The Reader Response Notebook: Teaching toward Agency, Autonomy, and Accountability

By Ted Kesler and Kathy G. Short

Ted Kesler, with a community of grade school teachers and students, demonstrates how students’ creative responses lead to deep comprehension of diverse texts and ultimately help them to develop their literate identities.

The Reader Response Notebook (RRN) is a tried-and-true tool in elementary and middle school classrooms. However, teachers and students often express frustration with this tool. Responses can read as though students are just going through the motions, with little evidence of deep comprehension. With this book, teacher educator and consultant Ted Kesler breathes new life into the RRN by infusing this work with three key practices: 

• Encouraging responses to reflect design work, using a variety of writing tools
• Expanding what counts as text, including popular culture texts that are important in students’ lives outside of school
• And making the RRN an integral part of a community of practice

Providing myriad examples of student work and explicit teaching in classrooms, Kesler, with a community of grade school teachers and students, demonstrates how students’ creative responses lead to deep comprehension of diverse texts and ultimately help them to develop their literate identities. This book colorfully illustrates how to teach students toward agency, autonomy, and accountability in their reader response notebooks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
• Release date: Oct 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780814100486

Ted Kesler

Ted Kesler taught grades K, 1, 3, and 4 for 13 years in the New York City public schools. In 1996-97, he was the featured teacher in a year-long series of articles in The New York Times called “Class 3-223: Mr. Kesler’s Struggle," by reporter Jacques Steinberg (nine articles in total!). In 1998, he received the prestigious Bank Street College Early Childhood Teacher of the Year Award. In 2001, he earned my National Board of Professional Teaching Standards license as a middle grades generalist. In the fall of 2001, he left the classroom and worked as a staff developer for the Reading and Writing Project of Teachers College until 2007. During this time, he also completed my doctoral degree in Curriculum and Teaching. He was a contributing author of Raising the Quality of Personal Narratives (Heinemann, 2006).  In the fall, 2007, he joined the Elementary and Early Childhood Department of Queens College of the City University of New York and is now associate professor, focusing in literacy education. He is also director of the MAT 1-6 pre-service programs and currently teaches courses in literacy and children's literature to Masters degree pre-service and in-service students. He is the author of books for teachers and teacher educators, including The Reader Response Notebook: Teaching Towards Agency, Autonomy, and Accountability (NCTE, 2018). His articles have appeared in Language Arts, The Reading Teacher, the Elementary School Journal, the ​Journal of Literacy Research, Reading and Writing Quarterly, and Children's Literature in Education, among other journals. He continues to do staff development, teach institutes, and give keynote speeches as a literacy consultant in schools around the country. 

Book preview

1

A New Vision of the Reader Response Notebook

What Is a Reader Response Notebook?

You are likely familiar with a reader response notebook (RRN). A reader response notebook is a bound school notebook of 100 to 200 pages, although some students may opt to purchase cloth- or leather-bound journals. We require bound pages so that students don't tear pages out and so the pages have more permanence than those in a spiral notebook or three-ring binder. As with writer's notebooks, we encourage students to personalize the covers of their RRNs with favorite quotes, images of covers of their favorite books, pictures of their perfect reading spots, and so on (see Figure 4).

FIGURE 4. Dyandra's reading response notebook cover.

Beyond the physical format, a reader response notebook is a tool for thinking about texts our students read. Vygotsky (1978) states that all people engage in goal-directed activities using mediational means that are both signs and tools. Language, of course, is the dominant sign system. In the case of the RRN, the goal-directed activities are reader responses to texts. The RRN enables blending of tools and symbol systems, including language, to achieve higher mental functioning.

When I first brought up my vision of the RRN as a tool for thinking, Reva Gluck-Schneider, the principal of P.S. 144 in Queens, New York, asked, Why not just use digital tools such as a blog or some of the great apps that are available such as Wordle or Glogster or VoiceThread? Her school was moving in the direction of integrating technology into classroom instruction. Although the integration and evolution of digital technologies in classrooms is occurring so rapidly that it's impossible to keep up, digital technologies are expanding what's possible for reader response in powerful ways (see, for example, Kesler, Gibson, & Turanksy 2016).

The physical RRN has an important place among these digital tools. It's portable, accessible, and doesn't rely on electricity or internet access or subscription. Students can simply take out their RRNs whenever they want or need to respond to a text. Even today, not all classrooms have one-to-one digital devices, and even if they do, not all devices are always charged or working properly. We and our students have to contend with the vagaries of internet connection and access; often, some sites are blocked by the school router system. Moreover, not all students, particularly students of low socioeconomic backgrounds, have digital devices or internet access outside of school (Leu, Forzani, Rhoads, Maykel, Kennedy, & Timbrell, 2015). Because the RRN is both physical and bound, teachers and students are able to easily track, reflect on, and revisit entries and monitor progress.

Some Common Views of Reader Response Notebooks

In my extensive work as a staff developer in elementary and middle schools around the country, I have noticed patterns in the use of RRNs. Sometimes students copy the aim or goal of the lesson in the notebook, perhaps including an explanation. For example, Good readers learn new vocabulary words by using context clues, followed by an explanation. Students then provide some examples of using context clues to figure out new vocabulary in their reading. Another pattern I notice is summarizing the chapter or article. A third pattern is responding to prompts or reading skills the class is focusing on, such as writing about the central conflict, drawing conclusions, or using text evidence from two or more texts to answer a question that the text set addresses, such as Why are elephants being poached in central Africa, and what can be done about it? Some teachers assign intermediary steps that guide students toward this complex response, such as focusing on one text at a time or using graphic organizers or thinking maps to collect evidence and then develop reasons and notice patterns across texts. Some teachers also provide paragraph frames (Cudd & Roberts, 1989) to support students’ responses, especially to nonfiction texts.

There are some compelling reasons for these patterns of response. First, they value expository writing, which is a mode of communication students need to develop. Developing strong expository writing skills also addresses state and national ELA standards. These responses also prepare students for state standardized ELA tests, which are intended to be aligned with standards.

But you might also recognize some compelling limitations to these patterns of response:

1. Responses are predominantly teacher assigned, and the teacher is often the only intended audience. Consequently, students don't develop a sense of ownership of their responses, nor a sense of purpose beyond pleasing the teacher. (How often do you see students willingly, without prompting, write a summary of a text they