erwc principles

Today I'm sitting in a training for Expository Reading and Writing Course. The speaker just explained the history and what the designers intended. According to the last Powerpoint slide, these are the principles of the course: 1. The integration of interactive reading and writing processes; 2. A rhetorical approach that fosters critical thinking and engagement through a relentless focus on the text; 3. Materials and themese that engage student interest; 4. Classroom activities designed to model and foster successful practices of fluent readers and writers; 5. Research-based methodologies with a consistent relationship between theory and practice; 6. Built-in flexibility to allow teachers to respond to varied students' needs and instructional contexts; and 7. Alignment with California's Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy. I especially dig #2; that's why we read "The Right to Your Opinion" and started choosing our own texts above/beyond the curricular units (like the one on Obesity). But I'm posting this to ask you all: How are we doing so far? Is the course doing these things so far? Can you begin to envision how your experience in this course can help you become a more effective reader and writer? Feel free to comment to this post. We'll also spend some time discussing this next week when we talk about organization, time management, and how to use Collaborative Working Groups & Big Questions as we move forward.