Doug,

The first bit of the title is a back end of a quote from Albert Einstein– I added the question mark. And it’s funny you should mention Nancie Atwell, since my last post on reading workshop here roused her to leave a personal, supportive, and critical comment on my blog a few weeks ago. Surprised, delighted, and scared the hell out of me. It left me with– well– more questions. They center, as always, around how workshop should and must be modified for the diverse needs of kids in public schools.

The homework component is a major concern for me, which is why I asked you about it in our latest round of emails– and thank you for putting forth your answer here. Me, I continue to be thoroughly stuck.

You know from reading my blog that I am an intrinsic motivation freak, and as such, I get the willies from commanding my kids to do anything– even things I legitimately must encourage, such as speaking respectfully to one another, or choosing independent books that are not walks in the proverbial park (or mall). This is the heart of the matter. As you so beautifully demonstrate, the aim of reading workshop is to help kids find the joy of reading– so making homework an extrinsically imposed requirement is a problem.

Or is it?

Let me lay out my observations, and tell me what you think.

a) By 7th grade, my kids are soaked in the extrinsic behaviorism of school– such that when I presented workshop to them in the first quarter, a disturbing proportion of them did not take it seriously precisely because it did not have a patrolled home reading requirement. Even if kids were enjoying their self-selected books in class, these students still did little to no reading at all outside of the classroom. “I’m too busy,” was the common response. (This is middle school code for, “If there isn’t a grade attached, it’s less important than my soccer game.”) It was only when I switched the schedule around to include a daily page check of 30 minutes a night that the students finally started to complete books at a pace appropriate for their abilities– and yes, via my conferences and their reading journals, I know the vast majority of them are actually reading those books. I am getting other substantial anecdotal evidence that they are reading more, and enjoying reading more, than they ever have in their lives.

b) I’ve administered the outside reading with as light a touch as possible. (I have to. Even if I were a behaviorist, I’ve blogged on Marzano’s research-based homework guidelines so publicly that I’d be a hypocrite to do it any other way.) It’s daily, but only for 30 minutes, and under any circumstances the child deems appropriate (at the dentist, on the bus– you know, the way real people read.) It’s graded, but only on completion. “Completion” means the most individualized, loose, and generous sense of “completion” as possible. And so on.

c) I meet my middle school kids so little– for a very rare maximum of 80 minutes of in-class reading time per week– that even with the most focused, flow-y, artful reading workshop in the world, I fear my kids are still not meeting the quantifiable amounts of pure sit-down reading practice in school that they require to improve. (See Stephen Krashen on this here.)

This is a structural problem, not a pedagogical one– but since I have little to no control over structural answers, it requires a pedagogical one from me. So far, the only thing I can come up with is homework.

But I still feel like the book police. Kids still greet the page check with that mix of apprehension and fear that haunts me at night. I still find myself hounding, calling home, expressing concern or disappointment that makes a kid’s face fall. It stinks.

So what do I do? Any thoughts?

Yours,

Dina

Dear Dina,

The reading workshop clasroom is taking shape. Over the last several weeks I’ve watched my students become more confident and self-directed as readers. At the beginning of the school year, many of them didn’t know what they wanted to read. They’d read whatever I told them to read, but when given a choice, most of them didn’t know what to choose. Mostly they chose books that were below their ability level. My inclination was to push them toward more challenging texts, but instead I took an indirect route, gently prodding and making suggestions. Now, all are choosing more sophisticated reading material than what they started with at the beginning of the year.

They are also spending more time reading out of school. The other day I asked for a show of hands from anyone who’d taken a book home to read on their own. Almost every hand went up. I then asked how they’d feel about being required to read each night for homework since they seemed to enjoy reading so much. That idea was not well-received. I’m not much of a fan of assigning “voluntary” reading as homework for the simple reason that once it’s assigned, it’s no longer voluntary. I wasn’t actually planning to do it; just checking.

If it’s an assignment, we get bogged down with compliance monitoring and grading, and the focus moves away from reading to accounting for reading. Assigning reading for homework causes a backlash where the kids, then, might either lie about doing it, or start to see reading as a chore. I feel guilty when this happens since my goal is to motivate my students, and to hook them on wide reading as a life-long habit. I don’t want us to get bogged down with administrative garbage.

But…. still, I have an idea that I need to *expose* students to things they might not discover on their own, so I make assignments. They do (oral) book reports and written book reviews. They also have content area reading assignments for science and social studies lessons. Additionally, we occasionally read a common book in addition to the SSR.

Mandatory reading assignments do put stress on some readers who may not be interested or skilled enough to read what I choose for them to read. So I then have to provide close support and guidance. But that also gives the whole class something to talk about. This is where we cover literary elements such as theme, plot, character, and so forth. Historical fiction is my preferred genre, since it’s a great vehicle for discussing social issues. Lately, we’ve been reading Number the Stars, and we discussed genocide since you can’t very well understand the book if you don’t have some background information about the holocaust.

I suppose you could say that I use a hybrid workshop approach. I hedge my bet and bring in a little top-down, old school lesson design and try to blend it in. What it costs, mainly, is time for the slow readers to write. On account of that, I do this only now and then. There are trade-offs no matter which way you turn.

I contrast my approach with Nance Atwell’s, which she describes in The Reading Zone. Atwell talks about “reading as a personal art” in which:

Reading workshop doesn’t impede the journey or exact a toll. There are no tests, worksheets, self-sticking notes, projects, book reports, double-entry journals, or discussion questions between the last page of one good book and the first page of the next. Teachers who help kids act as readers learn how to assess their growth in ways that match what readers do: in a nutshell, the teachers talk with young readers, and they listen to them (p. 17, The Reading Zone).

The problem with using one teacher’s approach as a model is that while we might be in sympathy with most of what she says, there may also be some points on which we’ll differ, and these differences are important because they reflect allowances we need to make for the specific needs of our students.

That said, I am strongly in agreement with Atwell’s idea of reading as a personal art. To me, connoisseurship is the mark of an accomplished and critical reader, but it is completely lost in the endless diet of junk texts and narrowly conceived, highly structured, basal reading programs that kids are offered in school. I can see that maybe a few bits and pieces of those programs might be useful for class discussions, but the whole package is cumbersome and interferes with our ability to appreciate the literature itself.

The most important thing, I’d say, is that my students can see themselves becoming readers now, having begun to develop uniquely individual tastes for what they like – and want – to read, and who they want to become.

Attribution: Scott Ableman

Dear Doug,

Finally– in so, so many ways. First “finally”: finally climbing out of the thicket of familial and school challenges to get back to blogging in general. Second “finally”: finally answering your first post here, Doug, and once again, thank you for agreeing to this exciting joint venture. Third “finally”: I think it speaks to the inherent quality of the workshop model that even with the craziness of the last few weeks going on, I finally feel like I am doing something worthwhile with my students’ precious time.

Precious, as you know, because our classrooms are not the delightful white and yolk cradled so carefully by Nancie Atwell’s own school, where she has designed the schedule around the model, and not vice-versa. Consider, for example, that she sees her students– no more than nineteen– for at least 90 minutes every single day for language arts instruction. Consider also something that I just learned from our literacy coach, who studied with Nancie in 2008: kids have Friday, Saturday, AND Sunday to complete substantial reading and writing at home. Consider also that although clearly the Center for Teaching and Learning does not seek out gifted students or discriminate financially, its population still self-selects for involvement, commitment, and “standard” students by a) being a private school that has a detailed application process; b) not having the financial means to address special needs, as they themselves state on their website; and c) requiring substantial parental involvement from the get-go.

So, then– precious, because we see our kids for so much less time. Precious, because our kids leave our rooms and enter a swift, unforgiving current of school culture to the very contrary of the principles we espouse through workshop. Precious, because our kids are so massively diverse in their needs, and so large in their numbers, and so often unsupported even at home.

And this, I would argue, is precisely why workshop is so important in the public schools. A public school does not make workshop unfathomable and unworkable. It makes itself the place where an oasis of personal choice, differentiation, meaningful instruction, and physical comfort like workshop is needed the most of all.

We’re five weeks into the model now, and I had my 100+ students rate themselves on a rubric to assess how successful they felt at the work. I reviewed each rubric with the student, and made adjustments to their self-assigned percentages in conference with them where necessary. I could count on one hand the times I did this. No student rated themselves below a 70% on one or more of the rubric elements, and those students were only a handful.

And I AGREE with them, Doug! They *are* silently sinking into their self-chosen books. They *are* producing 3-5 pages of draft on personally meaningful topics every week. They *are* engaging in daily, lively discussions of poetry. My high-needs IEP kids are working up to snuff. My ESL and former ESL students are indistinguishable from their peers.

Now, all that being said, we are now jumping into the far more instructional (versus procedural) form of workshop, and things may be very different in another five weeks. But I don’t think so. And here’s why: because workshop has let these kids know that their choices matter; that their voices mean something; and that workshop curriculum which is more arbitrarily taught still has a rationale.

In otherwords: workshop has bought their trust. And once you have the kids’ trust, I am discovering you can do nearly anything you like with them.

Could your next post reflect on how workshop and trust intersect in your classroom?

I’d also like to hear about the top major challenge you’ve got going. Actually, maybe we could make this a regular part of our posts back and forth: the workshop Challenge Du Jour. What do you think?

Yours,

Dina

The first in a series of posts in which Dina Strasser, who blogs at The Line and Doug Noon, who blogs at Borderland, discuss using a workshop approach to reading instruction:

Dina,
I like your suggestion that we use a blog 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

cross-posted at Borderland