ABSTRACT
Teachers must create well-organized learning environments encompassing predictable routines that promote children’s independence. This chapter discusses how teachers organize their classrooms to activate their students’ learning across whole-group, small-group, one-to-one, and independent contexts. In the process, students learn how to transfer their knowledge, skills, and strategies from one setting to another. The classroom library is a social and intellectual hub where students meet to collaborate on literacy projects or select books for independent reading. The ultimate goal of an integrated workshop framework is to enable students to generalize their knowledge and strategies for different purposes and across multiple settings. During the last thirty minutes of the language arts block, the students participate in writing workshop, which includes a ten-minute whole-group lesson and twenty minutes of independent writing and teacher conferences, and concludes with a five-minute debriefing session on strategies used during writing.
