Questions Every Reading Teacher Needs to Answer

This is the first in a series of reflective questions every reading teacher needs to take the time to answer.  This is not something I recommend you do as a team, as a grade-level, as a campus, rather something each classroom teacher needs to do by his or herself.  When we pause to truly reflect upon our own teaching practices, we begin to make discoveries about what we are doing really well and we realize there are some places where we can do better.  Posing these questions in a non-threatening, open-format and asking teachers to answer them behind close doors on their own should provide everyone with enough security to be completely honest about their answers.
My first question is perhaps the most important one of all.  How many minutes each day are your students spending authentically engaged in literature?  In other words, how much time do they get to read? I don't mean listening to you read, listening to their classmates read, following along in a text while it's being read aloud, or choral reading.  I mean one student reading, either alone, in a pair, or to you. This could be independent reading, guided reading, or paired reading as long as the child is actually reading the text for his or herself with minimal support from someone else.  The subject of the text doesn't matter--science, math, social studies, all of those count, so long as the child is actually reading the text.
If you teach in a self-contained classroom and you can honestly say that your students are reading at least 30 minutes per day, then you are on the right track, especially if those 30 minutes are consecutive.  This is the recommendation that Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) suggests as a minimum and they have a lot of research to back them up. Keep in mind, this does not include things like Round Robin Reading or reading in groups, as the skills students use for these types of practices are not the same as the ones they use for independent reading or reading aloud to a teacher or peer.
California state curriculum actually states students should read for 50-60 minutes per day and while this may seem like a lot, it makes sense.  Study after study shows that the number one way for students to increase fluency, comprehension, and to some extent accuracy, is through reading.  (For more information, please visit the AASL here.  This is just one example of the research) READING--not listening to other students read, not listening to the teacher read, not watching a video about reading, not completing a worksheet about reading--but READING! So, if reading makes students better readers, why not let them read?
Many of you are probably thinking you do not have the time for your students to read for 30 minutes each day, let alone 50-60 so I will challenge that with a few sub-questions if you will.
1) How do your students warm-up in the morning when they enter your classroom? Is it a worksheet?  Is it important? Could it be reading?  Could you put some leveled readers on their desks in the morning--their own book bag or a basket from your collection and just let them read?
2) Do you take whole group bathroom breaks? What are the other 15 kids doing while 6 or 7 are in the restroom?  Could they be reading?
3) Do your students wait in line to get in your classroom, to go home at night, to get their food in the cafeteria, to go out for recess, switch classes, go to specials?  Could any of these times be used for reading? Would it be simple  Maybe not.  It will take some management and some investment on your part up-front.  Would it be worth it?  Can you imagine your entire class standing in line in the cafeteria reading instead of talking, pushing, arguing?  Yes, please!  Maybe you already have a great class that doesn't do any of those things. Awesome--it will be extremely simple to get them to read in line then.  And if you're worried that the cafeteria workers will be annoyed with them because they aren't paying attention, don't worry, the lunch ladies won't mind. They like quiet, patient children, too!
4) When your students finish with an assignment, what do they do? Could it be read a book?
5) If you are handing out a stack of worksheets each day, think about making your assignments more authentic by assigning texts for your students to read and then write a response in a journal.  This is so simple and so much more meaningful for them.

Kids love to read about a variety of topics.

Allowing your students to read texts that are on their level will increase fluency and comprehension but you will still have to do some work with the accuracy, especially for your students that aren't reading on-grade level.  I know lots of really great teachers who spend hours upon hours preparing centers and stations for students to use while they are pulling other students in small guided groups.  There is absolutely a lot of merit in allowing students to complete these type of activities and I am not an advocate for completely removing them from the classroom. That being said, with the popularity of the Daily Five by Gail Boushey an Joan Moser, teachers began to realize we did not have to be so elaborate or creative in our production of centers and stations.  I'd challenge you to take it one step farther and say students can spend the majority of the time they are now spending in centers reading and reflecting.  Things like word work and listening to reading are great and students absolutely benefit from these activities.  But if we know the best way to increase students' reading ability is by letting them read, why not make the bulk of the time we have students in centers be all about reading?  Read, discuss, reflect, possibly work on a project. Wonderful, simple, self-directed! This allows the teacher lots of time to pull those other students and work on accuracy and decoding;.  Then, they will go back and read as well.
Let me tell you how to prevent this from working in your classroom!  If you do not set this up from the beginning the way you set-up your stations or Daily 5, it will not work.  You must invest time in the beginning showing students what it is supposed to look like and what it cannot look like.  You must require them to sign some sort of agreement, preferably one they create themselves.  You must have procedures in place for how and why to interrupt you (my standard was if no one is bleeding, barfing, or crying, I don't need to know) and you must give your students some trust.  They can put down their book to go to the bathroom.  They can't put their book down to grab another book out of someone else's hands.  You will cover all of this from the beginning and create a Classroom Utopia.
There are, however, other ways you can inadvertently sabotage your perfect reading classroom.  For example, if you give students limited availability to texts.  They must have a plethora of books, magazines, articles, etc. to read.  They should have books on any and every topic that interests them.  Sports, games, magic, trucks, dolls, etc.  Give them chapter books, paper books, board books, library books, their own books, your own books.  Any book you can get your hands on.  Research says students need anywhere from 500-1500 books available in an elementary classroom to be able to consistently find a text they want to read. That may seem like a lot of books, and it is, but you can do it!  I started building my library right from the beginning and by the time I had been teaching for three years, I was at 1500.  I begged, borrowed, stole (okay, not really) and bought my way there.  I would hear other teachers say things like, "Oh, that's not a good quality book so I'm not putting that in my classroom."  I figured some child will disagree with you and want to read that--may I have it please?  I went to any teacher that was retiring, book sales, 75% off books, Half-priced Books, yard sales, Scholastic outlets, my little sister's pile of out-grown books, my student's books from home that they no longer wanted--if it involved books, I was there.  And the only books I wouldn't take were books that were inappropriate.  I never turned down a book because of condition or topic (as in "this book is about Transformers, not in my classroom!" I turned down books about in appropriate topics, like romance novels!) or because I thought it was too hard or too easy.  Someone might be able to read that! Start gathering up your books, you're gonna need them! Even with ebooks, I still recommend getting as many tangible books as you can because you never know when we might have a power outage and all of your little friends will be sitting there with dead batteries, looking around them at a world they never noticed before!

