Teaching Difficult Books

(Originally titled “Opening the Literature Window”)

From the Marshall Memo #429

“I owe a refund to the first 8^th graders I taught,” says Carol Jago in this thoughtful Educational Leadership article. She filled her classroom with short, funny, easy-to-read books on surfing, skateboarding, and other enticing topics, but it didn’t work. Students still hated reading.

Jago realized that she was confusing independent reading (which mirrors and validates students’ real-life experiences) with literature study (which opens windows to other worlds, other cultures, and other times, posing intellectual challenges and demanding that students stretch and grow). “If students can read a book on their own, it probably isn’t the best choice for classroom study,” she says. She began to heed the advice of Lev Vygotsky: “[T]he only good kind of instruction is that which marches ahead of development and leads it.” 

Jago began to teach books that had aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, and wisdom and developed ways to make them accessible to her students. Her suggestions:

• Stop telling students that reading is fun. Serious reading can’t compete in the “fun” department with video games and other activities that are easier and have more obvious appeal. “If students groan, ‘I can’t do it. This is too hard’ as you distribute copies of a 300-page novel, agree with them that it may be hard, but reassure them that with effort and your help they will be able to do it,” says Jago. 

• Tap students’ prior knowledge. For example, to prepare students to read Antigone, have them write about a time they stood up to authority.

• Address, don’t avoid, academic vocabulary. Help students meet the challenge of new words and figurative language head on. Introduce a few key words in a meaningful context, not in isolated word lists. 

• Teach students how to negotiate complex syntax. “Reading long, complicated sentences is a challenge for everyone, but particularly for students in the habit of skimming and scanning Facebook updates,” says Jago. “Teachers need to help students slow the pace of their reading for literature and develop the habit of rereading when a sentence doesn’t seem to make sense… We can’t do the work for students. They must do it for themselves.” Jago suggests choosing a few important sentences and having pairs of students translate them into everyday language.

• Hold students accountable for their reading. “In too many schools, teachers have stopped assigning homework reading altogether, principally because students have stopped doing it,” says Jago. “This is the path to perdition for literature study. If a teacher reads Lord of the Flies aloud to a class of 10^th graders, the only person becoming a better reader is the teacher.” There are ways to get students to do the reading at home.

• Teach cognitively powerful works. Jago salutes the Common Core State Standards for listing suggested books that are rigorous and challenging. 

“Opening the Literature Window” by Carol Jago in Educational Leadership, March 2012 (Vol. 69, #6, p. 40-43), http://www.ascd.org; Jago can be reached at cjago@caroljago.com.