Making Reading Happen—A Reading in the Content Areas Workshop

"If the intellectual powers are to develop, the child must gain a measure of control over his own thinking, and he cannot control it while he reamins unaware of it."  Margaret Donaldson (1978), Children's Minds, New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 129.

Workshop Description
This workshop is designed to be insightful, challenging, engaging, worthwhile, and fun.  In the first part, the presenter describes and demonstrates the concept of "making the invisible visible," and then, through a series of examples and activities, makes the various reading skills "visible" to the participants.

The presenter goes on to engage the participants in specific classroom activities that utilize four important instructional strategies:

• The Close procedure
• Making inferences
• Read & Retell
• Constructing and negotiating meanings

Important points about the workshop:

• This is not a workshop about "teaching" reading.  Instead, it is a presentation and demonstration of ways to set up one's classroom instruction so that READING HAPPENS.
• Speaking and listening and writing are an integral part of making reading happen.  This insight is make visible by the structure of the many activities in which participants will be engaged.
• The most important insight--and the one that will be emphasized at the conclusion of the workshop--is:  "Use your course content as a vehicle to develop your students' reading skills.  If you do this well, then your students can, in turn, use their 'new and improved' reading skills to master the rest of your content."

This one-day workshop is designed to appeal to middle and high school teachers of all disciplines.  Participants will learn how to make reading happen in ways that make sense.