Well folks, I have officially been Lucy-Calk-i-fied. I am now a converted, true believer.

I spent my 2nd week of summer at a Writing Workshop retreat held in Verona, Wisconsin by Wisconsin Education Innovations. For 3 days, we learned about Mini-lessons, conferring with students, teaching points, positive language, student ownership, independence, assessment, and every single awesome thing you have every wanted for your students.

The best part is, nothing was incredibly new or earth-shattering. I didn’t hear a single buzz word or idea that I haven’t heard of (or even tried!) before. The Teacher’s College methods just happens to provide a very systematic scope and sequence, as well as a flexible structure to follow. Truly, they were all things I’ve already been doing in my classroom, but without consistency or structure.

I’ll never be a believer in canned programs, so I was glad to learn that this method has so much room for flexibility and personalization. When you say you are “doing Writing Workshop”, to me that means making a commitment to keep your teaching points brief and do-able (10 minutes or under), provide the students with most of the hour to work (40 minutes daily), to confer daily with students and give them immediate, positive, and doable feedback that they can work on right away, and to closely monitor student progress in order to personalize their education. I especially loved the positive language component of our workshop discussions.

Writing Workshop doesn’t mean everything is spelled out for us, and any monkey could teach this class. It will still take an incredibly amount of knowledge and teacher craft to design mini-lessons, choose reading materials for your particular students, know best literacy practices, guide students to become strong readers and writers, and pace your lessons appropriately.

The best analogy I can give you is that Writing Workshop provides you with the ‘kitchen’, but you need to know your patrons, choose the recipe, select the ingredients, and learn to wield the tools effectively.

By the end of the workshop, I left with an excitement to get back to the classroom and try this out. I’m perhaps most excited about the daily conferences with students. This is what was missing in my curriculum. Conferring with students will allow me to personalize their education and differentiate for individual strengths and needs.

I also left the conference with a huge wish list of books. I just can’t decide which ones to buy first!

My current wish list:

1. Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core
2. The Reading Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo 
3. DIY Literacy Video Series by Kate Roberts & Maggie Beattie Roberts
4. Falling In Love with Close Reading by Christopher Lehman & Kathleen Roberts
5. Teaching Reading In Small Groups
6. Writing Pathways by Lucy Calkins
7. Assessing Writers by Carl Anderson
8. How’s It Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers by Carl Anderson
9. Conferring with Readers by Jennifer Serravallo
10. The Power of Grammar by Mary Ehrenworth
11. Catching Up on Conventions by Chantal Francois and Elisa Zonn
12. Notice and Note by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst 
13. In The Best Interest of Students by Kelly Gallagher