Nancie Atwell leaves a detailed and thoughtful comment on her school. My response is below. (NB: revised from a 6 PM post, as I kept thinking and thinking about it tonight.)
Dear Dina,
Your blog has left me both inspired and confused – inspired by the accomplishments and engagement of your students and your own obvious success as a workshop teacher, and confused by the distortion of conditions for teaching and learning at my current school, CTL, and in my previous classroom at Boothbay Elementary.
To set the record straight:
- At Boothbay Elementary, I, too, took just five or six weeks – usually by Columbus Day – to help my seventy-five students learn workshop procedures and expectations.
- At CTL, I teach Monday through Thursday, in an 85-minute language arts block. (I also teach history, and I run the school.)
- I assign my students to write for a total of one hour for weekend homework; this is because I believe Thursday-Monday is too long for them to go without writing, momentum-wise.
- I assign students to read for half an hour every night, seven nights a week. My book The Reading Zone provides the practical details for this assignment and requirements and conditions of my reading workshop today.
- CTL students are not “standard.” On our website, we state that we cannot offer a special education program separate from the classroom; however, we work happily and continuously with mainstreamed students with special needs, including ADHD, dyslexia, and other visual processing disorders.
- CTL’s “detailed application process” is a one-page form, followed by a child visiting the school for a morning.
- The “substantial parent involvement” is is a requirement of two hours of labor each year, which helps us lessen maintenance expenses and keep tuition low.
- Tuition fees cover about 60% of school costs at CTL, which means that I fundraise twelve months a year in order to keep alive a non-profit lab school where faculty develop and refine methods that we hope will make a positive impact in public school classrooms. That’s our mission.
- Finally, in any given year at CTL, I’ve dealt with more problems with parents than in my entire previous public school career combined.
I am impressed with your commitment to your students and to reading and writing workshop; the rubrics you and they develpoed are terrific and likely to be helpful to other teachers. The kids you teach are fortunate; clearly, the work you’re doing will influence them for a lifetime. But I am mystified as to why your accounts of your teaching need me as a straw woman.
Sincerely yours,
Nancie
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Dear Nancie,
First of all, I thank you deeply for visiting the blog and taking the time to write. I am delighted and honored.
No straw woman arguments or distortions are intended by my comments on CTL, and I apologize front and center for any factual errors that I made in my post.
That being said, I still have questions about how the private standing and entrance requirements of CTL affect the diversity and challenges of its student population. I am certain CTL entrance and enrollment requirements are minimal, fair, and well-supported, as you state. However, it still seems to me that it’s impossible to get around the fact that even with the lightest administrative touch, the absence of a special ed program (or ESL program?), the necessary charging of tuition, required parental involvement, and even a required physical visit at CTL all self-select for families and students who are already predisposed to succeed at workshop.
Most importantly, though, I want to make clear that I bring this up not to malign the school or the workshop model– Lord knows, if I were Queen of Education, I’d have every school look like CTL. I mean only to point out that acknowledging the differences between CTL and, say, Edison High School in Washington DC, is necessary– and not a good enough reason to dismiss workshop as unsustainable. (I’m sure you’ve encountered that argument before.) In fact it’s exactly because the public schools are not CTL that our need for the joys and strengths of the workshop approach is desperate. I hope that’s a little clearer.
I do want to quote in In The Middle in regards to how long it took you at Boothbay to teach procedures at workshop, because it’s important that we in the public schools on a quarter system understand it correctly. In your chapter on evaluation (page 225), you state “At the end of the first quarter I couldn’t base grades on progress towards goals because there hadn’t yet been time or an occasion to set them,” and then go on to explain that you based that first round of grades on “good faith participation in workshop.” I took this to mean that the majority of the quarter was spent teaching and practicing the various procedures the children needed to succeed independently in the workshop model. Did I misinterpret?
Again, I appreciate your visit very much. I will hold onto your kind comments for encouragement.
Very sincerely,
Dina