The Workshop Model

Cris Tovani organizes her time in the classroom based on the workshop model (pg 45, figure 3.2). By utilizing this as a backbone for classroom structure, she ensures that students are doing work in the classroom so she is there to scaffold, encourage correct thinking, and do 'think-alouds' with her students. I think this structure is quite effective, and I have included how she organizes her class below:

Taken from pages 44-46

1. Share the 'targets' for the day - what do you really want students to get after today?
2. Next up is a 'mini-lesson'.
• Provides direct instruction
• Includes the whole class
3. Work Time!
• Students 'dig-in' and practice the learning done in the mini-lesson
• This should be the bulk of the class period - applying what they have learned
• Tovani walks around and conferences with each group that is working
• these conferences normally range from 2-4 minutes
• she uses these conferences to assess student learning and build stamina
• Support and scaffold students for the rest of the class period
4. Debriefing
• Give students an opportunity for metacognition
• Help them synthesize and reflect on their learning

Tovani discusses that this is an approach called "listening to teach, not talking to teach", and can help students do more work on their own, thus teaching them how to think and teach themselves with some supervision. She also explains that when students get 2/3 of the class period to practice, that time adds up by the end of a semester.

I find myself utilizing this in the art classroom a lot. By doing demo for a few minutes and then setting students free to work, I can walk around and scaffold their thinking while they are getting their 'hands dirty' and digging into the techniques that I have taught them.