| The adoption of the Common Core State Standards with its focus on preparing young adults for "college and career readiness" has renewed attention and focus on adolescent literacy in America's public schools. It has been well documented (Jacobs, 2008) that students often hit a "fourth grade slump" in reading as they move into early adolescence and middle school. This study sought to shed light on what the daily reading lives of students looked like in two Grade 6 language arts classrooms on a weekly basis over an extended period of time.;Over a 20-week timeframe, both classrooms were visited, one period weekly. As a participant observer, I took field notes on a laptop computer. The class transcripts were later converted into a two-column format, allowing a review of the observations. Two semi-structured interviews, one with each teacher, and three student interviews, were audiotaped and transcribed, then put into a two-column format. Artifacts were collected from each of the two classrooms and analyzed.;Classroom discourse around reading is significantly influenced by implementation of policy---in the present study, the Common Core State Standards. The effect on how texts were approached and made sense of appeared to be narrowed by the language used to do so (for example, close reading and text evidence). In addition, the ways in which emotional response to reading was scripted and controlled also appeared to limit deeper, more personalized aesthetic connections to texts. Studying classroom practice over time, coupled with teacher and student interviews, offers the potential for developing deeper understandings for in-school reading practices.;Studying the critical link between a policy mandate and its effect on practice is easily overlooked in a myopic quest for test scores. More research is needed in understanding practice at the ground level and teachers' and administrators' interpretation and implementation of policy and their effect on instructional practices. Further studies that engage middle school teachers and students in articulating what they value in the reading experience, as well as how classroom practices shape that experience, is necessary. |
