Professional Book Review: Read, Write, Teach by Linda Rief

Read, Write, Teach:  Choices and Challenges in the Reading-Writing Workshop by Linda Rief

Summary by Goodreads:

Veteran teacher and author Linda Rief has inspired thousands of practitioners across the nation to lead adolescent students on a journey to becoming lifelong readers and writers. In "ReadWriteTeach," Linda offers the what, how, and why of a year's worth of reading and writing for middle and high school students with a framework that is as flexible as it is comprehensive.

". . . This book isn't a compilation of tear-out reproducibles designed to help us replicate Linda's practices,"" writes Maja Wilson in the foreword. ""Instead, it's the most powerful gift that a master teacher can give us: the story of her thinking and feeling as she teaches." "Linda's insights and beliefs are woven throughout a comprehensive overview of best literacy practices, which include: essentials in the reading-writing workshop grounding our choices in our beliefs getting to know ourselves and our students as readers and writers.

Students' voices, through examples of their writing, drawing, and thinking, resonate throughout the book and characterize the thoughtful readers, writers, and citizens of the world that they become under Linda's guidance.

My Thoughts:

After reading the first 42 pages of this book, I posted my first thoughts on Goodreads:  

If you are a fan of Kelly Gallagher, Penny Kittle, and Donalyn Miller, you will find comfort in Linda Rief's words. I have already uncovered a few new ideas to share with our English teachers using a reader/writer workshop approach.

Normally I tend to have an urgency to complete a book quickly.  I want to read it and move on to the next one.  Because Rief's book is filled to the brim with real world ideas that I could see myself using in the classroom (or sharing with teachers), I wanted to slow down and read this bit by bit.  Instead of reviewing this resource as a whole, I want to share some of my favorite parts from a few chapters.

Chapter One: Grounding Our Choices in Our Beliefs

Linda Rief is a firm believer in giving students choice in their reading and writing.  In order to make this manageable, she uses a Readers-Writers Workshop.

Writing Conference Questions (pg 19):

• How did this writing come to be?
• Where did you get the idea?
• What did you do, and why, as you went from one draft to the next?
• What problems did you encounter:
• How well did you solve those problems?

Reading Response Questions (pg 21)

• What did this reading bring to mind?
• What did you think or feel or learn as you read?
• What questions came to mind?
• What in your own experience is similar or different?
• How does this make you view the world?
• What did you notice the author did as a writer?

Chapter Five: Immersion in Writing (and Reading)

In this chapter, Linda Rief shares some simple, short quickwrites to help her students brainstorm writing ideas.  A few of my favorites are:

A Positive-Negative Life Graph (pg 77-83)

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/107180098/Positive-Negative-Life-Graph

A Likes/Dislikes Chart (pg 83-85)

http://readwriteandreflect.blogspot.com/2014/08/purpose-and-authenticity.html

Reading/Writing Memories 

A perfect beginning of the school year set of questions to ask students (pg 84):

• What kept you reading?
• What stopped your reading?
• What kept you writing?
• What stopped your writing?

Chapter Six:  Immersion in Reading (and Writing)

Linda Rief believes in choice.  Her students have time to read in her classroom and their homework is to read thirty minutes a night (four days a week) outside of school. If you have read, Book Love, by Penny Kittle, she follows a very similar format of introducing new books to her students through book talks.  My two "take-aways" are:

End of the Year Book Recommendations (pg 108)

Students are asked to recommend a book to next year's class which includes the following:

• a color copy of the book
• a short summary of the book
• a passage so we can hear the style of writing
• their reasons for recommending the book

Letters About Literature (pg 116-118)

Did you know that the Library of Congress sponsors a contest asking students to write a letter to an author of a book, a play, a poem, or a speech, telling the author how the work changed their lives in some way?  Our freshman English team is in the process of revising our curriculum and assessments to incorporate more "real world" writing.  This contest would be a perfect assessment to teach argumentative writing and incorporate choice reading!

My hope by sharing a few of my favorite ideas from Read, Write, Teach is that you will go out and buy this book.  If you are a middle school or high school English teacher exploring or using Reading- Writing Workshop, you will want to have this resource at your fingertips.  Linda Rief's book is now shelved right next to books by my favorite authors:  Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher, Kylene Beers, and Donalyn Miller.  It is in a place where I can reach for it at a moment's notice when a teacher is searching for "brilliant ideas" to engage his/her students!