You are going to love Responsive Literacy: A Comprehensive Framework! This book will not only explain in great detail what this framework is all about, but SHOW you in a multitude of colorful photos about every aspect of this framework.
If you're familiar with balanced literacy, you're right on track with responsive literacy. This framework is all about providing structures for students to engage in literacy via reading, writing, listening, and speaking, but thought a multitude of modalities. Students will find these experiences in the Reading, Writing, and Word Study Workshop formats.
The foundations of this framework rest in the Zone of Proximal Development, teaching students to be participants in active thinking, engaging conversations, and authentic reflections about texts. Students engage in this work as the teacher plans with the workshop model in mind:
- Whole Group Teaching in mini-lesson, including interactive read-aloud, literature discussions, and shared and interactive writing
- Workshop time, where students have an opportunity for application of new learning on their own, in pairs or triads, or in small-group meetings with their teacher
- Share time, which is typically a celebration of learning related to the mini-lesson and closure for the day's learning
This workshop model works for reading, writing, and word study instruction, each practiced overviewed in detail in this comprehensive text. This book in broken down into six sections:
- Professional Learning
- Organizing for Learning
- Reading
- Writing
- Building Blocks of Language
- A Learning Community: Students, Teachers, Principals, and Families
Some of my favorite parts of the book include:
- Discussion of Author's Craft, pages 44-55
- Starting the Reading Workshop: The first 30 days, pages124-147
- Systems of Strategic Actions Wheel, and descriptions of thinking Within the Text, About the Text, and Beyond the text, page 196
- All of the references to quality books that serve as mentor texts for students, which are found throughout the text
- Possible ideas for writer's notebook entries, page 266
- "Your goal is to lift the writer, not fix the piece." page 273
- A WHOLE CHAPTER on handwriting!! Page 305 and Specific and Consistent Language for lower and uppercase letter formation - a dream for all of the K-2 teachers who scaffold their students to write the letters correctly! Page 311
- The last section that is of particular use to Literacy Coaches and Administrators, so that a building-wide culture can be built around this framework
If you are new to this framework, this book has it all, and thorough explanations and so many photos of classrooms, organization systems, student work, student-teacher interactions - everything! This book is geared toward K-6, but ideas can be adapted up to seventh and eighth as well.
I have a copy of this book to give away to one lucky winner! In order to win, leave a comment or question on this blog post and follow me on Instagram (@bigtimeliteracy). Can't wait to share the wealth of information with someone from this book!
Happy Saturday!
