I’m a product of the Northern Virginia Writing Project, so Sheridan Blau had me hooked from the Introduction when he discussed how the National Writing Project led him towards this style of teaching in literature as well.  I admit, I’m sad that I don’t have a classroom to practice these techniques with yet, because I’m already thinking about how I want to incorporate Blau’s ideas—whether as a full on lesson, as several mini-lessons, or as habits of mind for my students—when I get back to my own classroom next year.   But since I don’t have the ability to practice these things and report results, I want to think about the implications of what Blau’s saying.
One of the themes of our readings is the idea of difficulty: how we approach it as teachers, how students approach it, how we teach students to work through difficult things.  One thing that has been cropping up with the sixth graders I work with is that (according to their parents) they feel very anxious about getting anything wrong on homework, on worksheets we do in class, and also on tests or quizzes.  Much of what we’ve discussed in class and Blau discusses in The Literature Workshop deals directly with this idea: students don’t necessarily know how to work through something difficult and they don’t recognize that “failure” the first time is actually a necessary step in the learning process.  In Chapter 2, as Blau presents the workshop on “Sonrisas,” he comments that “to move ahead in the wrong direction is not progress.  But to move backward in order to correct your course is” (46).  So much of what creates problems for students is that they’re afraid to move backward because they don’t understand that sometimes that’s a necessary step.  We often talk about making our classrooms a safe place for students to take risks, but it seems that when we simply lecture about our interpretation of a piece of literature, we’re not only not showing students how we’ve come up with that interpretation, we’re also nullifying that safety zone.  One of the things I really like about the literature workshops as Blau presents them is that much of dealing with confusion is handled on the peer to peer level, rather than asking the teacher for answers when there’s a problematic section.  This should empower students to realize how much they can come up with just within their peer group, and it also makes admitting confusion more possible because it’s in a low stakes setting with only a few people, rather than in front of the whole class.   The more students can practice admitting confusion, backtracking when they had a misconception, and reading things over and over again, the more they’ll be able to begin doing these things naturally when they read on their own.  I hope.