By: Jen Serravallo

Last fall, about a month into the school year, a reading specialist emailed me for help with a very common problem. I wrote back to her directly but realized that because what she asks about is so common, perhaps more would like to spy on our exchange and think about their own classrooms. I wish you a wonderful start to the school year and lots of joyful hours spent reading in this year ahead.

Hello!

I was wondering if you could help me with something we’re encountering with our 5^th and 6^th graders.  They are abandoning books and not finishing them.  Students say they are bored and give up on texts.  Beyond the obvious reasons and solutions, what can we try to get them to stick with a book, work through the boring parts, and finish them? 

Thank you!

Anna

Reading Specialist

Hi Anna,

It’s hard to know exactly what will work without meeting or talking to your kids, but I do have a few ideas. But before I share them, I want to confess that I actually abandon books sometimes. Do you? Sometimes a book I thought I’d love really is boring – why struggle through a boring book when there are so many great ones? Sometimes a different book grabs my attention and I end up hopping over to that one. I do finish books that are good, so I’m not worried about my reading life. So I would encourage you to allow for some abandoning of books – I think it’s a normal part of being a reader for many people.  That said, here are a bunch of things you might consider to try to get kids into books they will love from the start:

1. Do a really critical examination of the books you’re offering kids, and ask the kids for feedback on what you’re offering. Which books reflect their identities, cultures, interests, experiences, language, family structures? Along those same lines, ask kids to tell you what they want — maybe give them an book catalogue order form, some time on the web to browse, and/or take them on a trip to a bookstore. Have them make a wish list. What do you notice about the books they want to read? How do they compare to what you already have?

• Do an interest survey that asks about their favorite movies, TV shows and involve them in coming up with names for bins in your library based on their interests (i.e. “Books That Will Make you Cry” or “Sports Stars” or “Powerful Female Protagonists”). Include them in resorting what you do have so they can think of their identities first when they go looking for new books.

• As they are choosing their books, you could try to encourage them toward books that you (and they) might consider on the “easy” side. My guess is that reading whatever they are currently reading may be presenting them with some struggle and their comprehension is possibly shaky. It’s no fun to read books you aren’t understanding!

• Give them lots of access to graphic novels. The books are deceptively sophisticated and the visuals can provide support for comprehension overall, and visualizing specifically.

• Do book talks, and maybe read the first chapter of a book they might love, and leave the books on ledges around the room. Highlight something about the book that you know will be a draw – the suspense, the hilarious main character, the real-life issues.

• Show book trailers/commercials from publishers that will help do the “selling” for you and get them excited to check the books out.

• Give kids time to talk books to each other. Set them up in partnerships or book clubs and let them choose books together, then set aside time a couple of times a week for them to talk. Knowing they will talk with a friend about their book might encourage them to stick with it and get ideas to talk about.

• Confer with kids regularly. Talk to them about their book choices, how engaged they are with the book, how it compares to past choices. Check-in on their comprehension, and offer strategies to support them with things they need. Offer them positive feedback with ways they might be engaging with the text – using prior knowledge, slowing down to visualize what they are reading, finding more time each day to read to get into their book, and so on.

• Ask your school librarian for help. Librarians know what’s just been released, what’s on the horizon, and what the hottest books are for the grade level this year.

I hope those help!

Jen

Jennifer Serravallo is a literacy consultant, speaker, and the author of several popular titles including the NY Times Bestselling The Reading Strategies Book, The Writing Strategies Book, and Understanding Texts & Readers. A Teacher’s Guide to Reading Conferences takes a closer look at the purposeful, responsive instruction that takes place while conferring. Her latest publication, Complete Comprehension, is a revised and reimagined whole book assessment and teaching resource based on the award-winning Independent Reading Assessment. She was a Senior Staff Developer at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and taught in NYC public schools. Twitter: @jserravallo | Instagram: @jenniferserravallo | Website for Jen Seravallo, Click Here

By Lester Laminack

Enjoy, as Lester guides you from teacher-centered to student-centered teacher read alouds!

When you reach the end of an article, a story, or a book do you reach for your notebook to answer a set of questions written by someone else?  Do you feel that your understanding of what you have read, your worth as a reader, hinges on being able to give the answers to someone else’s questions?  Probably not.  Yet it seems that much of our reading instruction relies heavily on having our students answer a set of questions after they complete a reading assignment.  Following reading with a set of questions is a longstanding practice in literacy education.  In fact, many commercial reading programs follow this pattern.  One well-known program assigns a point value to each title, then has the children read and log on to a computer to read and answer a set of 10 multiple-choice questions. Other programs have students read then write answers to similar questions. And if we are teaching from a literature-based approach that doesn’t rely upon a commercially produced program we tend to have our own questions to hold our students accountable.

