by Laura Robb

Why make time for independent reading? It’s a question schools frequently wrestle with. The answer is simple. The more students read, the better readers they become. Independent reading builds stamina, the ability to concentrate for at least thirty minutes. It also enlarges vocabulary, background knowledge, and provides the practice students need to become proficient and advanced readers.  Equally important is that independent reading develops students’ personal reading lives and sets them on the path to becoming lifelong readers because it nurtures their heads and hearts.

When I return to area schools to teach, I ask students this question: What do you think and feel while reading?  The responses that follow are typical of students who avoid reading and those who enjoy it.

• Jerome, an eighth-grade student wrote “0” and added “nothing.”
• Ricardo, a seventh grader, wrote: I learn good stuff about cars when I read. Sometimes I laugh and feel sad from books.”

Jerome dislikes reading and explained why during a conference: “I hate it.

Boring. Got better things to do.” Students like Jerome feel disconnected and alienated from reading. Stories and informational texts don’t affect their heads or their hearts.

In contrast, Ricardo enjoys reading fiction and nonfiction. An independent reading book is always on his desk. “If I have time, it’s [the book] there,” he tells me.  “I like to keep three or four books in my locker. If I finish one, it’s easy to get another [book].”

More than 1500 years ago, Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher wrote: “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” His words help explain why some students love to read and others dislike and avoid it: Unless reading affects mind and heart, students are merely decoders, saying the words on a page. That’s. Not. Reading.

To support students’ independent reading, first, reflect on and evaluate your classroom culture and environment by asking yourself, Does my teaching show how much I value independent reading?

Create a Class Culture That Values Independent Reading

The class environment you create can encourage students, even those who struggle with reading, to enter the reading life. It’s important to have a rich classroom library with books on a wide range of reading levels and diverse topics that offers access to books for students. Display books on your desk, under the chalkboard, on windowsills and advertise books that will motivate students to browse and choose one. In addition, it’s important to:

• Reserve time each week to present a brief book talk on new arrivals and invite students to book talk their favorites.
• Set aside class time for students to self-select independent reading books and find a comfortable place to read for twenty to thirty minutes.
• Share books you’re enjoying and read aloud every day.
• Invite students to share their favorite books on a class blog and/or a school website.
• Have conversations with students about their books and encourage them to discuss their books with a peer partner. Try questions such as: Why did you choose this book? Explain how did the book make you feel? What about the book did you enjoy? What did you learn from this book? How did the book connect to your life?
• Invite the principal and other guests into your class to read aloud.

You’ll want to have books on a wide range of reading levels and topics so all students choose books they can read and understand—books that affect head and heart. In a class where the teacher values independent reading, students develop the motivation and engagement to read more and read widely.

Motivation and Engagement Matter

Motivation comes from within a student and is visible when you observe students choose to read for the pleasure the experience offers. Students past reading experiences affect their motivation to read. If they struggle with texts used at school or find reading tasks such as completing worksheets boring, their motivation or desire to read diminishes.

In contrast, students who are voracious readers have positive and joyful past experiences with reading. Their motivation to read is consistently high because they’re always engaged with the books they choose and the reading experiences teachers offer. Motivated and engaged readers choose to read self-selected books at school and at home.  A sixth grader put it this way: “if I’m into a book the only thing that can get my attention is if my pants are on fire.”

Assessment: The Elephant in the Room

Avoid grading independent reading. Grading dioramas and nightly summaries of completed pages will turn students away from reading. Instead, have students write the title and author of completed or abandoned books on a book log form and choose a book to discuss with their group every six weeks. Encourage students to present short book talks once each month.  In a class with twenty-eight students who present monthly book talks, students will be introduced to 280 books over ten months. Trust. Your. Students. To. Read.

Closing Thoughts

Instead of saving it for the end of class and frequently omitting it, start your class with fifteen to twenty minutes of independent reading. Encourage students to keep a self-selected book on their desks so they can read it when they complete a task early. Make sure the centerpiece of your homework is thirty minutes of reading each night. If you make time for independent reading at school and celebrate books, then a transformation from “I hate reading,” to “Can we have more time to read?” surely will occur.

