Pages: 144 Price: $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-439-92644-7
Let me be clear about my biases before starting this review. I have been an avid reader for several decades, so am probably pre-disposed to agree with an author whose basic premise is that "frequent, voluminous reading" is the single most important factor for student success in school. Nancie Atwell and her teaching colleagues also hope that reading will help their students become "smarter, happier, more just, and more compassionate people because of the worlds they experience" (p.12) through books. My personal biases aside, I suspect that other readers will also agree with Atwell’s assertion, and share her frustration with the hijacking of the reading/English curriculum by structured, packaged programs that suck the life out of reading rather than fostering joyful readers. The subtitle of the book, frequently repeated in the text, summarizes the goal Atwell has for all her students (K-8) at the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), a non-profit demonstration school in Maine that she established in 1990. She is clearly passionate about reading and about her students, but that doesn’t mean she is one-sided in her presentation. Atwell cites research to support her approach as well as that which seduced her, earlier in her career, to adopt reading comprehension strategies. She clearly identifies when comprehension strategies can be useful and when not. Using Louise Rosenblatt's terminology, Atwell states that comprehension strategies serve to build skills for efferent or information gathering reading (e.g., textbooks, newspapers) but get in the way of aesthetic reading.
This book offers practical guidance on how to create the ideal situation for students to enter “the reading zone” (a term coined by her students), and how to become skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Key components, elaborated in separate chapters, include making reading personal, creating the appropriate space, offering lots of good books to choose from, making it easy to find books at the right level, and promoting wonderful books. She offers examples of letters to parents, readings assignments for students, and booktalks, as well as numerous guidelines and lists (e.g., The Readers' Bill of Rights, recommended authors), many of them generated collaboratively with her students. She has created a website (http://www.c-t-l.org/kids_recommend.html) with booklists of students' favorite titles; the goal is to help her students continue reading over the summer. Atwell also discusses reading goal setting and assessment—another process done jointly with the students—and includes examples of forms as well as illustrative student responses.
Atwell tackles related issues such as responding to parent concerns about particular books chosen by their children and working with students who are challenged readers, whether due to lack of previous experience or cognitive difficulties such as dyslexia. She addresses what she believes to be the spurious alarm raised about gender differences in reading, i.e., boys not being good readers. Although CTL as an institution is clearly somewhat unique, the students who attend are not. They come from all socio-economic strata and ability levels; Maine is a rural and relatively poor state, falling in the bottom third of states in terms of per capita income. CTL strives, through tuition assistance, to bring in students representing the population, rather than those who are gifted or financially privileged; although, Atwell readily acknowledges that a school in Maine has less than the national average of students whose first language is not English. She believes all these students can fall in love with reading and the fact that her middle schoolers read an average of 40 books a year would seem to support that belief.
Although the CTL curriculum emphasizes reading beginning in kindergarten, and although Atwell discusses some aspects of the reading zone approach for lower grades, her emphasis in this book is on middle-school-age students; hence, those teachers are the ones likely to get the most useful information from this book. She describes what she believes an ideal English curriculum should include, acknowledging and offering accommodation for the limitations imposed by situations where the workshop approach (blocks of time) aren’t feasible. Having followed the academic careers of many of her students after they graduate from CTL (through interviews and correspondence), Atwell also makes a plea for teachers to create a high school English curriculum that facilitates rather than impedes reading.
The Reading Zone is the right length for the practitioner—informative and inviting, not overwhelming. She offers lots of pragmatic tools for someone who wants to try out her approach and enough research to satisfy those who want to follow up on the ideas, without bogging the text down. So persuasive and engaging is this presentation that I plan to modify my own course on multicultural children’s literature, which I teach to education students. Teachers of reading and English will find this a rich resource and a satisfying endorsement of the value of reading.
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