Havent let it stop me though---although I don't make my students read outside class much as it's a) unenforceable in this context and b) there is no good textbook in Japanese anyway for my area.
Your post reminds me of a couple professors whose pedagogical strategies seemed especially impressive (though I'm completely in the dark about teaching on in the professional level of pedagogical strategy, so clue me in if I'm way off base)--
One of my professors wrote out each entire class (the lecture portion, anyway, which came first--followed by the open forum discussion) as an outline on the chalk board, which was the exact outline he had written as the basis for his somewhat improvisational style. He asked that we copy it verbatim every week as our notes, with any of our own reactions in addition in the margins.
This was amazingly successful in terms of guiding us along on a "meta" level, where, even if he strayed significantly from the outline, or the discussion went down tangential pathways away from his intended topic, students were able to get a 'big picture' of what the course was supposed to be teaching. I found this especially useful as a reference resource when I was writing papers, which he assigned brilliantly was multi-part essay question answers.
So many students found this super-rigid, because so many other professors completely ignored making the "meta"-level on which the course was supposed to work as a facet of the education as part of an academic discipline and its hermeneutics. I could still use those notes to write an excellent paper on any of the thinkers we studied with him. Unsurprisingly, this course had discussions that tended to stay more on point than any other I took.
Another professor I liked very much firmly believed in only assigning excerpts or short works (I think 30 pages per week or less), based on the idea that it was better for students to read 10 pages of Derrida or one relatively short Certau article with comprehension and attentiveness than it was for students to be given all of Being and Time to read and flagrantly fall short. He claimed that current research indicated that students retain and comprehend material in smaller chunks assigned with "medium" frequency.