Photo Credit: Terry Hassan via Compfight
Today’s post takes me away from the classroom stories I have been sharing and straight into the confessional.
Here it comes: I’m in an existential crisis. I love to read. I REALLY don’t like reading class. That makes me just like many of my students.1 Except that I’m responsible for the misery.
I had a crisis over winter break. I didn’t want to come back to school and teach reading in the spring. I wanted to teach science, social studies, math, and writing. Not reading.
Why?
Much of the current GREAT THINKING in education says our lessons have to be TIGHTLY FOCUSED around a SINGLE IDEA that is PROMINENTLY POSTED so students can KNOW WHAT THEY ARE LEARNING TO DO.
I’ve found that tight focus feels, well, tight…and confining…like a corset. (Or at least how I imagine a corset must feel?) It squishes me innards, metaphorically speaking.
I’m tired of the lessons whose tight focus on a reading strategy or genre leaves little space for the children to stretch and think for themselves; the five-days-a-week meetings of reading groups at the appropriate guided reading level to gradually release responsibility for my predetermined focus lesson; the “progress monitoring” of children, as if that much measuring of accuracy and rate (which is what it usually distills to) makes a hoot of difference for the big things that matter the most (or that measuring a lot makes a lot of difference, either.) I’m tired of the guilt for never being able to accomplish the above.
To make matters worse, a full two hours of our day is taken up by reading instruction, a 90 minute reading block and a 30 minute “intervention” block, which doesn’t leave much time for the classes the kids actually do like, like science and social studies and (less universally liked) writing, much less for student inquiry. The corset, though fashionable, is killing me and the students.
So, I’m experimenting. I’m stepping over to the Dark Side, further away from the core reading program, further into infidelity. (Infidel. Heretic. Ugh.)
It is not enough just to close the door anymore and hope no one notices. So, I have to be prepared for the eventual blow back. I will share my thinking so that I am prepared.
First (and primarily), I am focusing our learning on questions, rather than statements, because questions elicit thought. The two questions that have served me best are these: What sense can we make of this? And, later: Why might this be important to know or understand? From those, we can generate questions that will draw us deeper into our own inquiry. The inquiry may come from a topic I’ve chosen, or something the children develop themselves. But, if I post anything on a poster, it will be those questions.
Second, we will reflect on the answers to those questions. If I post anything else on posters, it will be how we have (provisionally) answered those questions, the discoveries we have made.
As far as structure, because I know I will get some questions about that. I’ll continue to offer a lot of uninterrupted self-selected reading. The innovation, though, was to create a wall of books we have read, with short, teaser reviews when the kids finish reading them. We are using that wall as a place to show our own reading, with periodic reflection along the way. The kids like reading self-selected books. (Like my brother-in-law, they don’t consider reading actual books to be “reading class.”) They like sharing what they’ve read with others. More of that, please.
I am also bringing more science and social studies into our small group reading time. Sure we are reading words, but we are also reading tables and graphs and maps and figures and videos and Google Earth and physics demonstrations in order to understand something important about a topic we are studying. We will start with the same questions: What sense can we make of this? Why might this be important to know or understand? And these groups will not meet five days a week, either. Two at most, for longer periods of time, sometimes less often.
I won’t let mini-lessons and small group work crowd out our shared read alouds. Period.
I’ll continue to talk to kids individually. If the powers that be want five group meetings for struggling readers, I’ll point toward two longer group meetings and (at least) three conferences per week and (hopefully) we will have a discussion about the relative utility of this path vs. the other.
Mostly, though, I want the kids to think. And I do not want to contribute to their dislike of “reading, the class.”
- My all-time favorite story about how universal this problem is came from my brother-in-law, then a fourth grader in Texas. When I asked him whether he liked reading, his answer came in the form of a question: “Do you mean reading the thing you do, or reading the class?” Turns out he hated reading, the class, but read all the time outside class. ↩
Thanks for sharing your crisis…and your solution! Teaching students to hate school and to hate learning seems like a sad commentary on practices that get accepted that don’t have students’ best interests in mind! I feel like this happens in lots of content areas, instead of figuring out ways to support and inspire learning in our students we torture them with repetitious drudgery in the name of “school.” Keep inspiring your readers and learners…maybe one day there won’t be a delineation between reading, the thing you do and reading, the class at school!
