ABSTRACT
The making of a reader-response teacher depends on the recognition and acceptance of altered goals and roles for teachers. Readers naturally want to share their responses to books with others. Sharing responses in a classroom provides situations ripe for learning. Such a sharing is illustrated and explored to establish the teacher-and-student goals and to evaluate the procedure and questions. A comparative evaluation of textbook questions and activities leads to a consideration of the presumed merits of these, in contrast to the values and learning engendered by the response approaches. Teachers are now turning to a new way to teach reading—through a literature-based approach. But some teachers are basalizing or trivializing children’s literature by using the same basal format for reading sessions. Many schools are moving toward a language arts block of time that will allow all of the language arts subject areas time to be integrated.
