Editor’s note: A version of this column first appeared in the author’s Substack.
Earlier this month, seemingly everyone was talking about Rose Horowitch’s October Atlantic article, The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.
Horowitch’s argument is as follows: The way we teach literature has changed drastically over the past 20 years, which has resulted in a severe literacy deficit for our kids once they arrive at college.
The gist? Students in grades six through 12 are no longer required to read entire books.
Due to reforms starting with No Child Left Behind, the educational system moved away from book-reading and instead toward assigning our children “short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea–mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.”
When I began teaching in Evanston in 2010, the idea of the whole-class novel was very taboo. Teachers who assigned whole-class novels were seen as archaic and viewed as pariahs by the curriculum and instruction department.
This move away from “teaching books” came on the heels of a few studies, including one by the American Library Association, specifically The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults, whose 2015 analysis, The Impact of Assigned Reading on Reading Pleasure in Young Adults, emphasized, “For sixth-grade students, motivation to read was tied to students being able to choose what they read and having good choices available. These students’ most negative experiences were ‘directly related to assigned reading,’ which they found difficult to understand and boring.”
Enter Lucy Calkins and her reading workshop model!
Calkins’ method, which focused on unit-based genre study with students mainly reading independently and at their level, as well as in book clubs, has now been largely discredited and replaced by curriculums based on The Science of Reading.
Long story short, the workshop model alone is not appropriate for children learning how to read, as research is abundantly clear; children need explicit phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency instruction.
But once kids know how to read, they should arguably have practice doing exactly that, reading books. The reading workshop model encouraged students to read independently, in the hopes of creating lifelong readers.
The National Council of Teachers of English defines independent reading as “a routine, protected instructional practice that occurs across all grade levels.” It goes on to state that “effective independent reading practices include time for students to read, access to books that represent a wide range of characters and experiences, and support within a reading community that includes teachers and students. The goal of independent reading as an instructional practice is to build habitual readers with conscious reading identities.”
Personally, I found the reading workshop model to be highly effective for middle schoolers. Those students who required intervention beyond and in addition to independent reading were easily pulled to the back table a couple of days a week to receive explicit instruction in small groups.
My students read what they wanted, with my guidance, and were all reading entire books, building stamina and, according to Horowitch, empathy.
“Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own,” she wrote.
This idea of building empathy through reading is paramount. Locally, we have invested in social emotional learning and wholeheartedly support SEL instruction. If a critical way to build empathy is also through reading novels, maybe we should continue encouraging our children to read more.
Our current language arts curriculum here in Evanston/Skokie is called StudySync, which consists of a catalog of texts that includes excerpts from longer novels, with short stories peppered in here and there.
Kids read passages, answer questions and write responses.
Throughout my teaching, I’ve always used excerpts and short stories to model skills. Historically, my students read bite-sized excerpts or chapters from longer novels in small groups. But this was in conjunction with children reading entire books.
According to Horowitch, “private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes” than their public education peers, which leads to what Nicholas Dames, a literature professor at Columbia University, refers to as “a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen” and a fast emerging equity issue.
There is a flip side to all of this. Is it possible that professors who are being forced to assign fewer books in their seminars are seeing other benefits?
Should we start prioritizing quality over quantity when it comes to reading at all educational levels? When Columbia decided to trim down their reading list, it began seeing advantages. Because “even the best-prepared students have probably been skimming some of their reading assignments over the years.”
The StudySync curriculum, on its own and without specialized instructor input, does not prioritize independent reading, nor does it prioritize whole class novels. There exists a tight pacing-guide that educators are held to, in order to cover all the excerpts and short stories, paired with the corresponding reading quizzes and essay questions.
How did we get here? That answer is simple. It all boils down to the way we measure success. Mike Szkolka, a teacher quoted in Horowitch’s piece, argues this: “‘There’s no testing skill that can be related to…Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?’”
If a skill is not easily measured, Horowitch argues, “instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it.”
Obviously, this is a broad curricular issue our entire country needs to reckon with.
But I wonder, what kind of readers and thinkers do we as a nation hope to produce?
This post was originally published on here
