APPENDIX

Syllabus for READ 9010

(Fall 2001):
Readers as Teachers
and Teachers as Readers
Michelle Commeyras

T
his graduate seminar is for those of us who are curious to
know more explicitly and specifically how one’s personal
reading life might be brought to bear on one’s teaching life. In
the International Reading Association’s position statement on
excellent reading teachers (2000), there is no mention of the
teacher being a reader—having a reading life beyond that of
reading to students and being familiar with children’s literature. It
seems to me that there is much more we can learn about the
potential significance of the teacher as reader. I seek to continue
my own reading life alongside inservice teachers wanting time to
engage in meaningful ways with reading in their everyday lives.
This seminar provides time and space for each participant to
set personal reading goals and to select readings to meet those
goals. Participants will be engaged in a study of themselves as
readers and as readers who teach.
In this inquiry-based seminar, we will pursue the question,
What is the potential of a teacher’s personal reading for enhancing
teaching in general and specifically in teaching reading and
language arts?
Our ultimate course goal will be to document what we have
learned about being teachers who read and readers who teach.

Proposed Reading and Writing Activities

(Alternative activities ideas are welcome.)
1. Read for your own pleasures, interests, and reasons.

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• At minimum, I think we should strive for 30 minutes a

day or two and one-half hours a week.
2. Keep a record of your reading life.
• Choose whatever form fits you. (I keep mine as a file on
my computer.)
• I record full bibliographic information for what I read
because I want to read it (for me this includes books,
New Yorker articles, New York Times articles, etc.).
• I type in regular font with excerpts from the texts that I
want to remember or share with you.
• I type in italics my own thoughts that relate to the
content and that relate to our seminar question.
• I find that keeping this record takes at least 15 minutes a
day or one hour and 45 minutes per week.
• At midsemester, pass in a bibliography of what you have
read. You do not need to give me your notes. Your notes
will be essential, though, for writing an essay and later a
book chapter.
3. Midsemester essay (7–10 typed pages)
• Write an essay that addresses the seminar question
based on what I’ve learned thus far from my reading life
and from our conversations on Tuesday evenings.
4. End-of-semester writing (All together, create a book-length
manuscript on Readers as Teachers and Teachers as
Readers to submit to International Reading Association for
publication!)
• Revise and further develop my midsemester essay, or
• Cowrite with one or more persons a chapter-length
paper.

Proposed Tuesday Evening Activities (Together, we will think

of other things that seem important for us to do together.)
1. While we are arriving and settling in, go to the chalkboard
or whiteboard and write down any text titles you want to
recommend or comment on and/or write down interesting
quotations from your week of personal reading.

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2. Have a conversation as a class about what has been

written on the board.
3. Have a half hour during which we take turns reading aloud
and offering some insights about our lives as readers who
teach and teachers who read.
4. Have time near the end of each meeting to write
individually or collectively what we are learning that
answers our seminar question.

Proposed Course Evaluation

I propose the following chart for the purposes of evaluation.

Reading and Writing Partially met Met my/leader’s Exceeded

Activities my/leader’s expectations my/leader’s
expectations expectations

Reading daily, weekly, etc.

Keeping a record of
reading life

Contributing to Tuesday
night discussions

Writing titles and

quotations on the
chalkboard or whiteboard

Writing the mid-semester

essay on the main question

Additional activities

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