I am pleased to present this guest post by Lesley Roessing, Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project and Senior Lecturer in the College of Education, Armstrong State University. Lesley is a former graduate student of mine at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, PA. Like any teacher I love to see my students make good.
By
Lesley Roessing
A meta-analysis of 41
studies examined the effect of choice on intrinsic motivation and related
outcomes in a variety of settings with both child and adult samples. Results
indicated that providing choice enhanced intrinsic motivation, effort, task
performance, and perceived competence, among other outcomes.
-- (U.S. National Library of Medicine)
I wake up and roll out of bed. What shall I eat? Cereal? Oatmeal? Bagel? Breakfast
bar? I have choices. No one tells me what to eat; I eat what I want and
what I feel I need—limited only by what is available. Maybe I want to eat
oatmeal fourteen days in a row; possibly I have a craving for a decidedly less-healthy
donut on a particular day. The following day I try a multi-grain, no-sugar,
vegan-friendly cereal bar, knowing that I can discard it if I take three bites
and find I hate it. I go to my closet. Again, I can wear what I want, limited
only by what I own and what I deem appropriate for the day ahead—my purpose, my
audience.
I experience the same situation with what I watch
on television, what movies I view, and what books I read. I make my own
choices, sometimes with the advice of friends or colleagues and sometimes with the
guidance of experts in the appropriate field. Sometimes I read a book because
my book club is reading it, but again I have the choice of which book club to
join and whether to read that month’s book so I can attend and contribute to
the meeting. I experience some failures but a lot of successes along the way. I
have come to know myself as a viewer and reader.
But as I talk to teachers and visit schools, so
many students are being told what to read, when to read, and how to read. I
held a literacy workshop and asked educators to free-write about what they
read, when they read, where they read, how they read, and what they do after
they read and what they do if they are not enjoying what they are reading. I
then asked them to contrast what they wrote about their personal reading behaviors
with the reading in their classrooms. The majority looked shocked, chagrined,
embarrassed. Many shared that they were told what their students had to read
and when. Some even said that all teachers in a grade level needed to be on
approximately the same page in the same book at the same time. Some even
admitted that the curriculum content was up to them as long as they covered the
standards but that “having students all read the same book at the same time was
easier—easier to implement and easier
to assess.”
What is our aim in
including reading and literature in the curriculum? If our aim is to grow
lifelong readers, I contend that we are failing.
According to studies, about
50% of Americans polled are alliterate, which means 50% of Americans can read but rarely do so. A third of
high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and
neither do 42% of college graduates.
There is a decline in, or
even a halt to, reading both for pleasure and academics at the middle grades. Alliteracy occurs when students are
capable of reading, but choose not to read. It is also known by the terms
“nonreaders, literate nonreaders, and reluctant readers.”
The other day, a friend
and I were talking about the classics, and I asked her, a former teacher, if
she had read a certain novel. She laughed. “Yes, the Cliff Notes version.” That
is not an anomaly. When I asked my university Adolescent Literature class how
many had ever read Spark Notes or Cliff Notes instead of a novel or multiple
novels, almost 100% raised their hands (even the pre-service and in-service
English teachers). There is a reason these companies stay in business. And
what’s the point? No one said they read the Notes along with the novel because
they couldn’t understand the novel; they read them instead of the novel because they didn’t want to read the novel. If
they are reading merely a synopsis and explanation, why assign the novel?
A few weeks ago I was
talking to a middle school teacher about working with her class to read
self-selected books in book clubs. She turned to me and said, “I don’t I can do
this. I have to tell you; I am content-driven.” I looked confused. I said, “I
can’t think of one novel where the content
was important—unless the reader is appearing on Jeopardy.” I am not saying
that students shouldn’t be introduced to all sorts of literature, including the
classics. Many, including me, love many of the classics, but I was a reader
first.
When I look back to
what I remember reading in middle school and high school, it was what I read on
my own—not self-selected choice reading for class, but reading completely
outside school, for my own benefit. After all the Nancy Drew mysteries, I read
anything about Edgar Cayce and Henry VIII, all the books by Dr. Tom Dooley, any
biography by Irving Stone, and Daphne DuMaurier novels. There probably were
more. I can’t remember anything I read for school. Despite school I continued
reading, but many college students have told me that they stopped reading in
middle school, when they were told what to read. In the two courses I teach
which required reading YA novels, self-selected with a genre or issue, at the
end of the course students tell me that they forgot how much they liked to read
or that they didn’t know they liked to read.
