Why We Need to Rethink High School English

Many progressive teachers recognize we need to do more than fill students’ heads with knowledge, and are deeply committed to the idea of meeting students where they are. Students in 2020, however, are not where they used to be. Many more seem to be bringing emotional troubles, learning differences, and habitual nonacademic behaviors to the classroom, all of which put new demands on teachers. Add to this the fact that teenagers now spend an average of 9 hours a day on their phones (Pew, 2018). This last fact has especially impacted our current students’ interactions with text, meaning-making, and how they access information.

There is no mistaking the fact that digital media have had a profound effect on students’ physiological abilities to focus on reading and writing, in and out of school. So many students struggle with reading in Science and History classes that some teachers have stopped using textbooks, and now teach content via PowerPoint slides, videos, and short readings. For English classes, however, students are still asked to engage in sustained reading. Spending upwards of 63 hours a week in front of a screen, our students’ neural pathways have been reshaped in ways that make this reading (which demands “sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object” -Carr, 2011, p. 64) more difficult than ever. What high school English requires from today’s students is literally the rerouting of their brains.

This is a sobering reality, but it is not news to most English teachers. Literary analysis – the traditional mainstay of high school English—has become an increasingly uphill battle in many classrooms. There are high schools where students no longer read at home, and where many struggle even to read in class. Some high school English teachers have learned to plan instruction which accommodates their students’ rejection of reading, but these teachers are not happy about it. They are frustrated because they don’t know how to hold students accountable without failing them. They are hungry for new ideas to help turn students back toward text and develop critical reading competence. They know they must learn to work with, not against students’ shorter attention spans and still-developing reading skills.

How can they do this? How can high school English instruction successfully engage and strengthen students as critical readers and thinkers in the 2020’s? It starts with the addition of more varied texts—different and diverse authors, genres, lengths-- sequenced intentionally. It includes not just the literary analysis required by the EOC or state exams, but the teaching and practice of the strategic reading skills that make that analysis possible. It means working with teachers to define and specify explicit performance outcomes in reading and writing. And most critically, it means making sure students find meaning and relevance in what they read. Such innovations will not only shift students’ experiences in the English classroom, but will also focus, invigorate and strengthen English departments so they can survive teacher turnover and prepare teachers for whatever comes next in this year of surprises and long-overdue changes.