Borderland

This is the first in a series of posts in which Dina Strasser, who blogs at The Line, and I correspond about our experiences using a workshop approach to reading instruction:

Dina,
I like your suggestion that we use our blogs to compare notes about teaching in reading workshop classrooms this year. I appreciate your observations about how theory rolls out in practice, and I look forward to your feedback on what I have to report. Our readers will also, no doubt, have things to say here and there.

The New York Times did us favor yesterday, highlighting a reading workshop classroom, since it provides us with a starting point for framing this discussion. One of the interesting things about the NYT piece is that it appears as part of a series called “The Future of Reading,” as if giving students a choice in what they read is a new idea, or maybe an old idea that is being revived. Is it? I don’t see much evidence of that now. What I do see is that reading instruction is becoming more prescriptive and more technically oriented at the elementary level. I believe the reform rhetoric is drowning out discussions about engagement and enthusiasm so that old ideas like reading workshop seem new and edgy.

The journalist who wrote the article for the Times sets up a false dichotomy between giving students power to choose what they read, and teaching the literary classics. The naysayers are alarmed. What about the need to maintain scholarly traditions? they ask. The advocates counter, We need to engage kids and motivate them to read; appreciation of the classics is overemphasized, and conventional approaches kill the joy of reading.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how “choice” is celebrated in policy discussions about charter schools, but denounced as potentially destructive to our very way of life when curriculum is on the table. With reading, I don’t see it as an either-or proposition. There may be plenty of room over the course of a school year to offer students choices and also to prompt them to read some of the Great Books. But as I think about this now, I wonder how many truly “great books” there are which a 10 or 12 year old can absolutely not afford to miss. I don’t know, really, but I do know plenty of good books – books that engage kids and get them talking and thinking. I believe, too, that having choices is motivating, especially for adolescents, and that appreciation of classic texts won’t ever happen for someone who has had the love of reading drilled out him at an early age.

Many students are clueless about how to even choose a book because they’ve never actually done it. The Readers in the group read for extended periods without getting up or looking around the room. They know a few authors they enjoy reading, and they’ve heard about some books they might like to read someday. They’ve developed a little of what we might call a sense of taste for what they like. The sad thing, and the main reason I want to do this with my sixth graders is that so many non-readers can actually read. They have the decoding skills, but their vocabularies are limited by their lack of experience with longer, more challenging texts.They prefer too-simple books they can finish in a single sitting or in a couple of days. They are restless and unsettled if they aren’t told what to read and what to do when they’re done reading. For them, reading is first and foremost a chore. They’ve been trained to see it that way.

One of my students has apparently learned to disassociate his thinking from his reading; he can sit and fake-read day after day for 30 minutes without any idea of what his book is about. I discovered this the other day in a conference with him. He read to me fairly smoothly, but without expression. He was on page 78 of a medium-length novel, about a third of the way through. I asked him a simple literal question about something he’d read – something like, “What ticket are they talking about?” He told me that he didn’t know because he wasn’t paying attention. I asked a few more questions and realized he didn’t know anything at all about the book he’d been reading for 3 whole days. I told him that I read Spanish that way, but I wouldn’t want to do it day after day. This student is now one of my “project kids.”

I have two hours a day, right after lunch, to devote to reading and writing workshop. This is one of the advantages of a self-contained elementary school classroom. At this point, I’m working on several goals at once. The main one, now, is helping the reluctant readers learn how to find suitable books that might interest them. This is taking some time. I’ve got about 5 kids in this group, and each one of them presents a special set of requirements. At this point, they’ve been cut off from anything that has more pictures than words, like Garfield, during reading workshop. We may eventually need to form a couple of little reading partnerships to get them moving.

The exciting and very encouraging thing is when a kid lights up and connects with a book. Two boys who weren’t clicking with this business each discovered Scorpions by Walter Dean Myers last week. They’ve each got a copy, now, and they are completely hooked.

There’s plenty more to say, but I’m going to bring this to a close here for the time being.

looking forward to our collaboration in this,
Doug

image source: Fire and Water by peasap