Newtown High School English

Department: Re-visioning Reading

By Jeff White

Ask Newtown High School English teacher Kerry Baldwin how she defines reading, and she will tell you that it is an active endeavor that is as much a learned skill as mastering trigonometry or vectors in physics.

It has been Ms Baldwin’s experience that students returning from their first years at college tend to give the same feedback: although four years of high school English prepared them well for the rigors of university writing, many of them did not feel as well prepared for the demanding reading loads. This reality has caused high school English teachers to take a closer look at the methods used to teach reading. They conclude that the same hands-on approach used in writing instruction would serve reading instruction well.

“Developing reading skills and strategies is a learned concept,” says English Department Chairman John Terenzi. Like any other discipline, the more reading is practiced, the better one becomes at it.

Many English teachers have begun to “re-vision” reading, moving away from traditional modes of instruction in favor of making reading a more active, palpable activity for students. Moreover, teaching emphasis now rests primarily on students’ response to texts, where they are required to consider how they feel about a particular book by grafting its various themes onto their everyday lives.

Ms Baldwin knows that books are not the only things that are read. In a similar way in which words are devoured, people often look at a work of art and read into its subtle uses of light and color in an effort to extract the artist’s message. Using this analogy, she had her students last year make a painting out of a short story.

Reading the same short story over six times, Mr Baldwin had her students focus on a different aspect of the story with each recitation. From their various observations of the story’s themes and imagery, students painted scenes that represented different parts of the story; they could not use any words. Upon completing these pictures, students had to go from painting to painting and match the scene on canvas with the scene in the book.

Language And Color

“What was so interesting about [the project] was how they brought the choice of colors to the language,” Ms Baldwin recalls. “I’d always tried to go the other way, to say, ‘here’s how language colors the way we look at things,’ and they showed how colors could illustrate language.” Ms Baldwin hopes to perform the same project with her classes this year.

Bryan Luizzi, who teaches 10th- and 12th-grade English, is another proponent of making books take on an almost physical element. Working from the classic Greek tragedy of Oedipus, Mr Luizzi had his students re-write the play using modern language. After weaving the play’s themes into a more contemporary setting, his students acted out the parts.

The biggest challenge that Ms Baldwin sees in building reading skills is developing some physical reality that will help student view themselves as active readers.

She likes to have her students think about every single book or article they have ever read, from the days of Dr Seuss to Sports Illustrated, and jot the titles down on index cards. On each card, besides typical bibliographic detail, students record what they remember about the particular work. Piles of cards are divided between nonfiction and fiction. Besides giving students something they can see, these index piles, no matter how large or small, help students identify deficiencies in their reading. A 10th grader might see that she reads mostly fiction, and will make the effort to take on some nonfiction to even the stacks up.

“The idea is that I want them to see that they are readers,” Ms Baldwin says.

Mr Luizzi utilizes a similar activity, allowing his students to add to the piles as each year goes by. He has noticed that these annotated reading lists also serve as good reference sources for other students looking for different books to read for independent reading.

The high school’s independent reading requirement is perhaps its most stringent method of allowing students to take control of their reading. All grade levels are required to read two nonfiction titles and two fiction titles each year. Although the choices have to be approved by teachers, most students do not run into problems with their selections.

“Only if you’re interested in a book will you get something out of it,” concludes junior Adam Bagger concerning the merits of allowing students to select their own reading.

“The independent reading has really supplemented not only our lives, but some of the things we do in class,” says Mr Terenzi. The seven-year teacher often has his students undergo what he refers to as a “paperback writer” assignment, when students can select books off everyday bestseller lists.

Mr Luizzi makes use of an educational devise called Concentric Reading Circles. He might assign a particular book, like The Catcher in the Rye, to his students. But from this main title, he gives his students a list of selections that have similar themes. Perhaps the class will deal with the theme of a child coming of age, as evident in The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield. He might suggest that his students pick from books like Huckleberry Finn or Moll Flanders, which deal with the same issues. In this way, students have a say in the matter.

“It [also] helps them see that these themes are growing, they’re not just in one book,” explains Mr Luizzi.

Making Connections

High school English teachers place a large value on student response, and much of the current reading instruction hinges on the connections students can make between language and their daily lives. Upon assigning a book, Ms Baldwin seldom has her students write the traditional book report. Rather, all she requires is that her students have a dialogue with the text, filling the book’s margins with questions, comments, thoughts and revelations. It could amount to a student stating his or her dislike for a character, or concluding more profoundly that he or she is currently wrestling with the same issues as the book’s central character.

 “You have to talk to the book,” Ms Baldwin says of active, close reading, a skill required when a student reaches the college level. “It’s giving them a different way to respond, letting the responsibility come to them for finding what they see. Instead of us saying, ‘here’s what you should see in the book,’ it should come from them; ‘hey, you know what I saw in this book?’”

The Reader Response theory that many English teachers are making the foundation of their instruction is the same method emphasized on the CAPT test, the state’s standardized test issued to 10th graders each year. As of last year, Newtown came in at 50 percent above the district goal for the test, and 35percent above the state goal, according to the Connecticut Policy and Economic Council.

“The CAPT tests focus on response, and it has been affirmation that we have been doing this all along,” says Mr Terenzi.

“Students are forced to ask, ‘why are we reading this?’” says Mr Luizzi. The authors might have the best intentions with intricate plots, transcendent themes and tone, “but if it doesn’t elicit a response, then what is the point?”

The emphasis on reader response has changed how many English teachers test. Instead of asking students to regurgitate facts on events in a book – which much of the time, say some teachers, was a way of catching students not reading – teachers now ask students to react and bring their personal experiences to bear on the book’s themes. As Ms Baldwin asks, “Why not catch them reading?”

For the English department, emphasizing the teaching of close, active reading is not rhetoric; they, along with colleagues across the high school disciplines, are practicing what they preach. Thanks in large part to a grant received from the district’s K-12 reading and writing initiative, teachers are getting together in a forum called Action Research.

During Action Research meetings, instructors get together and read, and then respond to what they are reading. Last year, the team took a sizable chunk out of a poetry book, reflected and commented on it, and even took to writing their own poems to present to the larger group. They will focus on nonfiction this year. “It is a really nice opportunity for teachers to be students,” says Mr Terenzi.

“Sometimes when you teach,” adds Ms Baldwin, “you forget what it like to be in those chairs.”

Ms Baldwin herself follows the exercises she sets out for her class, amassing a significant stack of note cards, which she realizes is skewed more to the realm of fiction. She has resolved to read more nonfiction. It will be easier for students to see themselves as readers, Ms Baldwin reasons, if they view her as a reader. 

There is no dearth of testing grounds for high school students to apply and measure the progression of their reading skills. From sophomore year on, students face the CAPT test, two forms of the PSAT, and the SAT, all of which test to some degree close reading along with reader reasoning and response.

It seems like the English department’s consensus to focus on reading as an active pursuit, along with giving a generous amount of student freedom in choosing books to read, might be the right combination for both teachers and their classes. As students bolster their reading skills through conscious repetition, the onus will remain on the department to maintain diverse and challenging ways to push such skill development.

For Ms Baldwin, it would be enough for now if her students recognized that in this on-the-go, need-to-produce world, reading is still time well spent.

“Maybe it’s okay to give up class time for students to read if we say we want them to read, and they can see us reading and see other people reading and then talk about what they’re doing,” Ms Baldwin reasons. “How can that not be valuable?”