My Personal Reading Curriculum

Key Ideas That Ground Me in My Teaching

Teachers are under great pressure to change their teaching these days. Hardly a year goes by that isn’t filled with new curriculum, new methods, and new requirements delivered as new mandates to which teachers must conform. Because reading is the first “r”, the change here has been particularly sweeping, so much so that it’s easy for some of us to feel swept off our feet into styles of teaching we’re not comfortable with.

Truth is, districts can tell teachers what and how to teach, and more are doing exactly that. So each of us has to have a way of connecting with what’s most important to us in our practice and infusing our core beliefs into whatever methods we are asked to use.

Over the years, I’ve come up with seven ideas that I’ve tried to make a consistent part of my teaching:

• Teach kids how to make their own good choices.
• Give kids real things to do.
• Offer practical, reusable strategies when kids get stuck.
• Surround kids with models of quality.
• Help kids learn to evaluate themselves and set goals for their own improvement.
• Treat kids as individuals striving to reach their full potential.
• Make the work meaningful and relevant to kids’ lives.

In a list like this, these ideas may not seem very powerful. But with each year that passes, I realize that they’ve become a lifeline for me, reconnecting me during hard and confusing times with my purpose as an educator and with the inspiration that drew me to working with kids in the first place.

Each of these ideas informs my practice in specific ways and each can be applied to reading regardless of the grade level or subject area in which I’m working:

• Teach kids how to make their own good choices. The first choice in reading is what to read. Choice is the key to motivation, to ownership, and to the essential goal of making sure kids are reading regularly at their independent reading level. Choice also makes reading with a class full of readers more interesting. When everyone is reading the same text, the same way, at the same time, individual readers lose the opportunity to make the individual discoveries that are so crucial to getting excited about reading and to becoming good at it. I want kids to have choices in their reading so they can learn to become choosy readers.

• Give kids real things to do. If we want kids to develop real-world reading skills, they have to be engaged in real-world reading activities. I want kids to have real discussions about books just like adult readers do. I don’t want them to write book reports, I want them to write book reviews just like the ones adults publish online and in newspapers and magazines. I also want kids to read in their interest areas. In order for kids to learn about informational texts, they have to read them for authentic purposes. Just like adults, I want kids to read not only for entertainment but also to solve real problems and to explore important issues in their lives.

• Offer practical, reusable strategies when kids get stuck. I want the bulk of my instruction to focus on techniques that help readers solve the most common problems they encounter when they read. To do that, I have to offer much of my instruction one-on-one through conferencing as kids are reading in authentic self-selected texts. I want to emphasize the process of reading so kids can master techniques that will serve them in any reading situation they encounter.

• Surround kids with models of quality. I want to model good reading in front of students as often as I can. I want them to hear me reading well and to follow my thinking about how I read as I share my thoughts out loud. I want to give them a language to describe good reading based on six qualities: speed, accuracy, phrasing, expression, understanding, and thinking. And I want them to listen critically but constructively to each other as they read and express their understanding of the texts they encounter. Finally, I want them to read good books and other high quality texts of all kinds. I want them to develop a sense of what they consider to be good writing, and I want them to have their own lists of favorite books, authors, and genres.

• Help kids learn to evaluate themselves and set goals for their own improvement. With each year that goes by, I become more convinced that self-assessment is the single most valuable skill I can teach. Kids who can evaluate themselves and set goals for their own improvement are more engaged in their learning and more likely to make progress regardless of the instruction they receive. I want kids to internalize our criteria for good reading and be able to apply it to themselves as well as I can. I want them to have high expectations for their performance that go far beyond minimum state requirements. Most of all, I want them to work with me, not as students, but as partners in their own learning, taking responsibility for the kinds of readers they want to become.

• Treat kids as individuals striving to reach their full potential. With so much emphasis on standardized tests these days, it’s easy to get caught up in the notion that our goal is to help every student develop the same minimal level of skills. But rather than working for minimum competency, I want to work for maximum potential. I don’t want the same learning goals for each student; I want individualized learning goals that support the notion of every child being the best he or she can be. Far from being standardized, I want my instruction to be as individualized and as differentiated as possible. Different readers need to read different texts, they need to learn different strategies, and they need to pursue different projects. The best way to make sure we leave no child behind is to push all children ahead as far and as fast as they will go.

• Make the work meaningful and relevant to kids’ lives. Reading is, first and foremost, the act of getting meaning from text. In order for kids to learn to read, their texts must be meaningful to them. No teacher, or curriculum, or entity can know better than the readers themselves what texts will be meaningful and relevant to their lives. The work kids do around reading must make sense to them as a natural extension of who they are and why they read. Why do we give book talks and write book reviews? Because we want other readers to learn about the books we’ve read. Why do we choose the books we choose? Because we like certain authors or because we want to learn about certain subjects. If we want kids to become lifelong readers, we have to start by making reading a part of their lives.

When I think about how to teach reading, these seven ideas form the foundation of my approach. I can’t realize all of them in every teaching situation. Sometimes the environment in which I’m working is too restrictive. But when I keep these ideas in mind, and when I work consistently to bring my teaching in line with them to the greatest degree possible, I know I provide kids with a valuable reading experience.

With all the change going on around us these days, it’s easy to lose our way. Before we know it, we’re teaching things we don’t believe in to kids who don’t care. That’s when our teaching suffers and our work becomes laborious. Reading is a deeply personal endeavor. If we teach it without a strong connection to our experience as readers or to our values as teachers of reading, our work lacks integrity. We may not be able to teach exactly the way we want to all the time. But when we ground our teaching of reading in our own personal curriculum, we create for our students an experience that has the power to inspire them as much as reading inspires us.