Rethinking Whole-Class Novels in Education

Having devolved into the very thing it was designed to defeat, a lack of reading, the
teaching of the whole-class novel is today not just replaceable, but itself begging to be. It would be
more like filling in an empty hole than anything else. Moving to student-choice novels would not
be swapping the old with the new because from the beginning, the particulars of what one
chooses to read and write is the very point of these activities. Nor would the elimination of the
whole class novel even be replacing something broken with something unbroken. Student-choice
novels have their own dangers and cautions, or, propensity to break, just like the whole-class
novel. It’s just that calling the whole-class novel a broken instructional choice would be to imply
that it at one time was working. Yet, the research does not indicated a trend of less effectiveness
as time went on. In short, the best way to describe the act of abandoning the concept of teaching
a teacher-chosen novel to the entire class is that the teacher, in doing so,
would be abandoning nothing. If a novel is not being read, then to not read it is to make no
change. Anyone who has put peas on the child’s plate understands this situation completely: to
remove the peas from the plate does not decrease the number of peas ingested by the child
(unless of course the child is the one all your friends with children hate hearing stories about). In
fact, taking away the peas might be the one shot the parents have at the child pointing to a can
of peas at the grocery store and saying, “What’s that? Can I try it?” One day when Timmy or
Sally is older, they enter your study and interrupt your book with the question, “Now what of
asparagus?”
And all the plates could not contain them.