Follow Laura on Twitter @LRobbTeacher

Check out Evan’s blog posts on ScholasticEDU!

Learn more about Laura’s ideas on reading- check out- Teaching Reading in Middle School

 

 

Ruth Culham 

Truth. We live in an educational world of high standards and pathetically few resources.  Every year teachers and schools are asked to do more with less. And, short of opening up the state and national checkbooks and finally funding schools the way they deserve, it’s going to stay that way.   I can’t help but wonder if other essential professions have to operate like this. Likely not. School funding should be like my parents taught me about saving:  Pay yourself first. Put money aside for the future and then deal with rent, groceries, car payment, and living expenses.  Americans should pay schools first, plain and simple. But, until that day, there are things we can do with the resources we have to accomplish more.

Writing in Today’s Classrooms

Writing is a big deal in today’s classrooms for all the right reasons. Writing is thinking and clear thinking is required for everything a student does and will want to do throughout his or her life.  And yet, it’s not an instructional area of strength and confidence for most teachers. Almost every educator I know, at every level and across the country⎯North, South, East, and West⎯asks the same question:  How do I improve student writing?  The truth is, most teachers are not adequately prepared to teach writing and a great many do not feel they received any help in college to teach this critical subject.  In my work with assessing and teaching writing for the past 30 years, I have often found that teachers are not aware of the most dynamic and proven writing practices, defaulting to the same ones they were subjected to during their own formative years–practices that created generations of adults who have no confidence in the quality of their writing and therefore avoid it like the plague.  

Given that writing is a collective goal and that resources to teach writing well are not likely to come flooding in any time soon, it behooves us to look for help at what is already present in every classroom:  print and nonprint materials. For a highly successful and extremely motivating way to engage students in reading AND writing, one of the best teaching strategies I know is to share high-quality books and resources for more than their original reading purpose⎯to see them as sources of writing models, too.  Reading like a writer. Here’s what I mean.

Reading Like a Writer

Regardless of how you organize your reading instruction, a stunning novel such as Wonder by R. J. Palacio is likely in the reading lives of one or more students in your classroom.  You hear students talking about it, you see how they eagerly pass the book around, you feel the palpable energy of this text. Terrific.  This is exactly the buzz we’d hope a fine book would create. But don’t let it stop there. Aside from what students can learn about reading from Wonder, ask yourself what can be mined from the book about writing, too.  The book is already in the classroom, accessible to students, so why not use it to teach reading’s fraternal twin:  writing.

A quick browse through Wonder and I found passages on almost every page that illustrate different traits of writing.  (see culhamwriting.com for the scoring guides and additional print resources that define the traits and their key qualities:  ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions.)

One quick example:

Pg. 156:  I shrugged but I didn’t say anything.  I just couldn’t. If I told him that Julian had called August a freak, then he’d go talk to Julian about it, then Julian would tell him how I had bad-mouthed August, too, and everybody would find out about it.  (Sentence Fluency: Varying Sentence Patterns)

Once you find a passage that is a model of good writing for a particular reason, share it with students.  With their student-friendly versions of the traits of writing scoring guides in hand (www.culhamwriting.com) they can pinpoint what the author has done well and discuss it using the shared vocabulary so essential to understanding how writing works and being able to talk about it. For instance, in this passage, the author has created rhythm and a smooth sound to the reader’s ear by using a variety of sentence lengths.  Challenge students to find passages from other favorite texts that vary sentence patterns and share them. Then ask them to find a place in their own writing and revise several sentences so they vary in length similar to Palacio’s.

The print and nonprint materials you have in your classroom and school library are a rich resource for teaching writing.  And the beauty of using them is two-fold: 1) you already have access to them and 2) modeling from mentor texts is a powerful instructional technique for teaching writing.  For more detail and examples, my book, The Writing Thief, (Stenhouse, 2014) might be helpful.

