across the school year.
Final Thoughts
I am never a fan of just totally throwing out something you have worked hard to establish. Traditional Reading Workshop was a starting place for me and layering reading units on top of a Reading Workshop format is where I have found my sweet spot with reading instruction. Pairing this with learning about Standards Based Grading has been another major learning curve. I suspect that I will continue to be a learning and tweaking, trial and error journey as my teaching career continues. That’s just what I signed up for when I became a teacher, and I’m totally okay with that.
Next Steps
Ready to make the jump into reading units with your middle school students? I’ve got you covered, and I PROMISE they will not disappoint! Check out the reading units I have available today by clicking on the links below. If you’d like a sneak peek inside the reading units, watch the video below.
Realistic Fiction Reading Unit
Science Fiction/Fantasy Reading Unit
Historical Fiction Reading Unit
Expository Nonfiction Reading Unit (Short Articles)
GROWING Year-Long Reading Workshop Curriculum (All 7 Reading Units Included)
