The final days of any school year are usually filled with a mixture of relief, excitement, and expectation. Students are pumped to finish their exams, turn in their books, and retreat through the school doors into a promising three month sojourn of staying up late, sleeping in, catching up on their YouTube subscriptions, and producing endless Snapchat stories that will immortalize their teen-angst in cyberspace for much longer than many of them realize. With all this budding freedom at their fingertips, the next book my students are going to read this summer is the farthest thing from any of their minds.
In the past, I would always end each school year with a smile and a strong sense of satisfaction because I knew that the books I had assigned throughout the year were rich with history, shared cultural experiences, and academic merit that would prepare them for the rigorous reading expectations of college.
How could this type of exposure and expected rigor ever harm my student’s academic progress? Well, I knew many of my students were reading and enjoying the books I had prescribed, but I also observed that their innate desire to read and seek knowledge outside of the assigned reading was low, and to my chagrin, many students would omit to only reading sections of the book that they knew they would be tested on. For an avid reader and a lover of literature, this realization was heartbreaking.
I think the unsettling reality that my students were not really becoming life-long readers when they left my classroom had suddenly burrowed in deep, and I knew I would have to make a change.
This paradox effervesced to the surface last year when my department, in the face of a district initiative, was tasked with taking this problem and shared burden head-on: Are teens and young adults really reading what we are assigning them to read? This question lead us down a rabbit hole filled with even more questions and concerns that left us feeling small and a little lost. Many of us were eager to seek out new ideas and innovations that would put us back on the right side of the looking glass. Luckily for us, many teachers across the nation have also recognized that students are not really establishing and maintaining reading habits that extend beyond the scope of the classroom, and have been working hard to rectify that issue. (Penny Kittle’s Book Love is a great place to start.)
Here is the bottom line: if young people are not successful readers in their English classes, then they will struggle in all academic courses. So, with this reality taking precedent above all others, I set out to make changes in my classroom that would better facilitate more authentic reading practices for my students and myself.
With this purpose in mind, I decided to go all in this year and give my students complete choice in their reading selections and to set my classroom up under a reader’s/writer’s workshop framework. I wanted to model real writing for my students, provide opportunities for purposeful writing and meaningful interactions with the literary world.
But where to begin?
I started by going back to the basics, and asked myself three questions: “When did I develop a love for reading? Who in my life facilitated that love? And finally, what did those people do differently in their instruction/presentation to spark this love within in me?
At
first, the task seemed daunting and insurmountable, and I knew that I would have to change my perspective if I hoped to succeed at all. I started by going back to the basics, and asked myself three questions: “When did I develop a love for reading? Who in my life facilitated that love? And finally, what did those people do differently in their instruction/presentation to spark this love within in me? Three people immediately came to mind: my Grandmother, my senior AP English teacher, and my undergraduate Philosophy Professor. All three of these people had several traits in common; a passion and unbridled enthusiasm for reading, a vast and impressive mental vault of stored information, and an intoxicating knack for storytelling. I decided to embrace these traits as a means to restructuring my personal approach to teaching literature and writing.
We are now well into the second semester and I am beyond pleased with the results. Continue reading my next post to see some of the exciting things we have been doing in the classroom!
I’m sure this is something that is already quite apparent to you, but I’m going to bring it up for the sake of discussion. The bar of what kids today find stimulating is so high! Reading very aggressively evokes the imagination. I think that the imagination is like a muscle in that it atrophies through lack of use. Kids today don’t feel as much of a need to use their imagination due to the constant stream of stimulus coming at them from every direction! And I hear your counter argument already: “kids will use their imagination anyway because it is fun!”. My response to this is that running is fun for the runner, swimming is fun for the swimmer, and dancing is fun for the dancer. So is reading (imagining) fun for the reader (imaginer)! The sad truth (and the whole point I’m trying to make here) is that we need to find a way to get these kids engaged in reading just enough so that it isn’t so difficult. Once it’s not difficult (it can -and should- still be challenging) I think they will be more apt to do it.
Let me know what you think!
I do agree with you, Taylor, these young people today are bombarded with stimulation that makes reading difficult for many. I also think that before reading can be an imaginative and enjoyable activity, people must build their comprehension, and this only comes with practice. Providing more choice in what they read and sharing a culture in the classroom that celebrates reading on a daily basis.
I think Taylor makes a really good point in that reading should be challenging, but not difficult. I also perceive one of the reasons that students (and adults) struggle in reading is because they have to think harder/differently about it than doing something like vegging out watching Netflix or keeping their social media in a constant state of refresh. One of the things that my students are only just getting used to is the idea that if they don’t like something they start they can PUT IT DOWN AND NEVER PICK IT BACK UP. I want to share the joy of reading with them because, to me, it’s truly a magical experience when you “get it.”
I can’t wait to see more of your workshop model and I’m a little sad I’ve missed so much of the implementation with being gone. You’ve also inspired me to do some thinking on why I love to read and who helped instill that in me. Lots to think about!
I am so glad you brought up the issue of “thinking differently” when reading compared to other activities. Neil Gaiman has an excellent article in The Guardian on this subject. He says “the simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.”
Link to full article
I enjoyed this blog very much because you captured WHY we had to change very well. I also enjoyed the analogy of Alice in Wonderland and often feel like I am falling down a rabbit hole. I enjoyed this brief synopsis of a universal problem that we are directly addressing and will read more.
I think threeteacherstalk would enjoy your blog and would publish it if you were willing to share.
I did not read a book from cover to cover until I was forty years old. I was in “that” reading group through elementary school. The one with the other girl who could not read. It was awful. I hated reading. But more than reading, I hated being singled out.
I never understood it when people questioned casting in films or said that they liked the book better. Who could possibly like the book better.
Then one day it happened, I had offered to mentor a struggling teenager…and I don’t mean someone who needed help with homework. This kid had been sent to wilderness therapy and was now back trying to make it through each day. She kept talking about a book. It was written by Viktor Frankl who was a Freudian trained psychiatrist sent to Auschwitz. ARGH… was I going to have to read it. Yep. The first book that I read cover to cover, all 200 pages. It took me four full days.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Viktor Frankl
It was empowering, meaningful, relevant, inspiring and motivating. Frankyl touched my heart and challenged my thinking.
That book was the first of many. I learned to laugh and cry reading “The Secret Life of Bees”. “ People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.” Sue Monk Kid
My first love story: “I don’t want to be married just to be married. I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
I don’t know how many books I have read in these last 14 years, I don’t even know if the number matters. I do know that words matter and that great stories matter and that relationships matter. That’s why I read. Vanessa Seghers
Thank you so much for sharing, Vanessa! This is a true testament to the idea that “there is no such thing as a nonreader; they just haven’t found the right book yet.” I am so excited to help my students find similar moments. Just the other day I had a student in my first-period class who refused to read, so I handed him The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The next day he was eagerly waiting at my door to discuss the first couple of chapters! He said, “I have so many questions! This book is awesome!” That is what makes my job worthwhile.
Isn’t the Rabbit Hole exciting? You never know when you’ll walk up on a tea party. Setting kids up to be life-long readers and writers is the best thing we can do in education: it impacts everything else. I’ll never forget the books read aloud to me when I was a child. I’ll never forget the books placed at my finger-tips that stoked my love for reading. You’ll be the one they look back on with fondness, remembering the choice you provided them to fall in love with a book.
This is perfect, Jenna. As a teacher who has been around for a while, I feel like this concept of student choice tests my control issues. Sure, over the years, I’ve seen a few students get true enjoyment out of reading some of my favorites like Richard III, The Scarlet Letter, or To Kill a Mockingbird. But the truth is, and now there is evidence to back it up, students don’t read the things we assign. Even I, as someone who loved to read, would avoid certain books when I was in high school. Since we’ve switched over to the independent choice idea, I see students who don’t want to put their books away, students who want to talk to me about their books, and students who are encouraging ME to read their books. I am in love with this! 🙂