Required Reading and Some Alternatives

Throughout the summer, many educators on Twitter have been discussing how to get students interested in reading during this upcoming school year. Often the comments have been about requirements that teachers set up for their students' reading: what students are told that they must read (or do with that reading) or that they are not allowed to read (or do).

Here are five articles (and several Twitter resources) related to that topic. What do you think?

"Is The Great Gatsby Really Required Reading? Disrupt Texts Challenges Teachers to Reconsider the Classics" (2018) by John Warner

The sentiment isn't necessarily anti-"classics" (the traditional texts that so many of us think of when we think of "the canon" typically read in high school English courses). Instead, the Disrupt Texts project asks us to think about which perspectives are left out when we persist in reading only the classics. Our students who do not find themselves or their experiences represented in canonical texts benefit when teachers consider how to rectify that by supplementing the classics or replacing them, as appropriate.

Check these out via Twitter: Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, Kim Parker, Julia Torres, and John Warner

"Assigned Reading Works as Well as Assigned Flossing" (2018) by Amber Counts

The title of the article is also its main point! Read this one after the one above and look for the point about some students' "fake-reading" of the classics versus their actual reading of young adult literature.

Check this out via Twitter: Amber Counts

 "On the Level" (2017) by Donalyn Miller

The article opens with an anecdote about elementary students who were taken to visit the school library but were forbidden from selecting their own books, instead being told that they were limited to books that were marked with a certain Lexile reading level--whatever had been determined to be each child's level. This misuse of reading level measurements to label children instead of the texts that children read drives the rest of the article, a look at "what reading level systems offer and what they don't."

Check this out via Twitter: Donalyn Miller

 "How to Stop Killing the Love of Reading" (2017) by Jennifer Gonzalez

This one-teacher-to-another interview of Pernille Ripp addresses the teaching practices that often make our students dislike reading . . . and those that can get them passionate about reading again, making the English classroom a place for enjoyable literacy development.

Check these out via Twitter: Pernille Ripp and Jennifer Gonzalez 

"Classroom Libraries Can Plant the Seed for a Lifelong Love of Learning" (2018) by Lauren Barack

Getting students excited about reading requires giving them access to texts that they will want to read. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is promoting an effort called "Build Your Stack" to help teachers set up classroom libraries that make appealing, enriching texts accessible to students without their having to leave the room.

Check these out via Twitter: Lauren Barack and NCTE