One of the biggest draws of implementing a Reader's Workshop at any grade level is the time that can be dedicated to conferring with readers.  I used to teach a 20 or 30 minute reading lesson every day with lots of teacher directed instruction, and every student would practice on the same class text.  This presented immediate issues.  First, not every student could read the text independently, so I had to scaffold and support A LOT.  Secondly, it was time consuming and took up a large portion of our reading time.   While I still sometimes do a 20 or 25 minute lesson when introducing a new mentor text or new concept, most of my teacher directed lessons are very short (5-10 minutes), and the rest is "practice" time where students practice what I modeled with a text of their choosing.  This means that students have a lot more time to practice, and they are practicing on texts at their own level.  This eliminates the reading level issue, since everyone is choosing a t