Professors, stop requiring reading.

Instead, require engagement. Require response. Require conversation. Require a challenge.

It seems incredibly sad that I have to say this, but requiring someone to do something because you are an expert or an authority is not how you teach. This is more along the lines of how to be a bad manager, or how to treat employees poorly. It’s how to be a disliked, irrelevant, and problem manager of a team rather than a leader or contributor to a team. Teaching isn’t – and has never been – the dictation of facts from someone who knows to a bunch of people who don’t. Instead, it’s modeling and practice in how to think along the lines of what constitutes good thought for a field.

Learning and evaluating the quality of claims is best done in groups where people are interacting with one another. Our reasoning does not work very well at all when we are sitting isolated and engaging a text. So reading itself is not learning nor is it the best way to develop a critical approach to information. Assigned reading must be considered a part of teaching and learning, but how significant is it?

Why do we require reading?

This is the first question that I have to ask when I’m assigning something to read. What is the point here? Why am I having them encounter this text alone?

For me the answer is that it becomes a commonplace, or a meeting place, or an ingredient we can all bring into the larger class discussion in order to have some common ground for a conversation.

I teach in the humanities, so I’m not sure what the approach might be in hard science. Perhaps something like a guide on how to approach a problem or how to understand what we know already about an issue or thing, as a basis for a more robust treatment of the theory, knowledge, or approach by the professor in the class. There is always the catch-all of having two different approaches to something helping you understand and retain it better.

I don’t assign any reading that I don’t plan to directly use in the construction of my own in-class speech, or video. I plan to model a response to the text if I’m going to give sustained comments. This is much more common in the pandemic. My typical way of teaching is to ask a lot of questions of the students to see what they thought about the reading. This encourages them to encounter the text at least a bit in the moment.

Assigning reading has to be incorporated by the professor in more ways than just a quiz or just some examination on the reading. It has to be the provision of some information, some material, for them to create something with. Most often this should be a response. The best way of doing this is for the professor to model the response to the reading themselves, performing the quality, standards, and approach that is accepted in their field. Education in all cases is the teaching of a discourse, and modeling that discourse is perhaps the best way to show students the difference between a field expert and a layperson on an issue or idea.

Eliminate Textbooks

Textbooks are a bane on education. They are distilled comments that would be made in class anyway, and don’t really help students with anything other than disciplining themselves to read and engage boring material that they have little interest in. The textbook is often just a flatter, less interesting version of the professor.

Some defend textbooks as a reference, and I think this might be the only defense out there that makes sense. But the web is a much better reference for the things we might find in a textbook, and the cost is often hundreds of dollars lower.

If you feel compelled to assign a textbook, you should consider assigning a reader instead. Cut right to the professional essays on the topic and show the students those. Have them read some bits of things you have found to be illuminating and inspiring. The reader will serve as a much better orientation to the course and the course topic than the textbook, which distills. The reader is more of a sampler, and also doesn’t insult the students’ intelligence like a lot of textbooks do.

Four Real Books

Several years ago I was chatting with a friend who was in graduate studies at Cornell University about why students today seem to have so much busywork to do for every class. There are blog responses, discussion boards, endless quizzes, etc. I believe this is because faculty are more insecure about their position and less prepared to teach than ever before. They don’t see the need to look to what the high schools are doing, and they feel that students should be happy to be in the presence of someone with a terminal degree and just accept what they have to say. There’s also the ease of the internet, and online instruction, where the presence of something like a discussion board feels like pressure to find a use for it. There are probably a ton of different reasons why faculty are assigning so much work per course, when I remember most of my courses were a midterm, a final, and perhaps a short review of a book somewhere in there.

The thing we found in common with our best class experiences in this conversation was that our favorite classes all had assigned four books, no textbooks, and had just gone through those books in conversation and with some short papers perhaps. I think this approach has many advantages over the required reading of the chapters of the textbook. It’s not insulting – here are some books written to a critical mind from one. It’s interesting: You get a concentrated approach to a set of ideas or problems, instead of a distilled covering of a number of ideas in a field. Most importantly, you get four arguments. These arguments call out to the students to respond either with questions, agreement, disagreement, or the desire for further framing.

You can assign four books and have students choose what to focus on, or have them read around in them, or do them in order. Most importantly, you are not assigning reading, you are assigning engagement here, assigning them to come to terms with a few different ways of thinking about your course and field. And most of these books are probably 14 dollars at the most, maybe 30 if they just came out, and students are pretty savvy at finding books online for free.

Don’t assign reading. Assign experiences. Don’t force reading with a quiz. Encourage conversation by introducing your students to a difficult text. Students don’t refuse to read because they are dumb. Students refuse to read because they don’t see the value, they feel it’s dumb, they feel that it’s ridiculous in the way it’s written, that it isn’t taking them seriously. Assign something that treats them like a valuable mind, and encourage reaction to the text in speech or writing. This is how reading becomes a part of a good course.