Closing Thoughts

Bottom line:  We must learn how to do more with less in this age of school funding woes. But good news!  If you have a classroom library, you already have what you need to move writing instruction forward with energy and success.  How to plan a year, week, and day of writing instruction with resources already on hand are found in Teach Writing Well, by Ruth Culham, Stenhouse 2018.  With access to proven strategies, regardless of your preparation in college or your experience as a teacher, you can turn teaching writing from cringe-worthy to credible to completely phenomenal.  

 

Palacio, R.J. (2012).  Wonder.  New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers.

 

Ruth Culham lives in Beaverton, Oregon with her two cats and her always-ready-to-write computer.  She creates professional books and materials for teaching writing based on the traits of writing and conducts professional development workshops for teachers and administrators across the country and world.   Her most recent book, Teach Writing Well, is based on 30+ years of teaching, researching, and learning about what works and what doesn’t work for classroom teachers.  

 

Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D.

 

In my previous blog posting for The Robb Review, I focused on what should be the real goal of phonics instruction – to get kids to the point where they don’t have to use phonics much in their reading.  We want students to be so proficient and efficient at word recognition that minimal attention is given to word decoding and maximum attention can be directed toward comprehension.   Staying with this theme of reading instruction goals, I’d like to focus on reading fluency and state right off the bat that the goal of fluency instruction should not be to make kids read fast.    It has been this incessant focus on increasing reading speed, I think, that has unfortunately given reading fluency a bad rep.

 

What is Reading Fluency?

Fluency has been called the neglected goal of the reading program (and it is) (Allington, 1983); it has also been called the bridge from word recognition to comprehension.     I like that bridge metaphor a lot. Fluency is the critical link to making meaning while reading. There are two components to fluency. The first is automaticity in word recognition – the ability to recognize words so effortlessly that most of a reader’s attention can be devoted to comprehension.   Automaticity is the part of the bridge that links to word recognition.

The other part of the fluency bridge is called prosody or reading with expression.  This is the link to comprehension. When a reader reads with appropriate expression that reflects the meaning of the text, she is striving to comprehend that text.    This is the part of fluency that is often neglected in instruction; yet it is critical for comprehension to occur, even when reading silently.

 

How Should We Teach Fluency?

As with anything we want to become fluent at (e.g., speaking, driving, golf, cooking), fluency is developed through practice.   In reading we have several forms of practice that can and should be employed. These forms of practice include wide reading, assisted reading where a reader reads while simultaneously hearing a fluent reading of the same text by a partner or recording, and repeated reading where a reader reads a text several times until she achieves fluency on that text (Rasinski, 2010).    In all these forms of practice the goal should be reading for meaning, and if reading orally, to read with appropriate expression that conveys meaning to anyone who may be listening.

 

How Does Reading Speed Fit into the Fluency Equation?

Reading speed (words read correctly per minute) is an indicator of word recognition automaticity and is often called the oral reading fluency (ORF) score.   The more automatic or effortless you are in recognizing words in text, the faster your reading becomes, AND the more attention you can devote to comprehending the text as opposed to analyzing the words in the text.    Reading speed is an indicator or consequence of the fluency component of automaticity, BUT it is not fluency. Our reading speed increases as our fluency improves, not the other way around. I often say that I want our children to become fast readers just the way I am and all of you reading this blog are reasonably fast readers;  but I want them to become fast the same way we all became fast readers – through lots and lots of authentic practice in reading.

So go ahead and use DIBELS and AimsWeb ORF scores, or Hasbrouck and Tindal’s norms (Words Correct per Minute) cautiously and sparingly as indicators of students’ growth in automaticity, but please please please do not let children think that you are trying to get them to read faster.   The increase in reading speed (as well as improvements in reading with expression) will happen with authentic reading practice, not with overt instruction or implied emphasis on reading fast.

