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MY ACTION PLAN: TAKING A HARD LOOK AT MY OWN PRACTICE, AND WORKING FROM MY CLASSROOM OUT, I WILL STRENGTHEN THE READING CULTURE IN OUR SCHOOL. Because, as an English teacher, I feel like I’m good at getting my students excited about English; however, I’m not so sure I’m fostering a love of reading. (Yes, I think it is possible to love English Class without loving reading).
As part my graduate studies, I recently reread Kelly Gallagher’s ‘Readicide’. In doing so I was reminded of how great Mr. Gallagher is, and how much I love his take on, and approach to, the issue of reading with today’s young folks (the issue being, by and large, that teenagers don’t seem to read literary texts much anymore). Yeah sure, Gallagher is an extremely passionate high school English teacher, and in that way his ideas are likely narrow and biased, but what do I care? I’m making an action plan on something I believe in and he’s throwing fuel on my fire. I’m good with it. I’m happy, for the purpose of this action plan, to consider all he says as absolute truth.
Before I roll this out, I should also say that under the guidance of friend/mentor/learning-guru/Jedi-master/former colleague and boss Dave Krocker (whom many of you are lucky enough to know), I’ve taken this initiative before. And now, 18 months into my new life at Rothesay Netherwood School, I’m excited to take the initiative again, this time with the added advantage of experience, distance, thought, reflection, this most recent experience with ‘Readicide’ and, of course, the many wonderful insights and ideas I look forward to gathering from Cohort 21.
The issue: I think, really, there are two issues, the first being that kids don’t really read anymore and the numbers are dwindling. The second issue is, of course, that reading’s kind of important. In skipping a dissertation on the essential skill of reading in learning and life, I’ll also highlight Gallagher’s contention that nothing in a student suggests long term “success”, as a learner and beyond, more than a love of reading. In that sense, instilling a love of reading is the VERY best thing we can do for a student. Wow! I should say, that as a father of a 2 ½ year old who LOVES her books, I think about this all the time. Makena has a love of reading already (and she can’t even really read yet). Kids love books and reading. What happens?
The Hard Part, Addressing the Cruel Irony: Gallagher suggests that even the most passionate of English Teacher’s actively kill a love of reading by over-teaching the text (I love Billy Collin’s ‘Introduction to Poetry’: “But all they want to do/ is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it./They begin beating it with a hose/ to find out what it really means”). Yet, as teachers, we’re still responsible for modelling good reading. And so, it’s up to me I guess to find that perfect balance with our curriculum texts – finding the important moment to enter a text for deeper analysis, while also easing the burden to allow for enjoyment of reading. This is, by far, the most complicated and difficult step in my action plan. I’ll keep you posted on this inward journey.
The Easy Part, Celebrating Books and Reading. The big part of this plan, really, is demanding recreational reading, or reading outside of the curriculum. Again, I’m trusting Gallagher here who insists that if given access to great books and the freedom to choose, as well as time for reading, teenagers will love reading. At the moment, it’s a six part plan following Kelly Gallagher’s framework to fairly drastically change the routines of my 9th and 10th grade classes. It is also a very organic plan so, you know… ideas please!!! Anything to bring excitement to reading and to enhance the conversations students are having about reading.
- Expose students to a wide range of literature. Our amazing librarians will play an active role here in presenting reading lists and offering suggestions. Students and faculty will also be important contributors to the list.
- Reading Aloud. From students and other faculty members, we will celebrate books daily with ‘read alouds’.
- Building the classroom library. I will be busy on Amazon. As a student endorses a book, I will be buying it and stocking our shelves.
- Class-time for reading. It’s so easy to get caught in the urgency of a lesson/unit/course, and often this urgency is self-imposed. And, as I’ve said, what could be more important than fostering a love of reading? Gallagher says it’s essential and so I’m going for it: meaningful class-time for recreational reading.
- 20 minutes a day outside of class-time. This is straight from Dave Krocker: Jim McNair, leading researcher for reading fluency, finds “The average reading speed of a child in primary school is around 200 words per minute (wpm).” 140 minutes X 200 wpm = 28 000 words per week. The average book for young adult fiction has about 16 000 words. Aren’t you kind of inspired to find 20 minutes in a day now for reading?
- Keeping the students accountable by extending the conversation. This is tricky, as I don’t want any part of this endeavour entering the realm of “project”, thereby defeating the purpose. I know this is romantic, but students will not be rewarded with grades, they will be rewarded with a love of reading. In general, I want students talking about books, sharing books, getting excited about books. I want them to know what each other are reading. I want a student’s next book to be one that another student just put down – that he/she couldn’t wait for that student to put down.
In terms of tech. Well, I’m wide open on this. I envision some kind of google spread-sheet where students can track each-others reading experiences. Certainly students will be asked to tweet regularly about their reading experiences. Really though, this is where I’m looking to Cohort 21 members – for ideas to enhance and broaden reading conversations within the school and beyond, without getting bogged down in the process of doing so. I have some ideas on how we might connect with authors and fellow readers out there, but I’d love to learn from some of your experiences.
I look forward to sharing my journey and learning from all of you. Happy reading!
Love your post on Readicide. I should check this out. As someone who had issues being forced to read things I didn’t want to read in high school, I totally understand the challenges that English teachers have. Have you heard of 20% time and Genius Hour? Perhaps you could incorporate some ideas from it into this action plan. Check out Jen Bibby’s post: http://cohort21.com/jenbibby/2015/01/15/cultivating-genius/ Good luck with your Action plan! I look forward to hearing about how it goes at RNS!
