Adapted from Kate Roberts' A Novel Approach.
Dating back nearly a century, a 1927 study found that the length of being in a book did little to affect comprehension but did a great deal to damage students’ attitudes about reading (Coryell 1927). In Book Love (2013), Penny Kittle examines the decline in reading as students enter middle and high school. While there are multiple factors at play (rising internet use and increasing demands of school and extracurriculars, for example), Kittle notes that most students do not do the assigned reading from their English classes because the book is too hard, or too boring, or not relevant to their experience. My own experience as a consultant in classrooms across the country suggests that when kids are all asked to read the same texts all of the time, reading does not get better; it often vanishes. It seems as though when we take away choice, and demand constant struggle, most kids stop reading at all.
I know this, and I suspect you do too. My middle school and high school classmates and I found so many ways to not read and still get good grades that I wish they had offered a degree in fake reading. And as I began teaching, I saw the same effect in my students. Many of them just didn’t read the books I assigned. The ones who did barely did. My class discussions felt surface and compulsory much of the time.
Of course, this is not just because I asked my kids to read the same text or because it was hard to read (though this might be a part of the issue). Instead the ways that we teach whole-class novels are often ineffective and alienating.
Time
Whole-class novels take too much time. When we plod through each page of a text over the course of six, eight, or even ten weeks, we do little to improve students’ understanding of reading or the text and we do much to harm their enthusiasm for and independence with reading these texts powerfully.
When we spend forever reading one book, we do not increase students’ comprehension of the text and we nurture negative attitudes about reading. Think of it as the law of diminishing returns: If I have a wicked headache and take two pain relievers, but that doesn’t work, taking four isn’t going to work any better and might begin to harm my liver. The same is true for the time it takes to read books.
Taking weeks to read a book does not prepare students for what they will have to do in college. Picture a high school graduate, having spent years going through books page by page, led by the nose by the teacher’s independent questions, arriving to her freshman year and being asked to read an entire dense text in a week. That was my experience, and it echoes many. While the ability to closely read a complex text thoroughly is one skill a graduating senior needs, another skill she needs is the independence and stamina to do so completely on her own—and quickly.
We take too long to read the books, and it’s not good for kids.
Teaching
We often teach whole-class novels in ways that discourage students: round-robin reading with no fluency instruction, constant text-dependent questions with no strategy instruction, and lectures, to name a few. While some students might make gains, most often the ones who benefit from these pedagogies are intrinsically motivated and eager to learn. For the students who are not already on board, or who are excited to learn but face obstacles, or who need support, these teaching techniques often keep them right where they are.
Take text-dependent questions. When wielded well, they offer a model of profound reading, one that could extend to other parts of the text or other texts. All too often, though, text-dependent questions begin to feel more like constant quizzing than transferable teaching. You know the feeling: You have read the text but found it hard to grasp, the teacher asks, “What does the bird signify in this scene?” and you just plain do not know the answer. In response to your (and the rest of the class’) ignorance, the teacher keeps asking questions you don’t know the answer to, until finally someone hits on the idea that the bird signifies death.
While there may be benefits to thoughtful uses of these methods, we must think critically and in divergent ways about the methods we use when we teach.
Transfer
If the main reason we teach is to see our kids improve over time, then each novel we teach should show marked improvement in the ways our kids tackle the texts. And to be sure, in classrooms with committed teachers, kids get better at doing the work we ask them to do. However, hundreds of teachers I have talked to over the years feel a dissatisfaction with the amount of transfer they see from text to text. When the next novel begins, it often seems as though our kids start from the same place they did at the beginning of the last book we read together. When we teach whole-class novels over long periods of time, without the kinds of teaching that help kids understand how to read any text well, we don’t consistently see transfer.
Text Complexity
It is possible to work on all of the previous issues and still teach a whole-class novel. One issue that will be harder to solve is this one: What about the kids who really, like for real, can’t read the book? Or, if we choose our novel with these kids in mind, what about the kids for whom this book is a breeze?
This is a central complaint against whole-class novels (and it is one that A Novel Approach spends a lot of time exploring). While a kid’s reading level is not some scarlet letter on her chest (and can be rather subjective), we can say confidently that it matters if a book is two or three or four grade levels above where she can independently read with strength. Of course there are instances where a student wants to read a crazy-hard book so badly that he dives in and rises to the occasion, but much more often, when faced with intense toughness, our kids back off and buck the text, as any of us would in their place.
Any time I choose to teach a whole-class novel, I should struggle mightily with this issue. I should ask: “For how many of my kids is this a tough read and how will I support them? Are there students in my class for whom this book is almost an unethical choice? That is, would asking them to be independent in this book be like asking me to do calculus right now with no help beyond a teacher asking me questions about calculus?” While there are ways to choose books and teach them that can help not only support but nurture our students, all too often we live in a state of denial about how hard these books are for kids to read on their own.
