The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers

I teach middle school English, read and profusely highlighted Nancie Atwell's seminal work IN THE MIDDLE, and once served as an intern at her Center for Teaching and Learning one snowy February in Edgecomb, Maine (a class act, Atwell came in on a snow day to meet with a group of teachers who expected the day to be a complete loss due to the school closing). Under her influence, I built an in-class library at considerable cost, launched a full-steam-ahead reading workshop, and spent countless weekends poring over kids' reading journals so I could write back encouragement and questions. Still, there were always questions and concerns about the workshop method (not to mention the time-intensive journals), plus new reading strategies to reckon with as the years rolled by. This new book deals with both issues - concerns related to workshop methodology as well as the latest reading strategy fads. For instance, in recent years our school has jumped on the "Sticky-Note Bandwagon" and English teachers were like flies to flypaper following its prescriptions to create better student readers. Under this "Reading Strategies That Work" spell, we began to isolate readings, stop our readers mid-page, and teach kids how to make connections, determine importance, ask questions, make inferences, visualize, and synthesize. You can imagine my pleasure, then, when I read Atwell's words in a chapter called "Comprehension." She writes, "In the 1990's, I jumped -- VAULTED is a more accurate verb -- onto the comprehension-strategy bandwagon.... In I plunged. I explained proficient reader research and schema theory to my students. I prepared, rehearsed, and modeled a connection-packed read-aloud of a short story by Robert Cormier. Then I passed out individual pads of self-sticking notes and invited kids to activate their existing schema, connect these to the new schema that emerged as they read, and capture it all on sticky notes" (pp. 51-53). If misery loves company, then you know why I found comfort in these words. You see, I, too, had followed the pied piper. I, too, had sensed something was wrong as my students dutifully parroted my words and terms while playing a game whose rules I spelled out. And yes -- I, too, had sticky-noted my way to reading perdition, wondering all along why so sound a theory was striking such a strident note with my increasingly restive 8th-grade readers. Enter THE READING ZONE, where the Empire Strikes Back in the form of Atwell reaffirming her original tenets, built on the work of countless researchers such as Frank Smith and Louise Rosenblatt. Turns out, all that stopping to think about reading was interfering with... reading; and all that stopping to write on a sticky note was interfering with... the zone. In the words of Atwell via Rosenblatt, it's a case of efferent reading vs. aesthetic -- reading for knowledge (as in, from a textbook or article) vs. reading for pleasure (as in, from a novel, short story, or poem). Must the

Nancie Atwell has set a high standard for her work. The Reading Zone does not disappoint. It is a short, clearly written work that is beneficial to all teachers and parents. It gives specific recommendations for improving student reading and, more importantly, students' love of reading. Much of its philosophy will fly in the face of the strategies teaching of reading that is currently in vogue because of the standardized testing craze. I highly recommend this book.

When I began teaching 17 years ago, I was lucky enough to have a copy of Atwell's In the Middle tucked under my arm. Over the years, I've often thought of my favorite teachers of reading and writing (Atwell, Elbow, Murray, Rosenblatt, Collins, Stafford) as dear friends in my classroom who helped me understand and know my students as readers and writers. Aside from my own love of reading, writing, and teaching, Atwell has helped me come to know myself as a teacher and as a person who puts great books into the hands of students (in my case, below grade level students who hated reading before they encountered reading workshop). With her newest book (manifesto!!!), I was once again incredibly lucky. Her new book is a survival guide, and it helped me live through a tedious pretense of a writing workshop called Step Up to Writing that an administrator at my district asked me to attend. As the presenter was extolling the wonders of formulaic writing and teachers as technicians, I was reading Atwell's chapter one--"The Personal Art." By the second day of the workshop, I was chanting Atwell's "How to Create a National Reading Zone." After a brief break, I came back into the conference and found another teacher reading my copy of the book and noticing all my margin notes ("Deja vu," "Yikes!" and "I'm guilty!" were some of my scrawled comments). When she asked me what I thought of the book, I told her it was incredible and how I'd love to meet Atwell some day. She asked if the book were as good as the Step Up to Writing workshop. What could I say except the truth--everything that Atwell and my other favorite writing / reading teachers do and urge teachers of reading and writing to do is counter to canned, formulaic programs. It's a no-brainer, really, except for the teacher who thinks a bi-polar stance on reading and writing is good practice. Nutshell advice: politely decline requests to attend brain-numbing workshops, save the $275 for your classroom library, devour Atwell's The Reading Zone and apply for an apprenticeship at CTL. Nancie, the only thing that could tempt me into the middle school from the high school students that I love, is the chance to do the CTL apprenticeship. Thanks for a timely KISS reminder. I can't wait to see my students on Monday to find out how Nick liked Give a Boy a Gun and how Katie liked Gregor the Overlander/, and because of your words, I can relax about the "rigor." I know I'm on track.

