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.