Thank you so much for pausing to leave a comment, Kim. It’s strange for me to admit this in such a public way, but I really do (did) need to get a handle on what was happening. We’re feeling more pressure at school to be faithful to “the program” because our test scores, while stellar, are not increasing toward 100%, and beyond. 🙂 So, through sheer panic, we (I, since I’m also part of the system) toss what we know about learning aside, hoping for a quick fix and our name off the SINA list. Really, this learning thing starts with the students. Any solution that doesn’t start right there is…well…a problem.
Steve,
When reading seems like work and devoid of passion, things have gotta change. Not just for us, but for the kids. I love your insistence on read aloud and your one-to-one conferences. When I think of teaching reading and what it means to be a reader, those are the parts of workshop that matter most. Ninety minutes for reading — eek. Not that I don’t love the time, but it does take too much away from other things, like science and social studies that teach those critical THINKING skills. I have 40 minutes on average of reading time and that seems a bit tight. I think 50 or 60 minutes would be perfect, especially for those who just need more time to read and don’t have the environment at home to do it in. Anyway, what is perfect?
I love your confessions and your questions (worth stealing).
Julieanne
Thanks, Julieanne, for the conversation. It is great to hear how others do things. When I got into this teaching gig, I was not prepared for how strangely isolated it is…
And I hope this doesn’t seem too whine-y, or curmudgeon-y. I don’t want to become that guy, the avoidance of which is probably what motivated this post in the first place. 🙂
I think the reason I like to start with those questions is that a) they presuppose that meaning is there and finding it is our task (and our joy!); b) it fits well with how I read by thinking. I’ve never practiced “visualizing” or “inferring” but I’ve done a heck of a lot of both of these in service of finding meaning in something important. The reading series I’m to use has an I model, we do, they do kind of format for the reading strategies. I’m to post these goals on the wall somewhere (Today we’re going to use visualizing to help us make sense of texts…) I’m much more comfortable working backwards, sort of reflectively, ’cause I think that’s the way I do things naturally: “Today we will try to make sense of this text.” Afterwards: “what did we do that helped us? Let’s give it a name.”
But…the learning goal becomes the same (I”m cool with that!): “Today we will try to make sense of…And here’s what we did…” I think that works well for reading. For writing, more explicit goals can be really helpful, sometimes. Same with for math, sometimes. Social studies and science, less so. They seem more interpretive, like reading. At least that’s how I experience things.
It’s hard for me to imagine, Steve, how an administrator could come into your room and hear your kids talk without recognizing the depth of their thinking. And I think it’s precisely that kind of narrow strategy instruction, which is frequently divorced from real meaning, that the Common Core hoped to change. So if you do get called to task, how about invoking David Coleman “We lavish too much attention on these strategies in the place of reading. I would urge us to instead read.” Or Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Vicki!
It’s odd. People who do come into the classroom are super impressed with the kids’ conversations, the level of work they are able to do. I think we really have something going, and I have hopes for something better in the future.
I think the pressure is rising because of the tests that we need to pass. Our district performs really well, so the kind of public shaming that the an eventual SINA listing represents is new and has directed our energies toward passing those tests. I don’t hear much talk about the Common Core at all right now. Two years ago, yes, but now we are focused on implementing a reading program (which is supposed to be aligned with the CCSS, but, I believe, is not) rather than critically examining our practice and how it fits the intent of the CCSS. The energy has gone into developing data systems that will ensure the program is taught with fidelity.
Here’s the rub for me, personally. I so much want to be part of system-wide change; I don’t want to be the guy who shuts his door and grumps around. Rather, I want to be the “force for good” that we talk about in our classroom. Yet, I find myself butting heads with system-wide change efforts, which really undermines my sense of who I want to be as a professional. And I do it because I don’t think these system-wide efforts will actually lead us to the goal we share. I believe that smart teachers making thoughtful decisions that integrate learning domains around important questions will result in greater learning. But, I worry that the time for those conversations has come and gone in the realm of reading instruction, at least until we get over the shock of the public shaming and focus our attention on what we know about learning. In the interim, we’ll probably focus our attention on implementing the reading program with fidelity. (And hiding our heads, which is totally unsatisfying!)
This has all been strangely jarring to my soul. Some would be more able to just let it roll off them. I’m having a hard time with that, for some reason…