Thanks for the love Mr. Rollwagen, and thank you for directing me to Jen Bibby’s post on the Genius Hour. It doesn’t provide the consistency (or relentlessness?) that I think this plan requires, but it’s an awesome endeavour and very much in line with another process I use in my non-IB classes (have other English teachers used the ‘1 topic equals 18 essays‘ model’?). Also, hearing from people, like yourself, about their ‘forced reading’ experiences in High-School is unbelievably helpful. Peace.
Yes! This is a Krocker introduced initiative that I used in my Extended French classes. What a great model, it blew the students’ minds however, and they quickly realized that their topics maybe weren’t going to cut it but they switched!
I love your initiative, and it brings back warm memories of the 100 in 100. Nichola Bendle – a LEAP faculty member introduced 16 days of reading and used a spreadsheet with conditional formatting so that when students ticked yes they cell would change colour. Seems it was successful with a few reminders to fill out the form.
Through which lens will you explore this plan? SAMR, TPACK, TIM? You’ve addressed the issue but I wonder if students might have insight as to why they don’t read. What are they saying? I also wonder if school does kill reading or if it’s a parent’s duty to ensure it lasts? Nigel freaks if we don’t read to him and Roxanna won’t let us read to her because she’s busy doing it herself.
You’ve inspired me to jump on your challenge, and we’ll be focusing on reading more in French class – do your kids speak French? Can we pair up our classes for a share?
Looking forward to catching up on Friday!
Thanks for the insight Derek Doucet, I’m still experimenting with spreadsheet ideas, so very helpful.
The discussion on reading is indeed complicated with many contributing factors. Of course this is a discussion that will be ongoing as they put their reading experiences into perspective. In truth, I’m not sure most, or many students, have really given much thought as to why they do or do not read, or why reading might be important to a life. It is a missed opportunity to not reflect critically on their reading lives, forming a sense of how reading can become a bigger part of their lives and why that might be important.
And yes, I live in the only bilingual province in Canada. Many French 1st Language students. Yeah, let’s pair up at least to reflect on the broad reading experiences. I’m not sure how much French we’ll be reading in English Class.
Graham,
Your post was the inspiration I needed today to commit to my C21 plan. Thanks! I’m very interested in watching your progress because I am also concerned with the generation of non-readers who are coming through my classrooms. I am acutely aware of all of the things I’m doing in my class that are contributing to ‘readicide’ and I am going to try to change the status quo. In addition, I can relate to being the parent of a young child who already reads. It has made me even more aware of the potential harm of this kind of illiteracy and I worry about it – a lot. Do you think there’s a positive way to get parents involved? Other faculty? I am wondering about the positive influence of modelling here… Best of luck with your project. Cheers!
M
Melissa, that’s terrific. Let’s keep each other posted as we reflect on our own practices.
I think it will be awesome to get parents and faculty involved. I plan to present the endeavour as a challenge and I’d planned to include faculty in that challenge. Now, because of your suggestion, I’m really excited to extend the challenge to parents as well. I’m imagining teachers and now parents dropping into class for quick read alouds and reading discussions. I’m sure many parents will be excited by the idea of reading conversations at home.
I know I’m excited to challenge myself to read what the students are reading – something I know I haven’t done enough of in my career. And perhaps this addresses the “status quo” – reading what they’re reading as opposed to insisting they read what we read.
I’m heading over to your blog right now, excited to read about your action plan!
I have ventured into the realm of total choice over reading in my grade 7 English classes this year. Learning as I go in many respects. I have found that number 6 on your list sort of happens organically once they are allowed to read anything that interests them.
I have been using shared notebooks in Evernote to track reading and hold my students accountable. Happy to share the approach I took this year and will be eager to see what you discover moving forward.
Yes, I’d love to know more about Evernote. Thank you!
I’m so happy that you have already connected with @mramon…that was my first order of business commenting on your blog, so I’m crossing that off my list.
The second is to give you an electronic high five *CLAP* because this post was awesome. I really appreciate how you are giving some essential air time to reflect on the problem before jumping in to the solution. Also, this is a problem near and dear to my heart, so you are preaching to the choir and I’m hanging on your every word.
Next, here are some awesome resources I shared with Melissa on her last post that you might also enjoy sifting through:
1) Nancie Atwell is my reading / writing guru and she should be yours too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rYSfkq05Ew If you haven’t, read her book “In The Middle”. Might be more of a summer read, but definitely amazing way to reframe how we see reading for pleasure happen in the classroom.
2) I follow NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) on FB and every now and then they have AMAZING articles on the importance of children choosing their own books. Here’s a sampling of two I thought might be awesome:
http://www.scholastic.com/readingreport/key-findings.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/10/if-we-stop-telling-kids-what-to-read-they-might-start-reading-again/
3) Donalyn Miller is an awesome advocate for student voice and choice in the writing classroom. She is like a younger Nancie Atwell. You can follow Donalyn on Twitter @donalynbooks and she has a great blog too: http://bookwhisperer.com/blog/
In terms of the tools:
– Twitter can connect students with their favourite authors
– Setting up a class-wide reading blog could help students find out what other students are reading and LOVING. Students could write or also post video commentaries of what they are reading and recommending
-Maybe even exploring the magic of goodreads.com – people have to be 13 to have an account, but if you students are old enough, you could connect with a larger reading community through this tool and have students write their own reviews