Depend on Angela Peery
Imagine a classroom full of young people.
They could be dear, chubby kindergarten, or show-off, confident high school students or anything in between. Can you see them?
Now, imagine this class focusing on reading.
What are you focusing on in reading? What does it sound like? What is the evidence that a real, participatory reading is being conducted?
See What is critical reading?
In my visualization, I see a room full of freshman life – my past classroom. Five or six students hang out in the reading area, lying on the sofa or stretching on the floor pillow. A dozen students lay on the desk, their noses buried in books, with pencils, highlighters and sticky notes scattered on the desk. A group of four girls sits on their side legs near the door, each with their own provocative copy of a young novel, whispering, whispering, and what happened next.
See When students say they don’t like reading, I tell students
They chose to read the book together and push each other to satisfy their own imposed discussion schedule. On the side of the room, near several electrical outlets, is a student sitting alone in headphones listening to audiobooks. A man lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. Another was lying beside him, following the hard copy of the book, often stopping, rewinding and carefully replaying the audio, and following the text with his index finger.
I was there – I could see myself near the front of the room, sitting in one chair, with my feet leaning against another, swallowing up some of the current nonfiction, glaring at any student who dared to interrupt my concentration or classmate concentration. When was the last time you saw the classroom I described, not only in your mind, but actually in your mind?
In the past five years of consulting, I have seen classrooms really get involved a few times. I remember them vividly because they are extremely rare.
A room is a first-year-old room distributed across various sites, spinning every 15 or 20 minutes. One group was next to the table with professionalism, another group had books on the floor, and another group had tablet devices. Finally, a group does some hands-on activity at the table that is related to their reading. I listened when adults talked to their kids about their reading. These kids can talk about characters, events, the whole Shebang. They are more than just reflux. They were invested.
The other is the middle school classroom. The teacher started class and everyone sat on the floor. She raises a real, nothing to the book they read together. The students answered her questions and each other eagerly. They asked new questions. The discussion is full of vitality. About ten minutes later, the students were inspired to run to the table, ready to open the book and continue reading.
In my observations, it is more common to read the room for students. They sit at the table, and in most cases, waiting for the next worksheet or the next recall level issue. Those who like to play school games answer loudly and quickly. They sometimes develop neighbors to participate in discussions or complete questions on worksheets. Those who don’t like the game will drop their heads or interact with people on the other end of the phone.
Those who despise the game. They may get up, wander around the classroom, or they may make inappropriate comments. They may repeatedly ask to go to the bathroom, nurse or counselor. When there are too much tedious work, they will do something horrible to ensure that the teacher removes them from the room.
What changes have happened to studying in school? Over the past few years, the terms “close to read” and “complex text” have been used enough to make me obviously cringe when my teacher speaks. Have we ever wanted students no Read closely? Of course not. Do we want students to read simple texts? No, but have these terms (or perhaps our application to them) killed the reading in our class?
What should a dedicated reading culture look like, sound like a reader, and achieve success?
My first thought was to go back to Nancie Atwell and her mantra for a reading/writing workshop: we had to give students time, ownership and response. Are we ELA teachers giving students time to class? Do we assign reading and then expect it to be done elsewhere? Shouldn’t the best time and place to complete reading in our classroom? Have readers who coaches and peers ever read without role models become stronger readers? I doubt.
What is the role of ownership? I have seen that self-selected reading actually disappear in the era of national standards. The teacher eagerly covered the assigned text after being assigned and spending hours considering weak reading skills and students’ outright boycotts. For me, this is not the right path. The right path is to free up more time to read preferred materials to improve the skills required to cope with allocated (and often boring) materials (such as endurance!).
Given the correct conditions, students will independently process extremely complex texts. Sometimes, peers can help promote this. At other times, a caring teacher will. I vividly remember a student telling me that he had never read the entire book in the first week of school. He was fifteen years old. He rode a commercial fishing boat with his father. What was the first book I took in his hand? The old man and the sea. I stayed by his side as he clumsily walked through it. Guess what he solved later this year? Calls from the wild. This is just a small example of what a teacher who really values reading abilities can do.
This particular student is inspired by the time, ownership and response of the third-level students. I responded to him as a reader, not as a teacher, checking specific goals in the records of his reading achievements. When a person’s teachers and peers are also dedicated readers, it’s hard not to participate in the community.
So let’s stop endless worksheets. Let’s end a fake collaborative group that browses through text only to find answers to the teacher’s boring questions. Let’s make room in the course again for the reading culture, where readers actually sit here and read in the company of other readers, because that’s important enough to do this together in the classroom, in a community. Readers talk to each other about what they are reading because they want to know what, not because they are forced to do so. Readers are confident in dealing with classics and other difficult texts because they know they can use real reading experience to help them.
As Pernille Ripp pointed out: “To create a lifelong reader, we seem to be missing some very basic facts about what makes the reader a reality.” Before we create a whole non-reader, we need to restore the time, ownership and response to their legal status in teaching.
