Instructional Decision Making Within Individual Conferencing: A Self-Study of Teaching Within Reader’s Workshop

• In Event: Self-Study Researchers Make a Difference for Innovation in Practice

Abstract

Current practice in literacy education in the United States is often discussed as a complex duality whereby teachers are asked to focus on specific components of literacy (Wilson, Martens, & Ayra, 2005), such as fluency, phonemic awareness, and vocabulary knowledge, while at the same time implementing programs within a district that are broader in scope, such as the readers’ workshop (Orehovec & Alley, 2003) and writer’s workshop (Fletcher & Portalupi, 2001)]. Instruction that focuses on specific components of reading or writing often highlights isolated skills, while instruction within a reading or writing workshop tends to focus more on the process of reading or writing with skills addressed as they emerge within that process. As an elementary classroom teacher, I recognize the pressures schools face in improving student performance in reading and writing, and see those pressures used as rationales for focusing more on specific isolated skills to increase performance on assessments. Yet I am intrigued by the idea of providing students with more opportunities to read (and write) for authentic purposes with the intent of developing critical problem solvers who have both the drive to read and write and the skills needed to do so. Through my work at the university in literacy education and in my partnership with the district literacy coach on my teaching of reading and writing, I have come to appreciate the complexity of literacy learning as a dynamic process of problem solving, critical thinking, and action. It is in this context that I became interested in self-studying my own practice using readers’ workshop as the instructional frame for my teaching.

In this self-study, I am interested in individual reading conference within the reading workshop, answering the research question: What influences my teaching decisions during reading workshop individual conferences? The study was conducted over a semester of instruction in the spring of 2013. Three sources of data informed me about my practice of teaching through readers’ workshop. I took daily/weekly journal notes of my practice during reader’s workshop. I also transcribed the weekly meetings with the literacy coach. The third source of data were the children’s reader response journal entries and my subsequent responses to their entries. The data were analyzed using a constant comparative method of analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) to determine categories and common themes across journal entries, transcripts of meetings with the literacy coach, and my responses to the students’ reader response journal entries. Data categories were collapsed into larger categorical descriptions that reflected three emerging themes: (1) the influence of text structures (story grammar or nonfiction text structures) on both student response and instructional planning, (2) the relationship of students’ personal connections within their readings to student engagement and to depth of skills addressed, and (3) the tensions in reframing my teaching practice through reader’s workshop.

Authors

• Angel Munson

• Deborah L. Tidwell, University of Northern Iowa