Professional+Development+Opportunities

**Workshops**

 * September 12th - Isoke Nia
 * October 3rd - Heart of Texas Writing Project in Austin 9:00-1:00
 * October 10th - Randy Bomer
 * November 7th - Isoke Nia
 * April 10th - Katherine Bomer

**Anderson, Carl. Assessing Writers. Heinemann**
Anderson's straightforward approach helps you imagine an ongoing assessment program that takes you from meeting new students to designing curriculum. In //Assessing Writers// you'll find out:
 * what you need to know about students to assess them as writers
 * how to uncover and make sense of this information
 * how to make an individualized plan for each student
 * how to use these plans when you confer
 * how to structure units of study to meet classroom-wide needs.

**Anderson, Jeff. Everyday Editing. Stenhouse**
Written in Jeff's characteristically witty style, this refreshing and practical guide offers an overview of his approach to editing within the writing workshop as well as ten detailed sets of lessons covering everything from apostrophes to serial commas. These lessons can be used throughout the year to replace Daily Oral Language or error-based editing strategies with a more effective method for improving student writing.

**Anderson, Jeff. Mechanically Inclined. Stenhouse**
//Mechanically Inclined// is the culmination of years of experimentation that merges the best of writer's workshop elements with relevant theory about how and why skills should be taught. It connects theory about using grammar in context with practical instructional strategies, explains why kids often don't understand or apply grammar and mechanics correctly, focuses on attending to the “high payoff,” or most common errors in student writing, and shows how to carefully construct a workshop environment that can best support grammar and mechanics concepts. Jeff emphasizes four key elements in his teaching:
 * short daily instruction in grammar and mechanics within writer's workshop;
 * using high-quality mentor texts to teach grammar and mechanics in context;
 * visual scaffolds, including

**Bomer, Katherine. Writing a Life. Heinemann**
This depth of attention to a single genre is unprecedented in books on the teaching of writing. Until now, for this depth, teachers used books written for aspiring writers and translated them into sensible classroom practice. Katherine brings writing and teaching together exquisitely in this beautiful book.—Katie Wood Ray, Author of About the AuthorsSmart teachers will read this book. Smarter teachers will use it as a guide.

**Bomer, Randy.Time for Meaning. Heinemann**
//Time for Meaning// is both thoughtful and practical. It confronts the realities of today's classrooms: overcrowded curriculums, unfriendly colleagues, choppy schedules, and resistant learners. Bomer suggests ways to transform these obstacles into opportunities to rethink the true purpose, meaning, and design of literacy education. He offers guidelines for:
 * helping students choose topics that are important to them- so important that they'll have the energy to work through the writing process
 * prompting initial responses to literature and moving toward polished pieces of writing
 * using writing as a tool for thinking and inquiring—an essential habit of mind for students to develop
 * understanding what makes for poor student research writing and how to improve it
 * planning curriculums that focus on story in fiction and memoir.

**Calkins, Lucy. Art of Teaching Reading. Longman**
Written in Calkins' graceful and passionate style, //The Art of Teaching Reading// serves as an eloquent and desperately needed reminder of what matters most in teaching. This long awaited text offers a compelling overview of the methods, insights and day-to-day classroom practices which have helped hundreds of teachers do more in the teaching of reading than most dreamt possible. This is the story of brilliant teachers whose children learn to read with eagerness and to talk and write in stunning ways about their reading.
 * Provides //countless real-life classroom examples//, transcripts of actual classroom dialogues, practical tips and ideas, and research and theory to back them. Readers peer in to watch as students learn to decipher an unfamiliar word, choose a book at their own level, use post-its to mark passages they love, clarify a classmate's comment on a book, and wonder out loud about why an author chose to write something in a certain way. Pg._
 * Presents //essential ongoing structures necessary for balanced literacy classrooms//, such as independent reading, reading aloud, guided reading, book talks, and "word solving." Throughout the book, Calkins encourages teachers to personalize these structures in order to author their own unique reading curriculum (Section II). Pg._
 * Describes //units of study in a reading curriculum//, showing the journey of primary and upper grade reading classrooms across the year and helps teachers to plan inquiries in topics such as reading with stamina and comprehension meaning, talking and writing about books, and helping children become flexible and strategic word-solvers. (Section III). Pg.___
 * Fletcher, Ralph & Portalupi, J. Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide. Heinemann**

Above all //Writing Workshop// is a practical book, providing everything a teacher needs to get the writing workshop up and running. In clear language, Fletcher and Portalupi explain the simple principles that underlie the writing workshop and explore the major components that make it work. Each chapter addresses an essential element, then suggests five or six specific things a teacher can do to implement the idea under discussion. There's also a separate chapter entitled "What About Skills," which shows how to effectively teach skills in the context of writing. The book closes with practical forms in the appendixes to ensure that the workshop runs smoothly.