You might have noticed
that I have been using the term “students,” rather than “readers.” That is
because we first have to grow readers, students who think of themselves as
readers and are on their way to becoming life-long readers. I had many eighth
grade students who admitted they never had previously read an entire book or
had read only one or two books in the previous middle school classes or rather fake-read those books. Those same
students became readers of twenty to thirty books by the end of that eighth
grade year.
How? I would like to
take the credit and say it was my amazing choice of whole-class reads and
exhilarating discussions of plots, character, setting, and figurative language,
and the spell-binding tests I gave. But in honesty, the answer was choice—theirs. Choice was the prime
motivator. At the end of seventh grade, Dave told me that he was “not a
reader.” On the last day of school, he turned to me and said, “I still don’t
think I like to read but I haven’t read a book this year that I didn’t like.”
(He read at least 25 books that year).
Think about it. There are very few topics or
writing styles or genres that interest everyone. I did attempt each year to choose
one such book for our one whole-class shared text. I introduced students to
reading strategies, literary elements, authors, writing styles, plot variations
through reading whole-class short stories, articles, and poetry, knowing that readers
can’t make choices until they know something about themselves as readers and they
can’t make text choices until they know something about text. I then let my
students loose on a shared novel that I thought most would like and all could
read within the shared experience. For me and most of my classes, that book was
The Giver, but there was noting
magical about the novel other than it is well-written, employs made of the
terms and concepts of plot, character, setting, and mood we had been learning,
has interesting concepts which can lead to deep ethical discussions with
students, especially eighth graders who are mature enough to understand them,
and touches on many interests. As Sean later told me, “The Giver was a good choice because it was a type of book most of
us would not have chosen on our own, but many of us went on to read the other books
in the [at that time] Lowry trilogy.”
I don’t employ a whole-class text to teach
students how to read and what they should read, but to open up the
possibilities of how to read and what to note and notice. When readers move on
the self-selected individual reading or group-selected book clubs, I encourage
them to read novels, memoirs, and nonfiction in diverse genres, formats, a
variety of challenge level and lengths, and with multicultural characters, by
multicultural authors. While I don’t require certain quantities, I want them to
be aware of their choices and extend them.
I designed a chart for my university
Bibliotherapy class which I would use if I still were in the classroom so that
students could analyze, and reflect on, their reading diversity:
I introduce readers, and they introduce each
other, to books though book talks, book blogs, book trailers, book passes,
gallery walks, and featured books-of-the-week.
Reading should be personal. Not every book speaks
to every child. However, when a student finds that book, a reader is born. It takes the right book at the right
time for the right reader to make the match. This could be the topic, the
issue, a character, the writing, or even the setting. I just read Jordan
Sonnenblick’s Falling Over Sideways,
and even though I already love his writing style and reading about the eighth
graders I taught for twenty years, what hooked me was the father’s stroke. My
mother had a stroke and lived for many years with the physical and mental
limitations. I am an adult and my mother was older than Claire’s father, and I
don’t know how common stroke is with middle-aged men, but many of my students
lived with, or near, their grandparents who in many cases were their
caretakers, or had an ill parent, and this novel would have resonated with
them. Other books have hooked me for other reasons, but it is always personal.
The most important strategy a teacher can employ
is to have books in the classroom, a diversity of books (refer to the chart
above when adding to your library). I was lucky to be able to build a classroom
library over the years and even though we had a wonderful school library and a
librarian who gave the best book talks ever, most of my “reluctant” readers
chose books from our classroom library which was shelved by genre and where an
“abandoned book” (one that had been previewed but still not found to be
enticing after 2-3 chapters) could be returned and the next book on a personal
list could be checked out.
To build a library, the holidays are a good time
to ask for library presents. Any student or parent who wishes to give a gift
can contribute a book in their child’s name. Design a “Book Given in the Honor
of…” tag for parents or students to complete and affix to books. The students
could even take part in a contest and then the winning designs copied onto
labels, the contest advertising the wish for books.
Imagine the pride when readers can point to
favorite books they chose to share with others.
Lesley
Roessing is Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project and Senior
Lecturer in the College of Education, Armstrong State University. She designed
and teaches a course in Bibliotherapy to use picture books and YA literature to
help guide children and adolescents through problems. Lesley is the author of The
Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension (Corwin, 2009), No More “Us” and “Them”:
Classroom Lessons & Activities to Promote Peer Respect (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), Comma Quest: The Rules They
Followed; The Sentences They Saved (Discover
Writing Press. 2013), and Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically &
Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core (Rowman
& Littlefield, 2014). Contact her at Lesley.roessing@armstrong.edu or
follow Facebook.com/coastalsavwp.
