Book Review: In the Middle, Third Edition: A Lifetime of Learning about Writing, Reading and Adolescents

Author : Nancie Atwell

Length : 640 pages

Intent/Focus : A “workshop” approach to reading and writing education

What You Will Learn : Detailed procedures for adapting the workshop teaching method to your English and writing classes

Why We Recommend It : The winner of a $1,000,000 teaching award is someone worth watching. Ms. Atwell’s fresh approach to teaching, as detailed in In the Middle, lets students truly experience and develop a passion for writing.

Summary :

Nancie Atwell is a middle school teacher and winner of the 2015 Global Teacher Prize. In 1990 she founded a K–8 demonstration school called the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). She is a successful author, and producer of a DVD series showcasing her writing and reading workshops.

The first edition of Ms. Atwell’s acclaimed In the Middle was published in 1987, followed by an updated version in 1998. The third edition (2014, reviewed here) shares the most recent innovations and refinements to her teaching methods, and is, for many educators, a how-to guide for teaching English.

Nancie herself describes the book as: "Everything I've learned over the past three decades that makes writing-reading workshop the only logical way to teach English." Nancie believes that students become better writers if they are given ownership of what they’re writing. In her workshops students are given long, uninterrupted blocks of time to write. Lectures, assignments and tests are replaced with occasional mini-lessons on topics such as technique, revision, genres, showing rather than telling, etc. For the remainder of her class, students simply write.

One reader/reviewer said, “In the Middle… changed my life as a teacher. The techniques she used… affirmed everything I felt in my heart to be true.”

Comprising twenty years’ experience with professional development workshops, the third edition of In the Middle provides:

• Detailed procedures for using the workshop teaching method
• A first-week launch sequence, and several mini-lessons to help you create your own workshops
• Studies of poetry, memoirs, reviews, essays, humor and short fiction
• Examples of prize-winning student writing, to use as mentor texts
• Techniques for conferring with students about the books they're reading

In The Reading Zone, Nancie applies the same approach to reading, with the assertion that students from K-12 should be free to choose their own reading assignments, and be given ample reading time in class. She believes the only successful “delivery system” for reading comprehension is reading.

Nancie also states that our job as educators is “to innovate for the good of children, and then to pass along to other teachers the lessons we learn that make a difference." Her book Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School shares insight on the most significant innovations made at the school she founded, the CTL. At CTL, Nancie and her colleagues have created a culture of engagement and excellence by combining smart practices with rich, community-building traditions. Examples include student and teacher self-assessment and goal-setting, a student-generated bill of rights, parent outreach and “rigorous yet kid-friendly expectations.”

"There are steps teachers and administrators can take… that make a classroom or school a place that's safe for children; one where every student feels noticed and known; one that challenges kids and entices them with the intrinsic rewards of real work, done well."
~ Nancie Atwell