Atwell Brings Me Home Again

This weekend I re-read Atwell's The Reading Zone and was surprised to see how my previous post shows how my methods have begun to slide in the opposite direction from Atwell's best-practice reading workshop. If you would have asked me which education author most inspired my teaching I would have said Atwell, and yet you wouldn't have known it by my post.

I wrote about how I had this great idea to have my students write down vocabulary words as they read their choice reading books - an unnecessary and even harmful disruption to what Atwell calls "the reading zone" - the uninterrupted flow of reading during which students experience a "hightened form of pleasure" and become life-long, habitual readers.

But what about rigor? Methods? Accountability? Data? All these nagging concerns that pull at me have also pulled at Atwell, and she goes into great detail about the teacher's role in the reading workshop, assessment, comprehension, and how less truly is more when it comes to reading strategies.

While for years I have subscribed to the belief that the best way to teach kids to read is to get them practicing, I still think there needs to be a balance between teaching schema and comprehension strategies, and allowing kids to enter the zone uninterrupted. Atwell's chapter on comprehension cites literacy theorist Louise Rosenblat and distinguishes between two modes of reading: the "efferent" and the "aesthetic." Efferent, from the Latin "effere" (to carry away), refers to gathering facts, information, procedures, ideas and so on. (Read: informational, persuasive, procedural reading.) Aesthetic obviously refers to reading we do for pleasure, beauty, self exploration, expression and all those higher artistic pursuits. (Read: poetry, fiction, memoir.)

I am at ease with this thought: get my students reading in the aesthetic mode frequently - get them lost in as many books as possible, facilitate rich, deep and higher-order discussions among them about these texts, and get them to love literature; then, teach them strategies for comprehending drier, less accessible texts with all the research-based methodology I can muster, using everything from double entry journals to vocabulary study to KWL charts to read-alouds.

If I teach these two modes simultaneously my class (starting tomorrow) will look like this: first 20 minutes of uninterrupted, untested choice reading, during which time I will circulate and confer with students about their reading (fabulous questions for readers on p. 92.) Then the remaining 30 minutes will be for read-alouds, group work, paired-reading or explicit literacy skill instruction in whatever genre we're currently studying.