There are many reasons you might be opening this book.
Perhaps your school or district has decided to adopt a workshop
approach to reading or writing and the Units of Study.
Perhaps you are new to a school where Units of Study are
already up and running, and you want to get up to speed. Or
maybe you want to try your hand at implementing a workshop
model of instruction using Units of Study and you are
looking for resources and a community of like-minded professionals
to help you get started.
Whatever way you have come to workshop instruction
and the Units of Study, this quick-start guide will help you
get your bearings enough that you can embark on the journey
of teaching reading and writing workshops, relying on
the Units of Study. It will not replace the Unit kits, but it will
help you get started, and above all, it will help you organize
a teaching and learning life for yourself. It will help you orient
yourself enough that you are in a great position to learn,
learn, learn once you actually embark on teaching language
arts with support from the Units of Study.
Although I’m writing this with the assumption that
you will be teaching either a reading or a writing workshop
for the first time, informed by the Units of Study
curriculum written by my Teachers College Reading and
Writing Project colleagues and me, in fact you may have
already been teaching the writing or the reading curriculum
without any orientation, and you may be turning to
this guide to fill some knowledge gaps. Or you may want
to quickly overview the resources in the Unit of Study kits
so you can decide whether to embark on that journey in
the first place.
This book will help you with predictable questions as you
begin to teach your reading or writing workshop and as you
hit the inevitable bumps along the way. It won’t give you
the full range of answers you’ll eventually need to become a
master workshop teacher. For that, you’ll turn to the Guides;
to the Units of Study Facebook groups; to your colleagues;
to administrators, coaches, and staff developers; and certainly,
to time spent learning from your own practice. This
book aims to give you information and tools to get all of that
learning up and started, as quickly as possible.
