Getting Boys to Read: Teachers Whose Classrooms Teach Us How to Do It

by June Berkley, Worthington, Ohio

In this country it is generally acknowledged that even boys who can read are not likely to choose reading over personal―or even vicarious―action. Boys are much less likely than girls to spend time sitting still "lost in a book." A recent reminder of this native disposition appeared in the January 30, 2006, issue of Newsweek, prompting no fewer than fifteen colleagues, teachers, neighbors, relatives, and friends to call my attention to the obvious as "exposed" in this magazine: Boys by genetic disposition typically do not function well in sit-still classrooms.

"Well, some do. Some don't," comments veteran teacher James Creighton of Chesterhill, Ohio, in response to the statement above. "So we need to fix our classrooms so they do."

Creighton's thirty years of engaging boys in active reading illustrate the first basic requirement for the job: the teacher's own devotion to print and to deep engagement with the world of ideas and art. In Creighton's words: "Persuading boys to read if you yourself don't love to read is something like working as a swim coach with no affinity or enthusiasm for the water. That's an unlikely way to produce a championship swim team."

What a pleasure to observe reader-teachers like James Creighton engage boys, as well as girls, as they read Miller's The Crucible, studying original sources from and historical accounts of the Salem witch trials―from his own library as well as public and school libraries―all the while bonding information, reflection, and analysis, developing the kind of minds that can lead our civilization forward. Through this challenging practice of reading, students come to terms with the responsibility to recognize personal and societal challenges and create solutions. Their response to this task rests on their powers of metaphorical thinking, a disposition manifest in the poetic arts―particularly in our literature. On this, scientists and artists agree, so how can we fall short of providing every student with rich literary experience.

Personal enthusiasm is not enough, though. It is only the beginning, Creighton maintains. Next is a conviction that the habit of reading matters, and matters deeply, in the lives of all our students.

What's a Teacher to Do?

What compromises can we make and what techniques and practices can we offer to both accommodate and guide the many varieties of male and female minds in our classrooms?

What are the hallmarks of schools and classrooms devoted to the habit and cultivation of literate reading?

What can we do to structure our classrooms to engage boys and girls alike in the careful, joyful reading of appropriate literature?

How do we accommodate the biological variations in children―particularly the differences in boys and girls?

What are the observable hallmarks of schools and classrooms devoted to the habit and cultivation of literate reading?

So many questions!
 

Good News from Great Classrooms

And now for some anecdotal answers:

• A kindergarten class in Pomeroy, Ohio, led by an experienced teacher who is supported by a very competent noncertified assistant and two carefully trained community volunteers, participates every day, from the moment the students arrive in their classroom, in movement, visual arts, talking, listening, singing, music, poetry, and stories. Four adults are focused on the literate development of nineteen 5-year-olds. Within two months these children (many from so-called at-risk environments) exhibited a familiarity with dozens of classic and current stories and poems.
  
  A reluctance to read rarely accompanies a child to school. This reluctance is developed in school. At worst, a kindergartner is unaware of reading, but the marvel of print is soon made manifest, and the most deprived child will join the others in seeking out―however briefly, and according to physical as well as mental development―all mysterious but observable phenomena. At a pace only the informed and experienced teacher recognizes, students will begin the act of reading, for the pursuit of decoding for meaning offers enticement, challenge, and possibility.
  
• In Marilyn Combs's Lowell, Ohio, first-grade classroom, a shelf full of well-used poetry books―adults' as well as children's―reminded me that the oral reading of poetry must be a regular practice. As a friend and visitor, I offered to help with the day's activities, and inquired whether I might participate by reading a poem. "When might you have a poem?" I asked (foolishly).
  
  "Whenever we need one!" Mrs. Combs laughed―which, I soon learned, was often! When one six-year-old boy wrote his personal response to "a compound word" (he had drawn the word homework out of the "compound word" box) and the teacher read his nicely cadenced lines aloud, the class chorused: "It sounds like a poem."
  
  Amazed at hearing his own talented work read aloud, the lad announced: "Maybe I didn't write that; maybe I just remembered it! It does sound like a poem!" He made for the poetry shelf and scanned the tables of contents in familiar volumes, and the class suggested all the poems with every allusion to homework that they could remember, but none overlapped or quite compared with the six-year-old's:
  
  Homework
  Heavy Homework
  How I Hate You.
  
  There! You're Finished!
  Now I Really Like You!
  
  Another lad noted―as the composition went on the blackboard―the line break after "How I Hate You," pointing out that "There's a hinge there where the opinion turns into something else. Put a space" (which, as you can see, has been duly added).
  
  Mrs. Combs reported to me that the next day the submission of homework pages was accompanied by a cheery chorus of "Now I really like you!"
  