Questions Can Create Patterns

As teachers, most of us were introduced to Bloom’s Taxonomy as undergraduates in a teacher education program.  We likely practiced developing questions for each of the levels in the taxonomy and began our teacher careers believing that it was our charge to develop good questions that would hold our students accountable and yield proof that they read and understood the assigned text.

We sat with our notepads at hand and read the books, articles, poems, and various other texts our students would read across the year.  We paused at various points in the text to draft the questions we would give our students. We were attentive to character traits, shifts in the plot, nuances in word choice, the author’s use of simile and metaphor and figurative language.  We noted allusions to cultural references and other literature.  We were alert to the role of setting in the text, the way the author used dialog, bias, and narration.  We read closely and synthesized as we developed the questions we would present to the students.  Questions, whether presented by the program or developed by the teacher, may fall into a pattern or categories.  For example, questions about the main character, physical descriptions, main idea, vocabulary, opinion, evaluation, analysis, synthesis, inference, etc.

As students read and respond to the questions presented they begin to recognize the patterns as well.  Does this impact the way they read?  Does it shape what they tend to notice and pay attention to?  In other words, are they reading with the pattern of your questions in mind?  If the answer is, yes, then what are they failing to notice?  What is the cost to comprehension and attention and engagement?

Get In Touch With Ways You Read

Consider your own thought process as you read a text with the intention of writing questions for students to answer.  Are you beginning with a frame in mind? That is, do you begin with thoughts focused on Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How?  Or do you begin with the intention of finding three detail questions, two questions about the character’s motives, three questions that require the reader to interpret, two that require analysis, and one that calls for synthesis?  If the answer is, yes, then how does this frame influence YOUR approach as a reader? How does that process differ from the way you approach a professional text or a book you have selected to read for pleasure?  How does the approach effect your engagement with and your comprehension of the text?  Chances are that you read differently when you read for pleasure than when you read with the intention of developing a set of questions for your students.

Who’s Doing All The Thinking?

I have come to believe that the person who is asking the questions is the person who has done the thinking.  As you read to develop the questions for your students you were summarizing the text at critical points.  You were evaluating the merits of details and the use of Literacy devices.  You were synthesizing information and generating new thoughts.  You were noticing were the text called for an inference or expected you to have adequate background knowledge to connect to a metaphor or allusion.  In short, you were doing the deeper thinking, the more thorough analysis as a reader in service to the development of questions that would yield the proof of your students’ connections and comprehension.

Time To Flip the Read Aloud

I invite you to try something the next time you are reading aloud to your students.  As the story draws to a close and your voice delivers the last line simply close the book and exhale.  Pause for a few seconds and let silence settle over the group.  Then, look at them and speak quietly:  “Think for a few seconds.  Don’t speak yet, just think if you could speak with (author, illustrator, character, expert—beekeeper if the story is about bees, etc) what are the three best questions you could ask?  Think about that, please.  I’ll ask you to share your questions in just a moment.”

Have your notebook ready to jot down the questions as they share. At the end of the day when the students have boarded their buses to leave, revisit those questions and place them into four categories: Vocabulary, Background knowledge, Schema/conceptual frame, and other.  Take note of where the majority of the questions fall.  Think about what this reveals to you about their understanding of the text.  

I’ve come to believe that I find out more about where their understanding fails by examining their questions than I ever got from checking their answers.  

Lester’s books are on Amazon!

Learn more about Lester Laminack, check out his website!

Follow Lester on Twitter @lester_laminack

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.

By: Jim Burke

At a certain point in our lives, it becomes difficult to remember how awful (and, if we stick with it, wonderful) it can feel to learn how to do anything that does not come naturally to us. I was reminded of the feelings that accompany such learning in an unexpected way and when I least expected it.

I was in Wyoming to work with teachers at a high school there over my spring break a couple years back. The teachers wanted to improve their instruction in the areas of reading and writing, a difficult conversation that not every teacher is eager to have in the presence of others. Colby and Carl, the two department heads who had invited me out, told me when I arrived that the workshop would not take place until after school the following day, then continuing on into the evening till about 8 o’clock. Before I could tell them what would happen to the three of us at my school if such demands and schedule were ever imposed, they said, “Since you don’t have to get to work till late afternoon, we thought we would take you fly fishing in the morning.”

“That is such a generous and interesting offer, guys, but I really need to spend the morning preparing for the workshop,” I told them with a smile that was meant to comfort them, assuage their disappointment.

But this was Wyoming. These two guys, who would have looked right at home in a fancy hipster juice bar sipping a wheatgrass latte back in my hometown San Francisco, were driving Ford F-250 trucks with gun racks in Caspar, Wyoming where they taught English and fed their families on the venison and fish they shot and caught throughout the year. They weren’t having my excuses.

“Just be ready when we pick you up at 7 tomorrow morning, Jim. The workshop will go fine. You know your stuff. And besides, we’ll have you back by lunch so you can have some prep time.”

The following day, Carl and Colby drove me out into the meadowlands that skirted the Platte River, a slender stream that snaked its way across the open prairie shimmering with spring green grasses. There, in the first light of the new day, Carl taught me a few quick basics about casting that were enough to allow me to flop a fly line onto the moving water. Then, having set me up, he walked up river to his own station and set to fishing his own water, leaving me to just enjoy the morning.

I caught nothing, of course. Not even a bite. But there was no shame, no embarrassment, no emotional upset. This is because I was not—yet!—trying to learn anything. Once we start down that road, we confront what Tom Newkirk, in his book Embarrassment, calls the “awkwardness principle”:

Any act of learning requires us to suspend a natural tendency to want to appear fully competent. We need to accept the fact that we will be awkward, that our first attempts at a new skill will, at best, be only partial successes. Moreover we need to allow this awkwardness to be viewed by some mentor who can offer feedback as we open ourselves up for instruction. (2017, 10)

There was no cause for embarrassment that fine Wyoming morning on that distant spring day because I was not trying to accomplish anything, did not really care whether I could do it or do it well. It was not even something I had chosen to do. Everything that would come to represent the difficulty of learning—the different knots, the types of line, the different styles of fly rods, the flies, types of water, psychology of the fish, all the different types of bugs they eat, the seasons in which they eat them—was handled by Carl and Colby that morning, thus protecting me from any feelings of incompetence, any aggravation, any anger, any shame.

Only when I returned home later that week did all those feelings begin, for while I may not have caught any fish that day, I did catch a sense of what standing in a river fishing for trout might offer me. Yet from the moment I decided to buy a fly rod, I felt overwhelmed, ignorant, stupid. Heading off to the casting ponds in Golden Gate Park with the new rod and reel I bought soon after at the local fly fishing shop, I felt ridiculous as I watched my bright line spill into a wet nest on cast after cast. What had seemed, in my head, so simple, so easy, so relaxing, so doable in Wyoming, now appeared to be impossible.

Over the course of the next year, however, after taking classes, making time to practice, reading books and watching all those YouTube videos that showed me how to cast, I improved. But it was incremental, the two-steps-forward-three-steps-back type of learning. I had to teach my wife to ask not “Did you catch any fish?” but “Did you enjoy yourself at the river?” It took me three months to catch my first fish, and even that seemed more an accident than an achievement. And when I caught that trout finally, it slipped the hook, thus leading to another lesson in the language of fishing: I had caught but not “landed” the fish as the men at the fly shop explained to me the following week when I went by to tell them of my progress.

My point in telling this story is as simple as it is important: Nothing has taught me more about learning than experiencing all over the sustained feeling of incompetence that accompanied me through my first year of fly fishing. Whether it is fly fishing or writing an academic essay, the experience made me realize that we must learn the vocabulary (of flies, lines, reels, water, and so on); develop the background knowledge (about water, insects, about  various fly fishing techniques, the fish themselves—who knew fish were so smart!?); acquire the skills themselves, typically with the guidance of someone we have been willing to be vulnerable with as they guide us through that process; and, finally, maintain the patience and persistence needed to learn to do anything of any complexity with some skill.

Even now, after two years of fairly disciplined effort in all these areas, I remain a novice at best—and I love it. There will be time enough to master the craft, but in the meantime, I am learning to be a better teacher of students, of how to read, write, and learn because fly fishing constantly reminds me how hard it is to learn anything—and how good it feels when we eventually do.

Learn more about Jim at The New English Companion Website!

Connect with Jim on Twitter @englishcomp

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