Week 3, Blog Post 3 Putting YA literature pedagogy in conversation with Kittle. I’ll start with my biggest takeaways again, this week from Penny Kittle’s “Understanding Readers and Reading,” “Building Stamina and Fluency,” and “Opening Doors into Reading” in Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers.
Buehler’s and Kittle’s beliefs about being teachers of readers are largely harmonious. The passages for this week and last interact for me as an introduction to the idea of YA lit (Buehler) and then how to teach reading (Kittle) in such a way that Buehler gives the larger ideas and material that Kittle then situates inside a more tangible teaching methodology. They certainly complement each other, and I enthusiastically agree with much of what both teachers have to say. When Kittle says it’s important for students to take pleasure in reading, it doesn’t mean avoiding challenging or potentially “dry” texts. It means letting students read what they want to read in addition to those texts. Their pleasure reading will often be a means of building the stamina to read these more difficult texts. As Kittle excellently explains it, students need “sustained engagement with stories” (21) to be better readers. We must encourage students’ confidence that they can be better readers. This is about teacher-student relationships and students’ relationships with books. We must trust students to trust us and to more importantly trust themselves. This looks like many things inside and outside of the classroom, but I believe Kittle suggests that the most important one is setting goals. The goals should be attainable (Kittle suggests setting reading paces to determine how many pages two hours of reading looks like and setting that as a weekly goal) and student-driven. Just as we have to trust students when they write and give them choice with writing (also from Kittle), we have to trust students to read and making reading choices. We as teachers must support students and therefore we must support students’ choices. And just like with writing, some of this support looks like conferences. Reading conferences! A novel thought (pun intended), but one I can get behind. Reading conferences support student-teacher relationships, give teachers the opportunity to match students with books (Buehler), the opportunity to check in on reading goals and progress, and the chance to catch “fake-reading” (where the student isn’t actually reading the book, just Sparknotes-ing it or maybe not even that). With reading conferences, we create a space where we can check and celebrate engagement with books to encourage our students as readers inside and outside of the classroom- and isn’t that one of our biggest goals as English teachers? “Developing reading stamina by cultivating an individual reading habit requires relationships with students and systems that support, encourage, and challenge readers; it also requires will.” Penny Kittle I enjoyed Kittle’s writing on writing and find myself also enjoying what she has to say about reading, which is probably obvious by my slightly-too-lengthy list of takeaways. If I was better at brevity (it’s a work in progress), I would have limited myself just to this excerpt from page 52:
Consider the reading we need to balance during a yearlong English class: 1.We need to study literature (whole texts). 2.We need to read short mentor texts (in all genres) to understand the writer’s craft and create a vision for what we ourselves will write. 3.We need to develop an independent reading life. This is also a reminder of just how interdependent reading and writing are to each other.
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AuthorI'm a high school English teacher looking to share with students, parents, and peers some of what I'm learning in the classroom as a teacher. Archives
October 2018
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