  

Fluency is More than Automaticity

A few years ago I came across recordings of arguably two of the most fluently read speeches in American  history – Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address “Ask Not What Your Country…”     I subjected the oral readings of both of these speeches to an ORF (reading speed) assessment. In both cases, Dr. King and President Kennedy’s readings of their speeches may have landed them in a remedial reading class based on their very low ORF scores.     I am sure they were both automatic in their word recognition, and they could have read those speeches quickly. But doing so would have taken away from the meaning they were trying to convey. Because they were automatic in their recognition of the words in their speeches they were able to devote their attention to making and elaborating on the meaning they wished to share orally. They raised and lowered their voices, had dramatic pauses, changed volume and tone in order to more effectively to deliver their intended meanings to their audiences.   What truly made those speeches fluent was not the speed, but the expression (prosody) that they embedded in their readings.

For fluency instruction to truly work we need to see the goal of fluency as expressive oral (and silent) reading that reflects the meaning of the text.    When we make expressive and meaningful reading of texts the true goal of fluency (and avoid putting emphasis on fast reading) we will see significant improvements in reading comprehension (as well as reading speed).

 

You can find resources on teaching accurate and automatic word recognition and expressive prosodic reading (i.e. fluency) at Tim’s own website – www.timrasinski.com

 

Please see also my new book on reading fluency (written with Melissa Cheesman Smith) – The Megabook of Fluency published by Scholastic.

 

References

Allington, R.L. (1983).  Fluency: The neglected reading goal.  The Reading Teacher, 36, 556-561.

Hasbrouck, J., & Tindal, G. A. (2006) Oral reading fluency norms: A valuable assessment tool for reading teachers. The Reading Teacher, 59(7), 636-644.

Rasinski, T. V. (2010).  The fluent reader:  Oral and silent reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension (2nd edition).  New York: Scholastic.

 

Many years ago my principal asked me to attend a conference and then train the staff at our school. I tried to learn more about what training the staff meant. Was this a common practice? It seemed intimidating to me. The train the trainer model, taken from the business world, was becoming a popular term in education. It did not work for me.

 

Yes, I attended the conference, had a good time, and learned some. What was not good for me? The faculty meeting I had to lead a month later where I was to “train” the staff on what I learned.  A horrible experience. I was not confident in the new information I learned while attending the conference and less confident to train a faculty where most were more experienced than me. Does your school or Division sing the praise of “train the trainer” models?  I hope not. I have rarely seen them work. Many times staff can be great in front of 25 students but not comfortable at all in front of peers who they need to teach. I propose a new method, well not exactly new, I propose ongoing professional development. Professional development meeting the needs of the school, occurring at the school, and for all staff in the school.

 

There are two ways to start ongoing professional development in a school: hiring a paid consultant or a school-wide book/professional study.  I will address both in two posts. In this post, I will give tips for using a paid consultant.

 

Assuming your school has access to professional support, the first step is to figure out what your faculty needs.  This can be accomplished through conversation, data analysis, and observation. Pick one focus area all staff can benefit from in all disciplines. As an example, in my school, our year-long focus is differentiating instruction.

 

Tips for successful year-long professional development:

• Know what you want to focus on and work with staff to build a commitment.
• Secure an educator who can meet with your staff at least six times during the school year. Add the dates and times to your staff calendar, so staff knows when each session is over the course of the year. I like to focus on professional development days or use time in the place of regular faculty meetings.
• Along with several staff members, meet with the presenter to grid out what topics will be addressed during each session. Know what the outcome should be at the end of all sessions and communicate this to staff throughout the year.
• I am a stickler that a consultant will let staff know at the start of the session what they will learn. Also, there must be collaborative opportunities during the sessions, and a task staff will try in preparation for the next meeting.
• It is critical for the principal and other administrators to be part of all sessions.  In my school all teaching staff, guidance staff, and administrators attend.

When reading this, you might think, O.K. it’s great, but it could be expensive.  My counter, it is not if you cut back on sending staff to conferences and training.  It is not costly if you consider the gain of all staff in your school receiving training instead of a few, or replacing “train the trainer” models which I do not feel are very successful.  Bringing on-going professional development to your school it is the best way to generate excitement and energy for a full year.  It is a positive and significant shift away from the one and done sessions and the false expectations that this method can bring change to a school.  You want positive change to impact students and staff. Choose a school focus that is inclusive and work on it all year long through purposeful professional development.

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