Daniels and Zemelman Chapters 8&9

I really liked the techniques described in chapters 8 and 9 and I think that both independent reading workshops and content-area book clubs could be very useful and interesting ways to tie reading into classrooms across all contents.  I thought the examples of minilessons in chapter 8 were helpful in getting an idea of how to get students to use reading workshops efficiently.  Chapter 8 also provided many examples of web tools to use for online sharing of reading responses and discussions.  While I can see both reading workshops and book clubs being effective, two things that I kept thinking about through these chapters were problems that could come with student choice and how time will allow for these tools to be put to use. 

            While I understand the importance of choice and how it can motivate students, I do not see how it can always work, especially when specific material must be taught and there are standards and state testing to take into account.  However, Daniels and Zemelman suggest using a modified student choice in which the teacher provides 5-10 different books or articles to choose from, including a range of topics and reading levels.  Teachers can give a quick book talk about each piece of text and also provide a minilesson that models how to choose the right text.  They can then ask students to write their top three choices and form groups or assign individual reading based on the students’ choices.  I can see this working much better than just giving students free-range to choose whatever they’d like to read in a certain content.  This will also eliminate the problem of every group or every student choosing the same thing to read if they have to share what they read with the rest of the class.

            As for timing, D&Z also provide some suggestions on how to make it work.  They say to “focus the readings on content you know you must teach, but as much as possible, look for short real-world articles and essays that cover the topic rather than just the textbook,” (pg. 235).  They also say that for book clubs, after initial training, most of the reading and note-taking can be assigned for homework to be done outside of class. I think if every content assigned novels for book clubs or reading workshops, students would be very overwhelmed with a lot of reading to do both in and out of school.  However, with options such as articles and single chapters I think students and teachers would have the time to fit these reading strategies in.