This past week we had our school wide book club meeting. This month the topic that we were discussing from the book was about increasing student engagement during reading. There was an immediate agreement that it is best for students to be engaged while reading and that there are, unfortunately,always some students that are not engaged with reading in the class.
One of the ideas/suggestions in the book was to use the popular books such as graphic novels during reading/strategy groups to hook the kids and get them reading. Some of the teachers thought this sounded great, while most were very unsure and just wanted to know how to get children away from those “graphic novel-y” books and to the “real” books. Of course this statement made me cringe. What makes a book a “real” and therefore better for students than any other? I immediately thought of a quote I had recently read by Jon Scieszka “Jeff Kinney's 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' series and Stephenie Meyer's 'Twilight' books got 49,323,701 kids reading.” I was very happy when my reading specialist (who was in charge of the meeting) nodded and said she understood the concern but a student reading anything was better than a student who wasn’t reading.
After the meeting I made sure to add Jon Scieszka’s Guys Read website to my weekly email along with an old news article from 2008 in the Chicago Turbine talking about Scieszka’s views on what reading is. For some of the teachers at my school I find just hinting and giving resources works far better than flat out disagreeing. Do you run into similar problems at your schools with teachers and or parents viewing some books as “not-real” books? How do you help change their opinions?
I definitely heard several teachers making comments about students needing to get a book they can "read" and not just look at, or a book that is at students' reading levels. Evidently books that aren't on our reading level or challenging us are not fun to read or good for us to read. How sad! I wish people would stand back and just think about what they are saying. It just makes no sense. And these are teachers! Education specialists. It boggles my mind.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I do not have an answer on how to change their opinions other than making positive comments, about graphic novels or students reading for fun, whenever the opportunity presents itself. Book recommendations in emails with reasons why a particular book might be good for reluctant readers in the classroom might help to slowly open their eyes to different types of books.
I still can't believe that this is a conversation that we have as much as we do. I definitely have this issue with some people in my school. Luckily the librarian before me felt (as I do) that kids should read what interests them and the library is full of fun, interesting, gross, entertaining, thoughtful books. Point being, they read what they enjoy! Good call by the way on dropping the hints in your weekly email!
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