ABOUT US

WHO ARE WE?
Hopefully, we are you! If you are fan of the Teacher's College approach to Reading Workshop AND want to make sure English Language Learners have full access to the benefits of this approach, we welcome your spirit of inquiry and collaboration. We would like to remind our visitors of an important fact about strategies developed for ELLs: what we discover to be useful for ELLs often ends up being useful for all students. By dedicating ourselves to making sure ELLs succeed, we focus our mind on what is essential in terms of effective instruction. So, even if you don't serve ELLs, you may find useful ideas on this blog.

The blog specifically facilitates the work of the ELLs in Reading Workshop Inquiry Collaborative based in the Oakland Unified School District in Oakland, CA. As instructional strategies emerge to address specific problems of practice, we write them up and share them here, and then open them up for comments and further inquiry. Sometimes these posting inspire classroom observation visits within or across sites. 


PLEASE FOLLOW US BY EMAIL IF YOU FEEL SO INCLINED! The sign-up box is on the right column of this screen.

POSTING AND COMMENTING
If you would like to contribute a post in order to share an instructional strategy, we invite you to email Michael Ray: 

michael.ray@ousd.k12.ca.us. 

Meanwhile, please feel free to comment! Your engagement with the topics and the connections you forge with other practitioners will, we hope, advance the work of making Reading Workshop a more powerful structure for ELLs. Common rules of respect and courtesy apply. In addition we ask that your comments and questions be solution oriented. This means staying in your "Sphere of Influence," to use Covey's words: those things you have some control over in your classroom, at your site, in your district, and so on.  

THE STRUCTURE OF THE SITE
This site is a combination of blog and forum. As a blog, it features new postings around specific instructional strategies contributed by teachers and by the blog editors, Michael Ray and Jennifer Kaufman, both Bilingual and ELL Specialists from Oakland Unified School District.

As a forum, it "archives" all postings into the categories of inquiry shown on the tabs at the top of the site (e.g. "MATCHING STUDENTS WITH TEXT") by providing a link from within that tab to any previous postings that align with that category. In this way, we archive our work into useful buckets of inquiry and can continue to comment on high-interest postings as our knowledge base grows. Some tabs have more entries than others. For example, the "MATCHING STUDENTS WITH TEXT" tab is a particularly rich area of inquiry, full of ideas for supporting ELLs. 

Have fun exploring, and we look forward to your comments!