Intro & Outcomes: Integrated Reading and Writing

For months we have discussed helping our students see themselves as researching readers and writers. We want them to see reading, writing, and researching as a singular process, a process that is inquiry-rich, highly recursive, very rewarding and very meaningful.  Without this integrated sense of the process, students artificially separate the three activities and frequently avoid whichever activity they see as most timely and/or difficult.  Before we can let our students experience some manageable small successes with this integrated process, we should first take a closer look at what it means to integrate reading and writing. 

• What does it mean to read and engage someone else's text with the eyes of a fellow writer? 
• What does it mean to plan, compose, and write a text with the expectations of the reader in mind?

We intuitively integrate reading and writing in many ways.  But we rarely slow down enough to make more strategic and explicit use of these moves.  Today we will compile a list of integrated reading and writing strategies to consider and test.