Real World Teenagers Don’t Read Stuff They Don’t Choose

The Com­mon Core Stan­dards are rais­ing hack­les again. This time, because the archi­tect of the stan­dards, David Cole­man believes that it inau­then­tic to do pre-reading before teens dive into a scin­til­lat­ing text­book piece.

Cole­man is against these meth­ods because he says they’re not how real read­ers read. He argues that peo­ple in the real world do not have back­ground knowl­edge before they read. They don’t make pre­dic­tions or think about themes. He says, imag­ine if we were watch­ing a movie and he kept stop­ping it to make pre­dic­tions and ask ques­tions. He says that we would throw him out immediately.

The prob­lem with his premise?  Real world teens don’t pick up pieces you’d find in a text­book. They don’t choose the mate­r­ial, so there is no inter­est on their part in read­ing it. That’s where the teacher comes in by “sell­ing” the piece to increase inter­est and moti­va­tion. Pre-reading strate­gies are how that gets done. People don’t go to a movie they don’t want to see, but we ask teens every­day to read pieces they don’t want to read. That’s dif­fer­ence, and it’s huge.