How many times during a writing workshop have you thought, “If only I could clone myself!” Well, authors Dana Johansen and Sonja Cherry-Paul have a solution for more one-on-one teaching time during your writing workshop: flipped learning. In their new book: Flip Your Writing Workshop, they explain how a blended learning approach allows students access to instruction and support when they need it, as often as they need it.

Now, they’re not talking about replacing you, the teacher, rather flipped learning lets students access a variety of mini-lessons on their own, work at their own pace, or move ahead and review concepts, depending on a student’s needs. Dana and Sonja say this gives the teacher more time to maximize individual instruction and conferring. We started our conversation on their first book, Teaching Interpretation, and we asked them how the two books relate?

Be sure to follow the authors on Twitter: @LitLearnAct, read their blog here: https://litlearnact.wordpress.com​, or join their Facebook group.

See transcript below:

Dana:    Sonja and I are so lucky and thankful to be able to work together. We're both classroom teachers. I teach 5th Grade and Sonja teaches 6th. We actually work in different schools and we live about an hour from each other. I live in Connecticut, Sonja lives in New York and we meet on the weekends at a Panera Bread and we get together and we talk about what's going on in our language arts classrooms.

    Our first book as all about teaching reading, teaching interpretation using digital texts and teaching close reading skills. A thread in the first book was how to use a balanced blended learning approach in our classroom. It just made sense for us that our second book would be about using technology and writing workshop, and how to use a balanced blended learning approach in the writing workshop as well.

Brett:    Sometimes Flip Learning is assumed to be just for science and math classes but that's not so. Can you guys explain more about that?

Sonja:    I think that a lot of teachers associate Flip Learning with math and science and particularly with high school students and maybe college students. Dana and I read a lot of literature that certainly supported that, but we wanted to think about how could this look in a reading workshop, in a writing workshop and with students who are younger, students Grades 3 through 8.

    We played around with this for a couple of years just thinking this through and trying it out in our classrooms. We discovered that there were a lot of benefits. Engagement was increased in our classrooms. We were able to differentiate instruction. Students could access what they needed and move more independently through curriculum. We want people to know that Flip Learning is not just about math and science, and it's not just about high school students, that your students can do this in writing workshop and there are a lots of benefits to this work.

Dana:    We've also connected with a lot of teachers on Twitter which we love. Yay!! Join us on Twitter. It's been a real joy and a real privilege to connect with people across the country in elementary school and middle sc...