I’m going to finish up this loooong series on genre study with a few short posts. This one is simple: Year long genre study promotes problem solving in your reading workshop.
Almost every reading teacher teaches genre, but we don’t always teach genre for all it’s worth. Sometimes we do this:
We set up a bulletin board, download some genre anchor charts, go over the charts with students, and ask them to identify genre here-and-there throughout the year.
This approach helps students identify genre, but it doesn’t do much else. Their understanding of genre will remain superficial. If they do a lot of reading, their understanding of genre will deepen, but they won’t have chances to articulate this in ways that enhance their understanding of specific genres, and literature in general.
How does Genre Study compare?
Here are some ways in which year-long genre study gives your students more chances for problem solving than they might have otherwise:
- Genre study is built around inquiry. Students are immersed in the genre, then they use their reading experiences to craft a class definition of the genre.
- Genre study allows for a complex understanding of each genre. Handing students a list of simple genre definitions gives them an overly simplistic understanding of genre. Some books fit into several genres, and some genres aren’t totally distinct from each other (historical fiction can tell the fictionalized account of a real person’s life, which makes it very similar to biography even though they’re on opposite sides of the fiction/nonfiction line).
- Genre study provides a framework for a growing understanding of reading concepts. In another post I said “Genre Study=Automatic Spiral Review.” With genre study, you teach the same broad concepts over and over, and you fill out the details according to the specific genre.
Because of its inquiry approach, and its dedication to in-depth genre study, genre study infuses your reading workshop with opportunities to problem solve.
