Challenge: How to Flip Middle School Non-Readers into Voracious Ones?
Posted: May 4th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 9 Comments »
Some time ago I blogged that it’s easier for top charter schools to generate math gains than English gains.
It’s an interesting thread with a few great observations in the comments.
I conclude with
I’ve often thought we should wage an all-out effort to generate pleasure reading habits among older kids. In our early years at MATCH High, we took kids to the bookstore each month, to buy whatever book they wanted. Somehow our tradition faded away.
My questions for you today:
1. Do you know of an urban middle or high school that has had shocking success at flipping kids who, when they arrived in August, never read for pleasure (preferring video games, TV, facebook, etc for 6 to 7 hours a day), but after a few months, read many hours each week? I am talking gigantic, massive, mega-turnaround….kids who read voraciously on their own, with non-assigned books.
2. Barring that, do you know of an unusual individual teacher who has achieved that?
Email me or just write into the comments.
A couple of thoughts. First, from Gotham Schools today:
http://gothamschools.org/2012/05/04/at-democracy-prep-counting-words-adds-up-to-literacy-growth/
Second:
I think we do a decent job at Brooke (specifically with the kids who came to us in 5th grade as that is more comparable to MATCH), but we are always trying to improve. What I would say is that it is not universal. Some kids totally get bitten by the reading bug and become obsessed. Others, not so much. Of course, I am a math teacher, but here are things I have noticed that have helped kids get bought in.
1) Dedicated reading time during the day. I’m not talking about 10-15 minutes like at many schools that use SSR or DEAR. In the 7th grade, we have 105 minutes a day for Independent Work Time (the amount varies by grade). During this time, some kids are conferencing with their teachers, others are working on long-term assignments, and others are reading. In my classroom, we ideally try to reserve the first of the three blocks (35 min) exclusively for reading and conferencing, but there tends to be some “assignment creep” when deadlines come up.
2) Readers’ Workshop. Time when kids are reading, working on reading goals, and the reading teacher is meeting with kids to discuss those goals. When this time is used as proscribed, I think it is fantastic. When my wife taught 6th ELA, she made a lot of growth with some struggling, struggling readers (5 years worth of reading levels in 2 years – kids who entered our school reading on a second grade level in 6th grade). I think this works really well at lower grades. We use currently use DRA2 as an assessment tool, and at the lower grades, when the levels jump more frequently, kids get really bought in to practicing their reading to get ready for the next assessment. Unfortunately, the levels are so spread out after mid-elementary schools that it doesn’t quite work as a motivating tool. However, I will say that when teachers are working closely with individual kids around specific strategies that will make them better readers, reluctant readers get more bought into their books.
3) This leads to another point – leveled books. Struggling readers, especially in upper grades, get turned off when they don’t comprehend. It’s crucial for kids to be reading independently on their reading level (most of the time). Allison had a student who had been mis-DRAed and was reading way above his level and getting nothing from his reading. When she moved him down to the correct level, he got hooked on a book series and read at least 20 books in it. It’s key to have classroom and school-wide libraries leveled so that kids can choose books that are right for them.
4) Book series are great for getting non-reading kids hooked. I can think of a number of series that have gripped kids – Harry Potter, Cirque Du Freak, Twilight, Bone, Series of Unfortunate Events, Magic Schoolhouse, Inheritance, Sharon Draper, etc all get kids to read in quantity. When a series gets hot at school, we buy lots of copies so that kids don’t have to wait around to read them. We find that reading specific books can be contagious.
5) Book clubs! We have been inconsistent about this, but when we have done it kids have really loved it. Sometimes, groups are made by the ELA teacher and the kids manage it themselves. We give them time to meet during one of those IWT blocks. We check in to make sure they are on task and continuing to read, and provide more guidance when they are having trouble. In addition, this year, we split the 7th grade into 7 or 8 book clubs each led by an adult (all the 7th teachers, plus some administrative folks ). I’ve loved talking with my kids about two great, pretty hard books – Nation and Matched. They were tepid on the first, but totally dug the second. We originally sorted by preference; we might be reorganizing soon by reading level. What I’ve loved is talking with the kids about issue that I never get to in my classes – faith vs. reason, the nature of control in society, etc. I assign reading over the week – usually about 80-100 pages, and then we meet during the first IWT block on Friday. We’ve sometimes done cross grade level book clubs, and soon we are going to do an optional book club across the middle school for kids and their families. For 5 bucks, the kid and parent will get two copies of the book to keep and then we will do an evening debrief after people have read it.
6) At our school, we have a culture that kids need to have a book with them at all times. Generally, if they are waiting around, they pull out their books and read. This happens in class, when they finish an assignment, but also after school when they are waiting for parents. For many kids it is habit; for others it is more of a stretch.
