Lucy Calkins and her Teachers College Reading and Writing Project coauthors aim to

prepare students for any reading and writing task they face and turn kids into life-long, confident readers and writers who display agency and independence. Lucy and her colleagues have drawn on their more than 30 years of research and work in thousands of schools across the country and around the world to develop powerful curriculum resources, instructional methods, and professional learning opportunities to support teachers as they work together and with their students toward these vitally important goals.

Why Workshop?

The Reading and Writing Project’s approach to instruction recognizes that “one size fits all” does not match the realities of the classrooms and schools in which they work. When you walk into a workshop classroom at any given moment, you’ll see instructions that are designed to:

• help teachers address each child’s learning, explicitly teaching strategies students will use not only the day they are taught but whenever they need them.
• support small-group work and conferring, with multiple opportunities for personalizing instruction, tap into the power of a learning community as a way to bring all learners along.
• build choice and assessment-based learning into the very design of the curriculum.
• help students work with engagement so that teachers can coach individuals and lead small groups.

The routines and structures of reading and writing workshops are kept simple and predictable so that the teacher can focus on the complex work of teaching responsively to accelerate achievement for all learners.