Whole Novels for the Whole Class

A Student-Centered Approach

Ariel Sacks

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118526507
• eBook ISBN: 9781118585061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Work with students at all levels to help them read novels

Whole Novels is a practical, field-tested guide to implementing a student-centered literature program that promotes critical thinking and literary understanding through the study of novels with middle school students. Rather than using novels simply to teach basic literacy skills and comprehension strategies, Whole Novels approaches literature as art. The book is fully aligned with the Common Core ELA Standards and offers tips for implementing whole novels in various contexts, including suggestions for teachers interested in trying out small steps in their classrooms first.

• Includes a powerful method for teaching literature, writing, and critical thinking to middle school students
• Shows how to use the Whole Novels approach in conjunction with other programs
• Includes video clips of the author using the techniques in her own classroom

This resource will help teachers work with students of varying abilities in reading whole novels.

Part 1

Essential Practices

1

A Case for Whole Novels for the Whole Class

“That carefully prepared leap of faith my students and I take …”

In our second whole novel study of the year, one of my most struggling readers, Hector, had a breakthrough. He is not literate in his native language of Spanish and has major difficulty decoding multisyllabic words in English. He has a bright mind and lots of potential but had resisted putting in the immense effort it would take for him to make progress. He had often dismissed learning opportunities with phrases like “I don't know” and “It's boring.” But when he borrowed a classroom MP3 player with the audio tracks of the book, Hector began to follow along in the grade-appropriate novel the class was reading together, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.

At the end of the period, the students had a five-minute social break, but Hector did not want to stop listening to and reading the book. Whereas his attitude toward education seemed to have revolved around what he couldn't do and how much he hated reading, he was suddenly saying to me and the other students, “Don't bother me! This book is really interesting !” It was the choice of the word interesting that especially called my attention. To be sure, he was happy to be able to read what everyone else was reading and share in the experience; more important, he was experiencing a feeling that was totally new to him in relation to the written word—a feeling of genuine interest.

In this chapter, I make a theoretical and practical case for why I believe the whole novels approach provides a natural and compelling way into reading for all kinds of learners. Struggling readers like Hector, who've been through the gamut of reading interventions, have woken up to literature in the whole novels program, and advanced readers, who often feel marginalized in reading classes that don't challenge them, have found belonging and new directions through this approach. Why this method works and why it's not currently a norm in schools—but could be—are the questions I begin to answer here.

Let Them Have Stories

Stories are interesting; there's no question about it. We are “the story-telling animals,” Jonathan Gottschall shows us in his fascinating book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (2012). We live for the stuff of stories! We have an innate drive to experience and tell stories; they are part of how we think and relate to the world every moment of our lives. Stories are also an important piece of how our brains learn and remember. Dan Willingham, author of Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom (2010), explains, “The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories—so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to them as ‘psychologically privileged,’ meaning that they are treated differently in the memory than other types of material” (66–67). Later Willingham notes that in psychological experiments, stories were consistently rated more interesting than any other presentation format, even if the information was the same.

And yet we also have a widespread problem across the United States of students not wanting to read—not even stories. Kelly Gallagher, author of Readicide (2009), believes the problem has reached a point of “systemic killing of the love of reading” (2), and I can't say he's wrong. The coexistence of these two opposite realities suggests one thing to me: when students are asked to read fiction, and this mostly happens for them in school, they aren't really experiencing the stories.

Over the past ten years, it seems as though the whole country has fixed its eyes on the noble goal of teaching all children to read but gotten horribly distracted by its questionably motivated doppelganger: the goal of raising all students' literacy levels a requisite amount each year, as measured on a standardized test. Under the pressure and threats of raising scores, it is easy to lose sight of the reasons we even chose to devote our careers to teaching children to read and the reasons we love to read in the first place.

Even the strongest among us have probably found ourselves on occasion telling students they must read a particular story or random excerpt because someone with greater authority than ourselves told us that we had to do it. Or how many of us, in a moment of weakness, have caught ourselves telling students they won't pass their standardized exam or move to the next grade if they don't sit down and read right now?

These scenarios are part of the reality of teaching in the current test-driven educational climate, and they shape our students' school realities even more. Most of us know that students don't learn because they are told to and that standardized test scores do not motivate most of our students on a day-to-day basis. Furthermore, the mental frameworks of the testing culture become damaging when we build our practices on them.

To combat this pressure, we need to consciously seek out the deeper motivations, realities, and needs that exist for our students and ourselves. Then we must build our curriculum practices and the language we use with students around these deeper goals.

Humans inherently love and need stories. Why is this hard to see in schools today?