7) Books – our kids, by the time they get to 7th or 8th, sometimes feel limited by our library. We have a large budget to buy books each year and we try to buy some things that we think are great and others that they kids request. I personally think we should invest in a full-time librarian to manage all of this. For now, it is very ad hoc. It does help if classrooms have extensive libraries themselves, and you swap books in and out (with the main library or other classrooms, from time to time). Also we let kids borrow from other classroom and do schoolwide searches if a kid is looking for a book.
8) We make sure that all of our kids have BPL cards. Some use them, most, I would say, don’t.
9) Our kids are tasked with writing down words from their books in spiral bound “lexicons.” At the end of the day, kids take time to look up definitions and share them with their peers. All school-wide vocabulary comes words that kids found in their books.
I am probably missing a lot of things. We are pretty harsh on ourselves, but might be doing well compared to other schools. Hard to say…come visit and take a look!
My colleague Jennifer Gallaspy is fantastic at getting kids hooked…she just signed on to a new and exciting gig at another Boston charter network; a gig so new that I don’t think I am allowed to share it yet. If I were you, I would talk to her as I think she would be way more articulate than me…
Jumping off mathteacher’s impressive contribution:
1. Book clubs run by non-ELA and ELA teachers are always fun, with the usual caveat: it needs to be kind of tight for it to work. Formally informal.
2. Book selection is more important than I thought it would be. Anything Saligner-ish is universally panned. I thought Hatchet would be a bigger winner than it was. Some kids grab onto Markus Zusak’s stuff, and those Graceling books were surprising hits. At the high school level, Raymond Chandler.
3. Always tried to create a lounge-like feel. It would usually amount to me turning off one of the lights and the kids drinking hot chocolate and pretending it was coffee. But I could see a great teacher really owning the atmosphere component. Field trips to book stores/coffee shops can add a lot.
Man it’d be great if MATCH ran a small RCT on something like this.
Paul talked about a lot of the things that have had some success at Brooke, and I think there have been many successes. I have certainly given out my fair share of automatic detentions and community violations for kids reading their independent book under the desk when they were supposed to be doing some other piece of work. I have seen many a kid fall in love with a book.
But we all think that we need to do more to get kids bought into reading. Kimberly felt like the reading instruction approach, the reading standards and our assessment system were limiting kids, so she totally rewrote the standards with lots of input from teachers. I don’t want to speak for her, but the new standards seem a lot less standard-y and a lot less discrete than what we used to have. So for instance, we now have power standards like, “Can sustain reading for 45 minutes,” “Can identify his/her favorite genres and authors,” and “Can ask questions to monitor comprehension.” More nit-picky standards like “Can identify cause and effect,” or “Can visualize while reading” have been either de-powered or eliminated completely. We have half the number of standards that we used to and half of the standards are the same for every grade level.
Now each grade level cluster is working on figuring out what instructional approaches will help us meet these new standards. There are great conversations flying around. We are talking about how to institutionalize great book selection in a way that ensures it happens every year. We have thought about getting in touch with experts like librarians to find out how they select books. We have been talking about how to have kids share books – through book groups, but also through share outs. The first grade team has been piloting the idea of stopping reading workshop halfway through to have kids share with a partner something that they are thinking about their book. They have found that the kids can sustain reading longer and are passing books around more. And the big question is how to use class time. We all envision lessons that are not quite as focused on a single point because readers don’t read just to look for cause and effect or just to visualize. Readers read to get the whole message, to learn new things, connect with characters. We also envision some more student driven lessons where the work of processing the text is on them rather than led by teacher directed questioning. However, a great question that is really engaging is also a great way to get kids into a book. So we are trying to figure out how to balance all this. We are hoping that we can do better text selection for whole group lessons if we are not trying to stick so narrowly to one point. When you are trying to find a text that has certain cause and effect words in it because you are trying to teach that vocab, you are probably not choosing the text because you love it. If you can choose a text that just has cause and effect in it, then you can choose almost any text. And then you can choose something you love and the kids will love.
I want to second what Paul said about leveling. When I taught middle schoolers who had come from BPS, I was amazed to find out that they were so much more engaged by a second grade book that seemed totally demeaning for a sixth grader (if that was where their reading level was) than with a book that looked more interesting for a sixth grader, but that they couldn’t decode. And for those really low level kids, I didn’t worry about diverse genre. I just wanted them to read tons of words. So I had a kid read 20 Magic Schoolhouse books and another read 46 Babysitter Club books. They got through those books in a moth or less (reading like a book a day) and by then their reading levels had gone up quite a bit and they were onto something else. Another great series for older kids with low reading levels is Blueford High. And Spiderwick Chronicles.
I’ll be interested to see what else comes out in this thread since it is exactly what I am thinking about right now.