• In another elementary school, an intervention specialist was recently recruited out of a highly successful first-grade classroom to work with fifth graders. This teacher (who has asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons) reports that she sees all around her the majority of classroom time overtly or obliquely devoted to daily drill and test preparation, particularly remediation of those "swing students," students who may keep the school's test results low enough to earn the dreaded school designation "Academic Watch." Not surprisingly, in light of the growing pressure of preparing children for skills-centered and knowledge-based tests, teachers have sometimes come to view the so-called leisure of student interest and self-directed time as "something we just don't have time for anymore."
  
  It has become the intervention teacher's task to "remediate" small groups of failing, "below the bar" students―many of them once bright-eyed and full of hope and eagerness as her first graders and now, four years later, presenting themselves as fifth-grade failures in reading, embodiments of fear and self-loathing, defeated and disenchanted with school, bearing every visible mark of their acquired inadequacy. She was advised to keep her "literary activities"―once much praised―to a minimum and to focus on "the basics of the test," even though that very focus over the past three years has culminated in the body of "inadequacy" that has been assigned to her intervention room nowadays.
  
  Her initial daily interaction with these children indicates, she reports, that their last wholesale "bathing in language" (as Ernest Boyer so lovingly recommended) was in her first-grade classroom. She has surreptitiously resumed her literature and skill focus (yes, she has always incorporated phonics), and her children, she told me last week, have asked if they might not once a week bring "a guest" from "the regular classroom" to enjoy their reading. (That old shelf of poetry, as well as her developing collection of intermediate-level novels and nonfiction, are much in evidence and are in independent and group use every day.)
  
• Boys, in particular, may claim they are absolutely confirmed nonreaders. Do not disagree; nor should you affirm their misconception, says Deanna Bixler, education specialist for many years in Xenia, Ohio.
  
  As a leader in an ongoing literacy intervention project that focuses on "swing students," Bixler has demonstrated a multitude of skillfully nuanced teacher techniques and teacher language behaviors that influence the development of reading skills and reading enthusiasm among the largely male population of "remedial groups." Teachers in regular classrooms (whatever those are!) have emulated her careful attention not to "hard-sell" reading. She avoids lecturing on the value of reading or the use of obviously false reward systems. Instead, in her rich conversations with young men, she elicits, over time, their individual experiences and latent interests and helps them articulate their current enthusiasms and discover their latent curiosities.
  
  She then employs one of two strategies: She may ask for information to help her further understand a boy's interest, for example, the intricacies of motocross racing or the cultivation of bearded dragon lizards; or she may have at hand a collection of print material on these subjects―materials that she has read and that she is willing to share. It is slow and careful work to make up for years of no real engagement with the developing mind of a child.
  
• A veteran teacher in a rural-suburban school near Akron, Ohio, Jane Kauffman came to the public school language arts profession after a distinguished career in music and opera. She quickly assumed a leadership role in her department, and as a nationally recognized department chair, she led many innovations that incorporated special attention to the school's boys, who typically lagged behind in literate literacy.
  
  She insisted on teaching not only Advance Placement students but classes largely populated by aliterate lads. She commandeered school buses to take them to city performances of Big River. She did this in the face of administrative warnings that the group was noted for shenanigans and would misbehave badly. She knew they would and assured the principal she would deal with it; they did and she did, and they went again.
  
  She hauled them on flatbed trucks into cemeteries to read Spoon River Anthology. She walked them into the woods to read Thoreau's Walden. She engaged them to build her a monumental set of bookcases to house the collection of readings she amassed in their behalf. While some worked in the shop, she interviewed others about the books she had carefully suggested to them. "Read ten pages before you give it up; then if you don't like it, I'll get you another."
  
  Hip pockets bulged with squeezed paperbacks, and it became quasi-respectable to read and recommend. After all, how can you refuse a lady who takes you out of the classroom at least once a week and who lets you sit wherever and however you please sometimes―a lady who encourages you to talk some among yourselves a bit, as long as you get back to your reading.
  
  As one lad put it, "No book reports; she writes down what she likes from what you say about the book you bring up finished (while the others read). And what she writes down is filed so other guys can pick up cards and read what other guys say about books they've read and maybe pick out one for themselves this way. You gotta keep reading if you wanna keep going."
  
  Boys who claimed never to have read a book read seven or eight―good titles. At the end of the year, they tramped around, then picnicked at Stan Hywet mansion, and Jane read to them passages from their favorites: Winesburg, Ohio, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Journey's End.
  
• A teacher in a competitive private school found her male students less than enthusiastic about admitting their interest in literature. She invited a Holocaust survivor to read aloud from Night and share his experience of escape and survival. He brought other titles from other topics that had sustained him in recollection. He reminded them what Senator John McCain missed most in his long, cruel captivity: imaginative literature. If only he could have had a book to read!
  