A Love Subverted: My Own Story of Reading

Strangely, I don't remember reading a single novel for any middle school English class I took in the early 1990s. I can recall the names of some of the books I pretended to read and can still picture the teacher talking about the important points of last night's chapter in front of the class. I remember one of my English teachers talking to us about To Kill a Mockingbird —a truly great book, I discovered later. I guess I found her lecture irrelevant to my life and whatever occupied my mind at that point. It didn't even occur to me to want to read it. With the information she gave in lectures and assignment sheets that allowed me to search through a chapter I never read for the answers, I was able to do well on the tests, or whatever else was required, without more than reading a chapter here or there. And this was before the days of finding book reviews and summaries on the Internet in seconds flat!

Secretly, however, I was a big reader. My grandmother, Baba, an educator herself, always gave me gifts of the latest and best adolescent fiction. These novels appealed to my own interests. I remember The Mozart Season, by Virginia Euwer Wolff, about a girl my age who was practicing Mozart for a big violin audition. I instantly connected with this book because I, too, studied violin seriously and battled the challenge of practicing. I also remember staying up late into the night reading The Devil's Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen, about a Jewish American girl, like myself, who asks at Passover why we have to remember the past and is transported to an alternate reality in which she is a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp.

I didn't stay up reading these books because someone would be checking the next day to see if I had read. Nor was I motivated by some abstract notion that I had to improve my reading skills. In fact, no one at school even knew what I read at home. Had I shared more with them, my teachers might have known me better; however, as a middle school student, I was concerned primarily with what my friends and classmates thought. Sadly, I perceived that reading was not a socially acceptable hobby in my ‘tween social circle, so I read privately. I talked to Baba on the phone about the books, but I never let them see the light of day in school.

My experience may not resonate with everyone, but the disengagement I felt is no stranger to English classrooms today. Many adolescents don't see their interests represented in the assigned reading they do for school and the tasks tacked on to check their understanding and teach skills with no discernable application. Gallagher (2009) argues that the limiting of authentic reading experiences is one of the key causes of “readicide” (4).

Breaking Free of the Chief Thinker Role: Putting Students’ Interests First

One of the barriers to authentic reading experiences for kids is what I call “the chief thinker” role, which is when teachers privilege their own questions and interpretations over those of their students. It can be tempting to do, because adults do know more about the world than children do, and part of our job is to impart some of our knowledge to students. Also, many of our own teachers positioned themselves as chief thinkers, and it can be difficult to find models who truly depart from this one.

However, we can't teach by doing the thinking for the students. If we do, we discourage them from connecting authentically with the world the author has created, effectively robbing them of this experience. Under these conditions, students become insecure about their own thinking (perhaps asking themselves, Why can't I understand this book the way my teacher does?), especially if they don't have people like my grandmother in their lives to validate their thinking behind the scenes. For a child's interpretation of a work of literature to be measured against that of an adult is not only unfair, but also misunderstands what the act of reading fiction actually involves.

At its core, a literature program must answer and be propelled by the desire humans have to experience stories of all forms, the nature of which changes over the course of a reader's life. (More on this in Chapter 2.) Often teachers' efforts to improve students' technical skills in reading seem to stray from this crucial aspect of a reader's development.

When we read fiction, our intention goes beyond comprehension. It is a deeper, highly personal process. In Fiction and the Unconscious (1962), Simon Lesser, a psychologist and literary critic who studied and wrote extensively on the psychological impact of literature, explains the phenomenon:

Fiction accomplishes something more miraculous than [a formulated understanding]. It involves us in the events it puts before us, without permitting us to become aware of the nature and extent, or usually even the fact, of our involvement. The emotions fiction arouses in us are evidence of this: they are too powerful to be explained solely on the basis of our cognitive reactions, conscious and even unconscious. (189)

If we read only to comprehend, we would read every text with equal interest and with little or no response. But as both teachers and readers, we know this is hardly the case. On the contrary, we read fiction to gain experience. Under the right conditions, we take great pleasure in the process, which allows us to inhabit the lives of others: we can journey to foreign lands, solve murder cases, get swept up in great love affairs, and confront our worst fears. Much like the compelling virtual worlds of games (though there are key differences in the use of imagination during reading versus video games), these opportunities provide a powerful incentive for children and adolescents to read fiction.

Without student motivation to experience a story, our efforts at teaching comprehension through fiction are dull, and our attempts to engage students in literary analysis lack purpose and context.

Back to Hector, and his comment, “Don't bother me! This book is really interesting!” The feeling he had at that moment is more compelling than any achievement goal we can set for kids. We must keep that reality front and center in the literature classroom, no matter what other priorities we have for our students....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Jossey-Bass Teacher
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Essential Practices
• Part 2: Making Whole Novels Work in Real-World Contexts
• Appendices
• Appendix A: Transcription of Whole Novel Discussion Notes
• Appendix B: Spanish Translation of the Parent Letter
• Appendix C: Notes Worksheet for Picture Book Study
• Appendix D: Directions for Plot Charting Activity
• Appendix E: Seeker Opportunity Assignment Choices
• Appendix F: Student-Designed “Book Report”
• Appendix G: Variations on a Theme Assignment
• Appendix H: Hero's Journey Cycle Activity
• References
• Index