Book Baskets go a long way to organizing texts for students

Another way to sabotage your self is by not allowing students to read what they want to, or requiring them to read something they don't want to read for no particular reason. If you have a curriculum that determines they must read a certain text, then by all means, get them all hyped up about it and let them read it. If you don't, give them some choice in what they read.  You can talk about the major portions of a book from just about any book.  As far as I know, there has yet to be a book written with no characters or setting and while some of them may be a little short on plot, it's probably still there if you look hard enough! Choice goes a long way when trying to get students excited about reading!
Probably the most important advice I can give you is to allow your students to work on their own level.  If you give Johnny Harry Potter  and the Sorcerer's Stone and tell him he must read it, but Johnny is only reading on a first-grade reading level, I guarantee you Johnny will not be a better reader when he's done turning the pages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (all 309 of them!) because that's all he'll be doing--turning the pages.  There is, as we all know, a huge difference between reading a book and just looking at the words, just as there is a huge difference between reading and word-calling, but we'll save that discussion for another day! Bottom line, let the children read on their own level so that they can increase their reading skills. Why do the struggling students always suddenly have to pee when we are reading the text book out loud?  Because they can't read it! It's a phenomenon I have deemed the 3 F's--fight, funny, flee.  They'll either get themselves in trouble to avoid reading, try to be funny and get everyone laughing, or find an excuse to leave the classroom.  They aren't doing it because they don't want to read, they're doing it because they can't read.  So, don't put yourself in the same situation when it comes to independent reading. Even if you have to disguise a lower-level text, give them something they can read.  It'll pay off when they master that level and move on.  You're going to be pulling them in small group EVERYDAY (did you get that, everyday, every stinkin' day) so eventually they will catch up. What you will be doing with them when you pull them I will be happy to discuss later as well, but my point is they don't need as many books because a significant amount of this time they will be spending with you.  They will, however, need to be reading while you are working with other groups so give them something they can read.
I am an elementary teacher so most of this post, I realize, has been pointed at the Pre-K-5 crowd.  Let's talk about how this could look in an older grade-level classroom.  If you don't know much about Project Based Learning, I'm going to suggest you look into it. It's your new best friend.  PBL is the classroom of our future. It goes hand-in-hand with technology.  It's not the peanut butter and jelly analogy, it's the peanut and butter analogy. Yes, it's that conjoined. If you only have your kids for 50 minutes a day, no you cannot let them read for 30 of those minutes.  But I think you can let them read for 15.  And if you are tightly horizontally aligned, you can make sure they are getting the rest of their minutes elsewhere. Our high school (Community High School, Home of the Braves!) is introducing PBL next year in blocks and I think it's going to be absolutely AWESOME.  Remember, if your students are researching, they are authentically reading and that's going to count as part of their time.  Likewise, if you are running lit circles where the students are reading, discussing and collaborating, that's also going to count.  That's so much more powerful than read this and answer that or fill in the blanks or create a Venn diagram about why these characters are the same and or different than those characters.  And that's what we want--authentic, meaningful, student selected, student driven--work.

Aren't they all sooo happy with their books?

Let's tie this back in to the original question.  How many minutes each day are your students spending authentically reading   I asked you to reflect on this in a quiet, zen place. However, if you'd like to answer that question here, please do so!  I am not the be-all-and-end-all of reading and I would love to hear your thoughts. Some of you may be angry or perturbed.  Some of you may think I'm insane.  Hopefully, some of you are thinking, "Yes, I can do that. 30 minutes.  Totally doable!" or even better, "Why am I doing so many worksheets? Why aren't my kids reading outside of the bathroom?"  You are my new favorite people! Please leave a comment, we'd love to hear from you.  I know I don't officially have any followers yet but I have about 60 people visiting each day--which is awesome--so you're not just talking to me, you're talking to fellow educators who want to know what you think!
Until next time. . . .