Workshops Work if You Put in the Work

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Replace “horse” with “student”, “water” with “a textbook”, and “drink” with “read”, and you’ve got a pretty accurate sentiment. I mean, no one really expects high school students to read textbooks that are eight or nine hundred pages long, do they? Well, the sad reality is, yes, some people do. After all, textbooks tell kids everything they need to know, right? And what’s more, many are aligned to those wonderful state and national standards that seem to be the end all be all in education nowadays.

Alright, let’s take a break from the sarcasm for a second. Plain and simple, textbooks are not the paragon of academic reading that they are made out to be. Sure, they contain vast amounts of information in one place and are therefore not completely invaluable. However, the information within textbooks is often so condensed and cherry-picked (and sometimes inaccurate) that we can’t seriously expect any real learning to be enacted solely by a cover-to-cover reading. No, instead we must use textbooks sparingly and supplement them with other reading materials that are fresher, more accessible, and less sterile. 

So how do we make sure that our students are getting something out of the textbooks when we actually do use them? Well, we have to make sure that they are equipped with varied and effective reading strategies. As educators, we must model and actively teach good reading habits and strategies so that our students can get the most out of what they are reading and take in the information on a deeper and more impactful level. Preparing students to read with pre-reading activities, encouraging them to ask questions, take notes, and make connections while they are reading, and answering questions, drawing conclusions, and summarizing what they’ve read after the fact will allow students to be active readers not just passive sponges that absorb (or more often, don’t) what they read in thick, heavy textbooks.

What about reading materials that aren’t textbooks? Well for those, we have reading workshops. Now that’s not to say that reading workshops cannot be used for textbooks, but they are more effective and more appropriate for materials such as articles or novels. Reading workshops allow students to delve into more exciting and more accessible content area material that is connected to and has meaning in the real world. Students can network with one another and discuss what they have read accurately and effectively if they have some accountability for their reading material. Reading workshops are also an invaluable tool for classroom management, as they allow teachers to speak with students one-on-one to check progress and understanding, as well as provide support. The physical movement of the teacher also encourages students to be on task gives teachers a better handle on the atmosphere of the classroom.

My only real concern with what I read in these two chapters of Daniels and Zemelman is the sheer number of reading strategies provided. I’m not saying that the variety and number itself is problematic, rather knowing how, when, and to what degree to implement them is. The authors provide us with twenty-six strategies that we can teach and model for our students. That’s quite a few, and I’m sure there are dozens of others they did not discuss, as well as combinations and variations of the ones they did. So how do we know which ones to teach? We can’t realistically teach them all. So do we pick our favorites and try and push those? Do we keep teaching and modeling until we find two or three that work? I found the reading strategies chapter overwhelming as a teacher candidate, so I can only imagine how students would feel if they had this multitude of strategies and ideas thrown at them. I would think that like any teaching tool, it must be used sparingly and only when truly effective. If it doesn’t work, don’t force it. Just go with the flow and adjust as necessary. But this is generally easier said than done. It’s something I’ll have to explore once when I get into a classroom. How can I strike a balance between using good strategies and letting ones that are not practical for my own particular situation go?