When America’s paper of record discovers a “trend” that is literally decades old and presents it as cutting edge, it makes you wonder about the articles in the paper you don’t know anything about. But there’s the New York Times, and a series on “The Future of Reading,” gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the spectacle of classroom teachers letting students choose their own books to read!
The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on.
No one seems to have mentioned to the Times that this is more or less standard practice, for good or for ill, and has been for a decade or more. Here’s a dead giveaway: search “reading workshop” on Google and you get 241,000 hits.
May I suggest to the editors of the Times that they assign an investigative team to a few other ideas that are “catching on.” I understand there’s a new sport that involves driving cars very quickly that a lot of people seem interested in called “NASCAR” or some such. And although I haven’t seen it myself (I don’t own a TV, you see), I also keep hearing about this something called “reality TV” that’s apparently becoming quite popular. You can even read about it on your computer over something called the Internets, or some such. Have you heard of it?
Update: “Progressive schools let kids pick their own books in the 1920s and 1930s. Now it is supposed to be a major innovation. Ha!” tweets Diane Ravitch, who is quoted in the piece. The paper “applauds the death of any version of a common culture.” Just desserts of the NY Times,” she adds. “By encouraging the death of reading, they doom the NY Times.”
I’ve adopted reading workshop in my classroom this year (9th grade English) in large part because of what I’ve learned from The Core Knowledge Blog. 1. Reading builds background knowledge, which is the key to further reading/success in school/cultural literacy. 2. Many students struggle in their content courses because of a lack of reading ability. Therefore, shouldn’t we be encouraging and facilitating students’ reading as widely as possible? This is not a dumbing down or a retreat from actual learning! It’s an acknowledgement that what we have been doing has failed spectacularly and that perhaps a different approach might work better.
I suspect that you and Diane Ravitch already know that most of the students in my English I courses are NOT reading at a ninth grade level. Many of them haven’t read a book outside school since approximately 4th grade. Many of them haven’t read a book inside school in that time frame either.
They are reading in my classroom now.
And as the Times points out, a workshop approach can be combined with core texts. I will be teaching Animal Farm and Romeo and Juliet as usual this year. The only difference is that my students will also read 5-25 *other* books, discuss those books with me and their friends, and use what they learn to improve their writing. If this is what the death of reading looks like, I say bring it on.
Your approach sounds perfectly rational, Jillian. The mischief comes when we worship at the alter of student engagement to the point that we are reluctant to choose challeging works of literature because we’re afraid they’re boring. In my school, assigning students books in the reader’s workshop was verboten. We trained them to choose books on their “just right” reading level and drilled them in reading strategies and response journaling. If we wanted to have a whole class experience, that’s what read alouds were for.
Students should be exposed to great books AND have the opportunity to choose their own. The two are not mutually exclusive.