Does MATCH use Accelerated Reader? In and of itself it’s not a total solution, but it seems like part of the toolkit needed to achieve what you are talking about.
Good stuff Friedman duo.
I’ll repost some of your comments as a separate post.
Andrew, agreed.
Sean, yep, I was thinking same thing.
Sanda Balaban wrote to say:
Hi Mike,
I’ve been reading and appreciating your blog for a while so wanted to capitalize on this opportunity to send “fan mail” as well as to flag your attention to East Side Community High School, a 6-12 public school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan serving a diverse, very low income population led by principal extraordinaire Mark Federman.
East Side does an AMAZING job of converting just about every student to becoming a lover of reading.
Literacy infuses every aspect of the school, from the plethora of books organized for every reader in the principal’s office and the cross-grade Principals Book Group he leads, to a fabulous librarian and a library that truly serves as a central artery for the school, to every teacher in every content area also perceiving of themselves as a reading teacher, to a schoolwide commitment to helping each student find the books that is right for her or him, to creating a culture of conversation about books that leads to students being inordinately excited not just about what they’re reading but about what they’re going to read next.
You can see some video about how East Side achieves this via my friend Kathleen Cushman’s great Fires in the Mind website: http://firesinthemind.org/2011/10/07/what-makes-the-pages-turn/
Sarah Tantillo wrote me to add:
Hey, Mike– Great question about how to get students to love reading; glad
you’re using the wisdom of the crowd to attract ideas. Here are a few
leads:
1) Donalyn Miller, author of THE BOOK WHISPERER and a blog of the same name
(this one about summer reading is particularly
timely
), requires her students to read 40 books a year. Then she SUPPORTS them
in this effort.
She brings in her OWN books and allows students to take
them home (thus avoiding having to deal with school budget limitations and
others’ concerns about “what if they don’t bring them back?”), and she
functions as a personal book trainer to each student. She confers with
them and uses a variety of techniques (amply described in her book) to
engage them in substantive conversations about their books. They’ll come
in from lunch and find a pile of five books she recommends on their desks.
And, of course, she gives them time to read during the day.
2) I haven’t been to West Denver
Prepin a few years,
but the last time I was there, they had a pretty compelling
Schoolwide Reading Challenge in which students and teachers (yes, they were
involved, too!) earned Frequent Reader points for every book they read,
based on the Lexile point value of the book (more on Lexile stuff
HERE).
Logistically, they built 10-15 minutes into their schedule every morning
for a snack-bathroom-library break, where students could quickly return and
check out books from their school library, which had an electronic checkout
system run by a teacher. PS– This stuff isn’t mentioned on their Website,
so you might want to check with Chris Gibbons about where they are with it
now.
3) Finally, Jeremy Resnick at Propel
Schoolsused to have a
policy that students were expected to read I think 25 books
a year; I’m not sure if they are still doing that, but they are getting
good results with their students.
4) I’m assuming you’ve seen the Democracy Prep piece in Gotham
Schoolsabout
Hi Mike, first time caller.
A good librarian can do this. My wife Laura is a National Board Certified librarian who works in a middle school with 1000 kids. She’s doubled circulation since she’s been there. She says Manga count, I say they may be juking her stats a little.
Her favorite stories to tell when she comes home usually follow the format of:
- Non-reader came to me last week and I found him the perfect book.
- Non-reader came back yesterday and asked for more books like the one I gave him.
- Non-reader read that book overnight and came back for more. Non-reader is now a reader!
Laura does a lot of “book talks,” throughout the school, which helps to create demand for lesser known but suitably high interest books. She generally reads 4 or so new YA books a week, so she’s up on all the latest lit.
I work in a charter school. I confess, we don’t have a librarian. Most schools like ours don’t. If they do have a librarian, (or “media specialist”) many elementary schools use them as a “specials” teacher– less to provide expertise in literature and research and more to provide planning time for classroom teachers.
Regardless of who makes it happen, I think turning kids into readers could be the most high impact thing we do in schools. Great thread!
Librarian wife of Will here. For me, flipping non-readers into readers is about culture and relationships. Reading is cool at our school. As long as I have the hit books (“hit” paranormal romance books, the Hunger Games and their read-alikes, etc) and I’m responding to student interest, the books fly off the shelves. Our teachers do require free reading, but I constantly see students recommending books to each other and even to me! And yes, I think manga and graphic novels count because I’ve had plenty of non-readers go from those books to traditional novels. Sometimes you just have to get them in the door.
My relationship with the students matters, too. I try to relate to them as a peer reader; they have opinions about the books they read and I’m interested to hear them. In turn, they trust my recommendations because they know I love these books, too. Every school needs adults in the building who have a real passion for tween/teen literature. I think it should be a librarian.