This is a fine, fine book that works on its own or as a compliment to all of her earlier work. What to add to the previous review? I, too, found Atwell's challenge to teachers at the high school level - and by extension, their parents - to be especially powerful. Students are so loaded with vocabulary words and double-entry journals and literary minutia and book reports that they avoid reading anything beyond assigned materials, and too often learn to abhor all that falls under the `English' umbrella. Whose interests are served by a curriculum that proscribes experimentation, curiosity, and exploration? Her critique of reading programs and `skill building' instruction is also sobering. With countless dollars and many instructional hours devoted to building reading skill from Kindergarten through community college, it is worth remembering that reading is an art best crafted through habitual, passionate, thoughtful practice. Although teachers have an arsenal of A.R., DOL, SQ3R, and all the rest, there is precious little evidence that students learn to read because of these tools (for further evidence on this point, look into Stephen Krashen's "The Power of Reading"). Once again, Atwell swims against the educational currents in which most of us blithely bounce. The greatest challenge presented by her oeuvre is that she is highly self reflective and attuned to her professional responsibilities. Atwell holds nothing sacred beyond what is best for her students. Her work cannot be copied because it continues to evolve. Her stance may be digested, but each teacher must then engage with his or her unique students in their particular context. I, for one, hope to be up to the challenge "The Reading Zone" presents to all of us in the teaching profession.

Nancie Atwell calls her new book The Reading Zone a manifesto: that free choice of books and time to read should be a child's right from kindergarten until high school. She uses her more than 20 years of successful teaching to support her claim that the only delivery system for reading comprehension is reading. I couldn't agree more. Eight years ago I read her seminal work, In the Middle, and it changed my life as a teacher. The techniques she used in her middle school reading and writing workshop affirmed everything I felt in my heart to be true. I worked hard to create my own workshop, wrote grants for books and purchased hundreds myself. I read, read, read until I knew most books well enough to recommend them to my students. And it worked. With independent reading as the mainstay of our reading block, I saw my kids, 7th and 8th graders with little or no previous interest in reading, enter into their own "reading zones" and blossom into authentic readers, right before my eyes, long before the end of the school year. I should have been ecstatic, but I found myself uneasy. Was it enough to let kids just read and do occasional projects that promoted their books to their peers? It all seemed too simple. I worried that I wasn't doing enough. Eventually, I did what Atwell herself admits to doing in The Reading Zone: I jumped (she says she "vaulted") into teaching comprehension strategies techniques-- predicting, connecting, visualizing, questioning, summarizing, re-telling and so on. This focus should have enriched my workshop, but it didn't. Atwell explains far better than I what happened in her classroom that caused her to "collect the sticky notes," and makes the case that these are study skill techniques, valuable in approaching difficult text, material above a student's independent reading, but unsuitable for teachers to focus on during workshop. Insisting that students stop and predict, list connections, etc., interrupts the reader, slowing him down and taking him out of the "zone." One of the book's most compelling chapters is a long overdue a cry to our colleagues at the high school level. Atwell writes about seeing her avid readers graduate eighth grade--and become non-readers for the next four years. She could have been writing about my students, or my own daughter whose experiences with the sacred canon of literature, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, vocabulary pages, grammar exercises and the like, mirrored that of her former student who "lost" four years as a reader. Fortunately, both young women made the journey back to a love of literature in college, but are probably among a select few. Atwell asks high school teachers to re-consider how they teach English, to think about what will make a true difference in the intellectual lives of their students. Those who want practical advice on acquiring, displaying, and maintaining classroom libraries, as well as ways to meet the needs of all readers, including those with learning di