Transforming Our Teaching Through Reading/Writing Connections

In Transforming Our Teaching Through Reading/Writing Connections, Regie shows how to raise students' achievement in reading and writing through a model that interconnects these two literacies. The opening sessions ask teachers to articulate their beliefs and align them with their practices. Subsequent sessions show how students' literacy understandings are deepened when children's work in writing is used to enhance their reading, and vice versa.

Transforming Our Teaching Through Reading/Writing Connections
includes the following professional development sessions and video segments:

Session 1: Welcome to Regie Routman in Residence
Introduces the core beliefs about teaching and learning that support this professional development program and gives an overview of the structure of the PD sessions.

Session 2: Applying an Optimal Learning Model to Your Teaching
Participants explore a three-part model for teaching and learning that makes teaching easier, more intentional, and more joyful because it scaffolds students’ independence.

Session 3: Examining Our Beliefs About Reading/Writing Connections
Participants view a video of two teachers and examine their own current beliefs about reading/writing connections with an eye to developing a consistent set of goals and practices across the grades.

Session 4: Setting Up the Classroom for Independent Readers and Writers
Participants learn how to set up excellent classroom libraries with and for students for maximum access and enjoyment as well as to begin to assess what students know about effective reading and writing.

Session 4: Setting Up the Classroom for Independent Readers and Writers Video Clip

Session 5: Reading and Writing Lots of Texts
Participants see firsthand how to maximize the daily literacy block and how teacher demonstrations, reading aloud, shared writing, and shared reading of fiction and nonfiction narrative texts efficiently and joyfully promote independent reading and writing of authentic texts.

Session 6: Reading to Writing: Creating Relevant Texts
Participants learn to use shared writing as a scaffold for writing and reading class-authored texts as well as how to use scaffolded conversations with students to support them in successfully writing and reading texts.

Session 7: Shared Writing to Reading
Participants further develop the possibilities of shared writing, learning how to set an authentic purpose for their writing, set goals for revision, and guide small-group and whole-group revision.

Session 8: Word Work: Teaching and Assessing Skills in Context
Participants learn how to teach, develop, and practice students’ word skills during read-alouds, shared reading, shared writing, and independent practice.

Session 9: Writers Become Readers Through Daily Writing
Participants learn to guide students to narrow an important topic, brainstorm a list before writing, write with elaboration and detail, revise based on feedback in public content conferences, and connect writing with reading so that both disciplines improve.

Session 10: Reading and Writing Book Reviews
Participants learn how to use book reviews to reinforce the reading/writing connection, showing students how and why book reviews are used in the world and guiding students to write and publish reviews that display their abilities to analyze and summarize.

Session 11: Reading and Writing Poetry
Participants learn how to use free-verse poetry to quickly take students through the Optimal Learning Model and the process of writing. This provides all students the benefits of demonstration, shared writing, whole-class conferring, composing, and publishing.

Session 12: Reading and Writing Nonfiction Reports
Participants learn how to teach students to write manageable reports, demonstrate how to turn notes into paragraphs, and use shared writing in small groups as a scaffold for writing focused, excellent nonfiction reports.

Session 13: Using Writing to Reach and Teach Struggling Learners
Participants learn how to raise expectations for all students, gaining strategies for turning English language learners into readers by having them publish and read their own writing, conferring with students to help them advance, and motivating all learners by habitually celebrating academic success.

Session 14: Re-Examining Our Beliefs and Celebration of Learning
Participants revisit beliefs and goals established in Session 3, discuss how their beliefs and practices have changed, and celebrate all they have learned and accomplished in the professional development year.