What is the Catch and Release Workshop Model?

From So What Do They Really Know? by Cris Tovani

Students do the majority of work in class by reading, writing and thinking during class. According to Tovani the workshop has four major components:

1] The Opening

Set the stage for the day: This will be conducted with a board question and broad general lessons for the unit.

2] The Mini Lesson

Direct Instruction for the whole class: This will cover key terms, literary terms and/or aspects of figurative language. Concepts every student must have to achieve the unit.

3] Work Time

Students practice the learning: Each student will have different things they need to work on completing and as they are working they can ask questions, address difficult aspects of the night's work or just use class time to complete the reading/projects.

Tovani has a couple of goals for this time:

• As students work, I confer with individuals or small groups. Often my conferences are pretty short—about two to four minutes long. The purpose of conferring is twofold. I want to assess student learning and help them to build stamina. When I confer, I try to figure out what students know and what they need so they can continue doing the work on their own. My goal when conferring isn’t to “fix” students but rather to provide support and scaffolding so students can be the ones who engage in the critical thinking. Just like during the mini-lesson, I must be careful not to take time away from students’ doing the work. Conferring helps me help students stay on task so they can build stamina, skill, and endurance.
• Catch-and-release occurs during the work time and can be either a planned or an unplanned part of the workshop. When I use the catch-and-release technique, it is because I have noticed a pattern of confusion in several students. Instead of repeating the teaching to each individual student, I temporarily halt the work time to quickly share a strategy or a piece of content that will benefit the class’s learning process. Other times when I use catch-and-release, I’ve anticipated places where students might struggle. In these cases, I model a way to negotiate the difficulty and then I release the kids so they have time to practice what I showed them. In either case, the catches are short, usually lasting only a few minutes.

4] The Debriefing

Gives students process what they've worked on in class. This can be a whole group activity like a focused free write or an exit slip or just a group conversation about the things they've learned that day.