Why Reading Workshop?

While this is not a question I've actually been asked, it's one I feel compelled to try to answer from time to time, if only to remind myself of why I'm willing, in our culture's current super-charged, over-processed educational atmosphere, to devote one hundred eighty precious minutes per week to silent, sustained...INDEPENDENT reading. An edifying article in the Winter 2008 edition of Independent School Magazine served to bolster my commitment to freedom of choice when it comes to reading selections as well as maintenance of the "sacred space" in which to practice the skills...the art of silent, sustained reading. Author Thomas Newkirk noted in his article, "When Reading Becomes Work" that "reading competes for student loyalty in a crowded media environment, and...the middle school period is the crucial fulcrum where many students decide to draw their narrative pleasures from media other than print. It is crucial...to view this rejection of book reading not as the character flaw of students, but as the rational choice to seek narrative pleasure elsewhere - because reading, itself, has become work." (For a full study of the current status of reading versus media, Google and download the Kaiser Family Foundation's report: "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year Olds" by Donald Roberts et al of Stanford University.)

My personal favorite and pedagogical mentor, Nancie Atwell comments in her recent book The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers, "...we need to become comfortable with the 'P' word - comfortable with 'pleasure' as a motivating force in reading."

Newkirk ends his article with words I've often thought and sometimes spoken: "...the pleasure of reading (both fiction and nonfiction) comes from entering a meditative state in which the reader is not even conscious of reading - or conscious of the passing of time. The reader is in the text, a confidant or observer. Readers, to be sure, can resurface for discussion and analysis- in fact, engagement is a prerequisite for analysis."

Thus, Monday and Tuesday mornings from 10:45 until 12:15 our 8th grade cores actively engage in the pleasure of independent, self-selected reading and enthusiastically navigate uncharted literary terrain. Even those who admit to attention issues are regularly caught up in the energy of a "page turner." If you don't believe me, just drop by some Monday or Tuesday late morning...but be forewarned: Reading Workshoppers wax downright grumpy about distractions or interruptions!