Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Reading can be a very fraught topic for parents, teachers and students. Strong reading skills are essential for accessing later curriculum, so teachers put a lot of emphasis on it early. But the pressure and angst of getting students reading on schedule can sap the joy out of an activity that many young children love. At its heart, reading is a way to access stories, which in turn make readers wonder about the world. In the race to get kids reading, it can be easy to treat reading like a procedure, instead of the complicated experience that it is.

In her ten years of teaching, Courtney Rejent has had many students pass through her classes who claimed they hated reading, but rather than forcing them to read books they hate or making them fill out reading logs to show they read at home, Rejent has taken to heart an approach to reading that is much more relationship-based. Her sixth grade classroom runs on a reader's and writer's workshop model, which means students are doing the majority of their reading and writing in class, where Rejent can help them.

OK, Radical Nation, here’s a simple question for you:  Do you believe that there is a fundamental difference between developing kids who CAN read and kids who WANT to read?

And here’s another question:  Which of those two buckets would YOUR district, school or classroom fall into?  Are your practices and processes around reading instruction sparking a love of reading in kids — or have your practices and processes become so directive and scripted that kids might master the skills necessary to read and then never willingly pick up a book again?

Those ideas have been roiling through my professional circles lately, sparked originally by this Kylene Beers quote: