Adapted from The Teaching Life by Kelly Gallagher.
Many students leave high school and cannot handle the reading demands at the university. The main reason? They haven’t been reading. This is why I am an advocate for building independent readers. In school. Every day. You get better at reading by reading. That said, I have seen reading initiatives fizzle out at numerous schools (including mine) because they lacked one or more of the following key ingredients.
- Access to good books. Most schools say they are interested in building reading habits in students, yet often students have nothing interesting to read (see mission statements). And by interesting, I mean interesting to the students, not the teachers. Every student likes to read—even the most reluctant readers—if you can give them access to books on skateboarding, weight lifting, or computer coding. But when you mandate daily reading in the middle of a book desert, failure is guaranteed, and kids will grow to dislike reading even more. They need good books. So simple, yet, somehow, so difficult.
- Knowledge of good books. Of course, the key to supplying kids with books they want to read is knowing what books they like to read. This meant I often read YA (young adult) books, and I was constantly surveying students on their likes (and dislikes). I was also dialed into the major literary awards (e.g., The National Book Award for Young People’s Literature™, The Michael L. Printz Award™ for excellence in YA literature, the Pulitzer Prize winners, and the Newbery Medal and honors winners) and organizations that recommend books for young readers (e.g., the Book Love Foundation, The StoryGraph™, the Global Read Aloud®, the Nerdy Book Club, the American Library Association, and The New York Times® YA bestseller lists), all easily found via quick internet searches.
- Administrative buy-in. I had a principal who fully believed in school-wide sustained silent reading (SSR), and in those years, the program went well. I also had a principal who did not believe in SSR, and in those years the program fell apart. How do you know when a principal gets it? She insists that everyone, from teachers to classified staff, be trained to participate. She actively seeks funding for books. She drops into classes unannounced and reads alongside the students. She leads by example.
- Staff training and support. Teachers have to be trained on how to facilitate independent reading in their classrooms. This training cannot be a one-and-done workshop at the beginning of the school year; rather, it needs to reoccur at every staff meeting over the course of the year(s).The training should begin by focusing on the why. Why are we doing this? What is at stake? Once teachers understand why, they are much more receptive to focusing on the how. How do I launch this in my classroom? How do I facilitate it? What do I do when students are reading? (For answers to these questions, and more, start with Janice L. Pilgreen’s The SSR Handbook [2000].)
No traditional school accountability. The goal of implementing independent reading is to reestablish reading momentum in students who have stopped reading. We want them to like to read. No one likes to read when that reading is followed up with writing prompts or questions to answer. I am currently reading Scott Turow’s Presumed Guilty (a follow-up to Presumed Innocent, a book published nearly forty years ago). I love books with courtroom drama, but there is no way I would curl up with this book at home if I knew a teacher was waiting for me at the end of each chapter with a quiz.
However, “no traditional school accountability” does not mean that there is no accountability at all. Rather, it means that while students were reading, I conferred with a few of them each day. In these three-minute conferences, I checked in to see what support was needed. Does this student need a nudge to keep going? Should she change books? Can I help her wrestle with the hard parts? All these conversations were an attempt to ally myself to the readers in ways that might motivate them. (What a reluctant reader does not need is a “gotcha encounter” with the teacher.) And this gets to a major reason SSR programs often fail: If the teacher doesn’t repeatedly talk to each reader, the students become adept at fake reading. They hide, and years later, they become twelfth graders who admit they haven’t read a book in years—a common occurrence in my classroom.
In my senior classes, I had students who worked thirty hours a week after school to support their families. I had others who rushed home after their last classes to take care of their younger siblings for the rest of the day. For these students, the only opportunity to read occurred at school. Without a dedicated daily reading time, it was a certainty they would not develop a reading habit.
So what happens when you give students good books to read, time to read them in school, and carve out time to confer with them? In a study I conducted, I found that my thirty-eight freshman students went from reading 184 books in the eighth grade (before me) to reading 486 books in the ninth grade. Two of my students read over thirty books. The fewest number of books read by any student was seven. The mean was 12.7.
So, yes. Independent reading. Daily. As my friend Penny Kittle says, “If students aren’t reading with you, they are not reading without you.”
