Within a week of starting this school year, junior high students spent about four days taking a reading test (MAP, Measures of Academic Progress) on our new Chromebooks. It took four days, in part, because we had wi-fi problems causing the computer-based test to stall or shutdown and, in part, because the MAP test is not a timed test. Some students finished the 40-ish question reading test in 15 minutes and some took 80. All the new books I had added to our classroom library looked beautiful on the bookshelves, but I was anxious to get those books into the hands of readers.
As I walked around the test-takers in my role as “proctor,” I spied questions about main idea, summary, and theme (some frozen on the screen because of said wi-fi issue) and found myself “taking” the test alongside the students. I thought about how students understood the word “theme” in relation to their own reading experiences — if they did.
A few weeks later, the eighth grade students were days away from taking their high school placement test — that’s right, they were taking a test in October of 8th grade to determine their classes (track) for high school. The local high school had, in past years, used the EXPLORE test, but this year, they were using the PSAT to make decisions about the incoming freshman. A few days before the test, I decided to teach a few test-taking strategies and look at an excerpt from the practice reading test so that students would feel more comfortable with the format and get a sense of time management. On the day of the test, they would read five passages and answer 47 questions in 60 minutes, but we just read one passage and practiced answering nine questions in about 12 minutes. It was an excerpt from Jane Austen’s Emma.
In just the first month of school, I was more of a test proctor than a reading teacher. I was keenly aware that I was being the sort of reading teacher schools seem to want us to be. Schools make very important decisions about students based on high stakes tests results; they often fail to consider the students taking the tests and how such tests impact a student’s relationship with reading.
As people who learned to read in the era of No Child Left Behind, our students are quite adept at test taking. They know that the test wants them to find the “best” answer, so they scan the passage and perform “process of elimination.” Or they know that the test does not care about who they are or what they want to become, so they may just bubble in any answer to rebel or to surrender. When it comes to reading in English class, they may also see reading as something that is just for school; they no longer see books as an escape, a mirror, a window, or a door into becoming.
Of course, it is important to know if a student can understand what is happening in a text — the where, when, who, and what — so that we can get at the deeper meaning and craft, but how English teachers approach terms like “summary” and “theme” has implications for a student’s relationship with reading. If the test is to measure what a student knows and can do rather than how a student feels about reading or school, then we have to care about students’ feelings about reading. Reading for school and reading for life are intertwined, but “reading for school” can choke “reading for life.”
Think about the lessons and tests you’ve created for standards related to “summary” and “theme.” Did you design the lesson with some high stakes test like MAP, PARCC, and PSAT in mind? Did you consider how the way you talk about and teach what happens in a novel (summary) and what it is about (subjects/ideas) and what the narrative is “saying”(theme) situates the reader to read in certain ways that might help or hurt the way they see themselves as readers, as students, as people.
I’m glad to say that once we all got through the first month of school, my students finally got their hands on the new books. There’s nothing more beautiful than empty book shelves and teenage hands holding said books. (I bet all English teachers are most happy when they are talking about books with their students.) We talked about what was going on in the books every day in our reading conferences, and students wrote about the topics the books explored as well as what the narrative “said” about those topics in relation to humanity. This is summary and theme. Sometimes we did say, “Can you give me a quick summary?” or “What was the theme?” These words were in the service of comprehension but also in the service of communication, processing, reflecting, and comparing our reading experiences.
I do think about how our reading workshop supports students in “meeting” the learning standards, and I do think about how or whether our conversations about books can help students’ stamina and confidence with high stakes tests, but I have to say that our NCLB-trained students still love a good story, can get lost in a book, and know that a reading class does not have to be about reading “for answers.”
I wish our high school would have the time and resources to meet the people they are placing into this English class or that;I wish our high school would make decisions about our students based on portfolios of learning (see below).
For now, schools are still counting on tests to make decisions about students and their teachers, so English teachers must find ways to navigate the terms of reading.
In closing, I’ll say that there are so many English teachers out there finding meaningful ways to navigate the testing culture of our schools and nurture students’ reading lives.These teachers know what reading does for humanity because they are readers, and they bring their reading lives into their classrooms. If we live too much in the testing culture of reading, we can lose sight of what real readers think about and do. I asked some of my teacher-friends and reader-friends on Facebook what they do when they’re finished reading a book. I want to hold tight to these responses so that when our students are finally finished with schools, their reading life is still alive:
I don’t use the word “theme” in my own reading or discussion of reading. I am, however, always thinking about what questions this book or story is asking and seeking answers to. When I read, I do look for those wise phrases or discoveries of the character (which in YA literature usually come from some older character). I summarize a book to entice others to read it, not to demonstrate I read it.
As I think about the second quarter the school year, I want to be always conscious of how I am navigating the teaching of reading for schools and the teaching of readers for life — always intertwined, I don’t want to be complicit in choking the life out of reading.