How to Create a Nonreader

Alfie Kohn wrote a marvelous piece in the English Journal in 2010 on how educators can create nonreaders. As an English major and Language Arts teacher, this hits close to home. I begin every single day knowing that I have 5 gigs. 5 shows to perform. 5 opportunities to inspire and motivate my learners. Reading Kohn's article provided me with insight to some practices that may make my learners loath reading (something that I, myself, loathed in grade school as well) rather than help them find their place in the literacy world.

“‘You can command writing, but you can’t command good writing,’ as Donald Murray once remarked- and you can’t make them want to do those things. The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as a matter of fact, the less interest student are likely to have in whatever they were induced to do.”

— Kohn, 2010

I am trying to promote literacy, not kill it. 21st century learners have the ability to find any piece of knowledge at their fingertips (literally). As educators, we need to understand the skills our 21st century learners need to acquire while keeping our instruction and practices relevant and meaningful. Here are the seven suggestions Kohn gives that teachers are doing that kills motivation in readers:

“1. Quantify their reading assignments....When they’re told how much to read, they tend to just ‘turn the pages’ and ‘read to an assigned page number and stop,’ says Christopher Ward Ellsasser, a California high school teacher.... ‘What parents are discovering (surprise) is that those kids who used to sit down and read for pleasure- the kids who would get lost in a book and have to be told to put it down to eat/play/whatever- are now setting the timer...and stopping when the timer dings.... Reading has become a chore, like brushing your teeth.’”

— Kohn, 2010

“2. Make them write reports....’The best way to make students hate reading is to make them prove to you that they have read....Such assignments make the students hate the book they have just read, no matter how they felt about it before the project.’”

— Kohn, 2010

“3. Isolate them...”

— Kohn, 2010

“4. Focus on skills. Children grow to love reading when it’s about making meaning, when they’re confronted directly by provocative ideas, compelling characters, delicious prose. But that love may never bloom if all the good stuff is occluded by too much attention to machinery... I would have been far more successful had I asked a lot fewer questions that have only one correct answer. I should have helped the kids dive headfirst into the realm of metaphor rather than wasting their time on how a metaphor differs from a simile.... ‘Consequently, many young people come to associate reading with schooling rather than with learning more about what interests them.’”

— Kohn, 2010

“5. Offer them incentives.”

— Kohn, 2010

“6. Prepare them for tests.... By analogy, a classroom where learning is always pointed to a test is one where ideas, and the act of reading, are experienced as just so many means to an end.”

— Kohn, 2010

“7. Restrict their choices.... Those who choose...a “working with” approach- make a point of bringing students into the process of making decisions whenever possible....
The sad irony is that as children grow older and become more capable of making decisions, they’re given less opportunity to do so in schools....kids learn to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.”

— Kohn, 2010

In the end, I am left with more questions than answers. How can we continue to make skills, lessons, activities, and texts relevant with meaningful content? How can we ensure we are helping to create a community of readers? How can we teach important literacy strategies to those who need them in a way that won't kill the reader inside them? What would it look like if we did away with grades? How can we know our learners are growing if we took grades away? How can learners continue to have a voice in their education?