While it is easy to agree that teachers need to spend more time on literacy and that students need as much explicit instruction as possible, it is often hard to give up those deeply rooted notions of which novel every student must read or which writing genres must be mastered for high school or college. Nevertheless, teachers sometimes have to let go of the five-paragraph essay or Jane Eyre in order to achieve real student growth in literacy. This transition requires teachers to build classroom libraries, so that they can provide a wide variety of texts for their students. As readers, most teachers take for granted the process of choosing a text to read. Many students do not know how to select text, however, and their teachers should model and provide explicit instruction in this process.
Teachers can show how they preview a text by examining the cover and reading the first few pages.
Teachers can model this process by selecting their own texts, with attention to number of words on a page, size of type, number of words that they do not know on a page, etc. The more a student knows about a topic, author, or genre, the more accessible the text will be. The mini-lessons in the workshop model provide the necessary framework for direct, explicit instruction. At the beginning of the workshop, the teacher introduces the strategy or skill that students will work on that day. While thinking-aloud, the teacher clearly explains that she is doing so in order to show her thinking as she applies a strategy to the text.