A Well-Balanced Diet

By Shawna Coppola, 2019 CCIRA Featured Speaker

I am often asked by colleagues how to help their students break out of comfortable habits as readers and writers in order to facilitate new discoveries, provide greater challenge, and broaden their horizons. As someone who enjoys the security and steadfastness of reading the same kinds of texts (memoir, true crime, YA) and writing within a limited pool of forms and genres (memoir, essays, comics), I understand both students’ desire to stick with what’s “working” for them as well as teachers’ desire–and often, the outside pressure–to nudge students toward a more “well-rounded” reading and writing identity.

It is important to tread lightly when doing this work. Many of the literacy giants whose shoulders we continue to stand on have made a rock-hard case for providing students with lots of choice around their reading and writing (Guthrie & Humenick, 2014, Kittle, 2013; Krashen, 2011…