**Fletcher, Ralph. What a Writer Needs. Heinemann**
In //What a Writer Needs//, Ralph Fletcher brings important perspectives and ideas that are well-grounded in classroom experience. The book is for writing teachers as well as teachers who write, and with its thorough exploration of literary techniques it will also be useful and appealing to reading teachers. As Donald Murray writes in the Foreword, the author "builds sturdy bridges from the writer's studio to the elementary and middle school classroom."

Designed to produce sentence maturity and variety, the worktext offers extensive practice in four sentence-manipulating techniques: sentence unscrambling, sentence imitating, sentence combining, and sentence expanding. All of the activities are based on model sentences written by widely respected authors. They are designed to teach students structures they should but seldom use. The rationale is that imitation and practice are as valuable in gaining competence and confidence in written language production as they are in oral language production. ====**Painter, K. Living and Teaching the Writing Workshop. Heinemann** Painter is your mentor and guide as you build your writing identity. She shares proven ideas, examples of her own work, and "try its" for those who are unsure how to get started. In addition, she offers numerous suggestions for creating a writing group in which you can practice the craft of writing among professional colleagues or out-of-school friends. As you hone drafts in the safety of your own adult writing workshop, you'll experience epiphanies that shed light on the big ideas that support writing instruction, and the little, tiny details that make the planning and conducting of a workshop go smoothly====
 * Killgallon, Don. Sentence Composing for Middle School. Heinemann**

**Santman, Donna. A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Test:Knowledge is Power. Heinemann**
Written with the intimacy, inspiration, and classroom-based practicality we've come to expect from [|//The Art of Teaching Writing//], //A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests// reflects the authors' belief that in order to be less victimized by tests, we need to be more knowledgeable about them. To that end, their book: ====**Santman, Donna Shades of Meaning. Heinmann** In this smart and lively guide, veteran middle-school teacher Donna Santman shows you how to teach readers the skills and strategies of comprehension and interpretation within the framework of a reading workshop. //Shades of Meaning// takes you through Santman's own rigorous workshop, describing the teaching that allows students to stretch and empower their imaginations. Santman offers guidance in:====
 * provides a complete overview of tests, showing us how to use this information to be more powerful and more articulate participants in today's political conversations and in our interactions with colleagues, parents, and our students
 * demonstrates how the methods we've come to trust in the reading and writing workshop can be built upon and adapted as we do test-preparation work with our students
 * rethinks the reading workshop in light of standardized tests, describing predictable challenges children will face when taking tests and ways we can help children develop the capabilities to meet those challenges
 * provides guidelines for reading and interpreting test results, enabling us to minimize the damage caused by troubling scores.
 * creating curriculum and lessons that teach habits of mind that support interpretation, like naming the ideas hiding in texts and thinking about perspectives from which to analyze those ideas
 * using reading workshop structures to teach students to practice articulating their thoughts, exploring others' ideas, and interpreting texts
 * assessing students' interpretive skills and moving them toward deeper and more meaningful interpretations
 * using standards-based rubrics and checklists to communicate expectations and track students' progress**.**

**Serravallo, Jennifer & Goldberg, Graviti. Conferring with Readers. Heinemann**
//Conferring with Readers// is a comprehensive guide that shows you how to determine what readers have learned and what they need to practice, then provides suggestions for targeting instruction to meet students’ needs. It provides explicit teaching methods for use in effective conferences. You’ll learn how to:
 * research a student’s use of skills through questions and observations
 * compliment to support and build upon successes
 * follow up on prior instruction for accountability and depth of understanding
 * explain a reading strategy by providing an explicit purpose and context
 * model the strategy to make the invisible brainwork of reading more visible
 * guide a readerinpracticing the strategy
 * link the strategy to independent reading.

**Wood, Katie R. Writing Workshop. NCTE**
In //The Writing Workshop,// Katie Wood Ray offers a practical, comprehensive, and illuminating guide to support both new and experienced teachers. While every aspect of writing workshop is geared to support children learning to write, this kind of teaching is often challenging because what writers really do is engage in a complex, multi-layered, slippery process to produce texts. The book confronts the challenge of this teaching head-on, with chapters on all aspects of the writing workshop, including:
 * day-to-day instruction (e.g., lesson planning, conferring, assessment and evaluation, share time, focus lessons, and independent writing)
 * classroom management (e.g., pacing and scheduling, managing the predictable distractions, and understanding the slightly out-of-hand feeling of the workshop)
 * intangibles (e.g., the development of writing identities and the tone of workshop teaching)

**Wood, Katie R. Study Driven Heinemann**
Ray shows you how to set up your writing workshop to facilitate close study. From grounded understandings to informed practice to supportive resources, she demonstrates:
 * how to find a rich variety of texts that give students a clear vision of the writing you want them to do
 * how to strategically select texts to support whole-class learning as well as individual choice
 * how your teaching language gives structure to curriculum development and student learning
 * how good planning turns curricular standards and objectives into sensible units of study
 * why depth can be a more practical and effective curricular goal than breadth in writing instruction

//Study Driven// also gives you the ideas and resources for thirty units of study, ranging from genres to punctuation and appropriate across grade levels.