  They interviewed other men in the school and community and were astonished to find that the most interesting men had read volumes of imaginative literature (it helps to preselect rather than assign random interviews). She organized a student and adult summer reading project to involve men as well as women in the community, and the school devoted an entire day to book discussions from the assortment offered as choice. (For more on this type of activity, see the January 2006 issue of The English Journal, for an account of an English teacher's successful schoolwide engagement in the marathon oral reading of Moby Dick, with boys and girls organizing an entire school day and evening around Ahab's search.)
  
• Yet another teacher in a rural Ohio school invited gentlemen to read during her "Men Who Are Readers" Mondays. The vocational agriculture teacher, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Ohio State University, strode in wearing his customary coveralls and read his favorite poetry. He amazed the lads with his selections. They liked his explanation of Gray's "Curfew tolls the knell...." They were fond of W. B. Yeats's "nine bean rows." And they began serious attempts―as he did―at reciting parts of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
  
  These are enormous strides for boys who find sitting still inherently difficult. Every experienced teacher knows how, without special accommodation, these boys soon separate themselves from the entire school experience and consider themselves failures, outsiders―in spite of what we may mistake for quiet withdrawal and resignation, superficial bravado, or more surly disruption, separation, and accommodation.
  
• Recognizing these (predictable) proclivities in a group of aliterate boys who brought those proclivities with them to Linworth Alternative school, head of school Wayne Harvey invited the boys to join him in the daily shared oral and silent reading of a mutually selected classic novel. Linworth Alternative is a long established, nationally recognized high school in Worthington, Ohio, a school that offers a rigorous student-centered curriculum and rich literature, arts, and humanities experiences for every student.
  
  As is the custom at Linworth, the academic setting (read "seating" and "sitting still") varied from day to day. In keeping with the custom, the informal but focused physical setting for the book club moved about every day or mid-lesson as the group made its reading way from bench to lawn to hallway to lounge chairs to grassy lawn to gym mats and round again to classroom chairs and on to hallway corners.
  
  Since Linworth is a school with an "untraditional" atmosphere where students (many of them highly intelligent but unfulfilled or unsuccessful in other environments) qualify for such independence through a commitment to learned self-regulation, such a group of engrossed (or struggling-to-stay-focused) readers is respected and quite ordinary. Young male graduates often recall reading with Wayne (the use of first names connotes the responsibility for mutual respect inherent in the school environment) as a happy and productive aspect of their Linworth experience.
  
  Are all the boys once privileged to these literary experiences with Wayne and other literate mentors now inveterate readers of Dostoevsky, Dickens, and Proust? Of course not. But many of them are readers, and all of them understand firsthand the singular, unparalleled experience of reading for deep purpose and genuine pleasure. They know that investment in a book gives the reader an experience unavailable anywhere else. They respect those who develop this important habit; and they've moved closer to understanding how, like other profound experiences, reading a great book well in great company creates new options, yields indelible insights, even reshapes the mind of the reader.

Final Words on Great Classrooms

A collection of reading materials, selected carefully by a knowledgeable teacher who is constantly attuned to professional reviews as well as to her or his own classroom proclivities and interests―and far beyond―is imperative. If a teacher can't lay hands immediately on printed material that may satisfy or stir up an interest, students will be limited in their learning. Boys, in particular, need to see reading as a masculine pursuit. If they're not fans of Gary Paulson (though it's difficult to imagine many resisters), keep looking, asking, searching. There's a colleague somewhere who has a suggestion that will entice. Beyond the resources of a large library that is widely visited and richly used, personal collections in classrooms create an environment where reading is a natural route to exploration, discovery, expansion, and enchantment. It is a lost day when the teacher cannot help students move beyond the moment, that state of captivity that paralyzes and defeats so often, so many. Literature and all the related arts save us from "the prison of our aloneness," and even a casual reading of history and biography helps students come to terms with one of the requirements generally agreed to be crucial in saving children in sociological peril: an understanding that "you are not going to be here forever." The classroom is more than a place of refuge for children mired in the many varieties of abuse or struggling to survive intellectual neglect, deprivation, or poverty. The classroom door is admission to enhanced possibilities of thought and behavior every day. Now. Through reading, no matter how briefly, children live different lives. They do not merely escape the moment; they experience another, parallel existence.

References

Ross, William David, Hunter, Alyce, and Chazanow, Leon. (2006, January). Reading aloud: The Moby-Dick marathon. The English Journal, 95(3), 43-47.

The trouble with boys. (2006, January 30). Newsweek, 42-52.

June Berkley is an English language arts and education consultant who lives in Worthington, Ohio, and who is known and works nationwide. Formerly she taught creative writing, English, and English education at Ohio University, Athens. In addition, she has been a junior high and high school English teacher and has had a career as a newspaper journalist. She is the author of Shannagany Blue and countless articles and is the recipient of the 2006 CEL Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. You can contact her at jberkley@columbus.rr.com.

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