Make Lemonade: How to Sweeten Your School's Climate for Reading
Mary Leonhardt -- School Library Journal, 11/1/1998
A veteran teacher says kids read more when they read what they want. But she needs librarians to help her make her case.
Years ago, I was a graduate student at Old Dominion University and an English teacher at Norfolk (VA) Catholic High School. During that time, I set up a reading program as part of my thesis work. We took inner-city students into Norfolk Catholic, tested them, and put the students who scored below a seventh-grade level into a special saturation reading program. They came to class every day, selected a comic, magazine, or paperback, and sat and read for 45 minutes.
We didn't care what they read -- Richie Rich comic books and Disco Rollerskating magazine were big hits, as I remember -- we just wanted them to read. We never gave quizzes or held students accountable in any way for their reading. If they were sitting absorbed in the reading material in front of them, that was good enough.
We tested them at least once a year, using different versions of the Peabody Picture Reading Test, and saw an average gain of 18 months in reading skills for every six months we had them in this program. The kids who came in reading around a sixth-grade level progressed the most quickly -- virtually all of them were able to return to a regular English class within the year. Students who came in scoring on a fourth-grade level or below took much longer -- a few of these kids ended up staying in the program all four years. I had one student who came to the school at age 16, reading on a pre-primer level. Three years of poring over Doonesbury books raised his reading level to fourth grade, fifth month. He dropped out then, not ready for Harvard, but able at least to do a little reading -- enough to progress more on his own.
The program in Norfolk was my first direct experience with the power of free-choice reading to create better readers. In the years since, I've taught high school English in public, private, and parochial schools around the country, and I've seen time and again the critical connection between students who read a lot and high reading scores. Indeed, a love of reading is the single, distinguishing feature of top students. The research supporting this is overwhelming, from the work of Stephen Krashen at the University of Southern California to the National Assessment of Education Progress, which consistently shows a clear correlation between the amount of time students spend reading and their reading scores.
Why am I telling you, the nation's librarians, all of this? Because I'm convinced that the failure of schools to raise reading scores is a direct consequence of their failure to develop avid readers. And I believe that, for a variety of reasons, most of my colleagues in education just don't get it.
In fact, in my travels around the country speaking to various educational groups, I've found that librarians are the only group that can be counted on to understand the importance of avid reading. And that's why I'm putting my faith in you and issuing here what I can only describe as a call to action.
You, our librarians, need to be on the front lines in helping to turn around the educational establishment. You understand the importance of reading. You know what books attract kids to reading. And frankly, I think you're our last chance.
So now that I've asked you to change the world, the least I can do is give you some suggestions on how to do so. I've come up with several ideas, based on my years of teaching as well as the countless conversations I've had with parents, educators, librarians, and students around the country in the last few years.
Why They Don't Get It
Before you can solve any problem, it's important to understand what's causing it. So let's look at why so many educators don't understand the importance of avid reading. There are two myths, I think, that block them from doing so.
The first myth is that learning to read is a somewhat simple skill that kids can acquire by fourth grade. First children "learn to read," the old saying goes, then they "read to learn." The reality is that the kind of sophisticated reading skills demanded by high-level academic or professional work -- the ability to understand multiple plots or complex issues, a sensitivity to tone, the expertise to know immediately what is crucial to a text and what can be skimmed -- can be acquired only through years of avid reading.
It's not that schools aren't aware that children need high-level reading skills, but their idea is that, after children learn how to read, more advanced reading skills can be taught. This is the second myth, and it results in endless worksheets requiring students to answer comprehension questions, find main ideas, and memorize vocabulary words.
It also results in the universal practice of assigning the whole class to read the same book, and then analyzing the book to death. If this worked, then students who by high school read well and did well in every subject would report having done more comprehension worksheets than their peers. They would have loved analyzing every word in a class-assigned book. But that's not what happens. Top students tell me they hated any kind of skill work, got bored quickly with literary analysis, and avoided both whenever possible. One girl told me that she began to dislike even Charlotte's Web after having to analyze it as a school book.
And that brings us to my first piece of advice:
Your main goal should be to get teachers to substitute free-choice reading for assigned reading in the curriculum.
Why do you want free-choice reading as part of your school's curriculum? Except for sports -- which are seen as a crucial part of getting kids into college -- the only activities in a school that are really respected, and funded, are curricular. You want avid reading valued the same way that spending hours bent over a test tube is valued.
Currently, only assigned reading is respected, which is ironic, because assigned reading at a K?2 level is fraught with problems. It drives out pleasure reading, for one thing, and often drives out reading altogether. Few students will read a book on their own while an assigned book is hanging over their heads, and many don't even do the assigned reading. I've found this to be true with students as young as third grade. One little girl confided to me that she was supposed to be reading a biography, but she didn't like the biography. She did like Goosebumps books, she told me, but couldn't read them now because she had to read the biography. "And are you reading the biography?" I asked her. "No," she whispered.
By high school, this practice is endemic to students. Just the fact that a book is assigned makes it unappealing to kids, and they become very streetwise about ways to avoid reading it. They rent the movie, read the Cliffs Notes, or just ask their more conscientious friends what the book is about. Even the students who do read all of the assigned books end up doing little reading, as most schools assign no more than four or five books a year. Some assign as little as one or two.
I've found that all students do better with free-choice reading. Poor readers, often for the first time, can read books for school that are really interesting to them. Average readers discover that reading isn't just another boring school chore, but a wonderful pleasure. And avid readers, when turned loose, choose an incredible, rich selection of literature, much of which is more difficult and challenging than any teacher could ever assign to a whole class.
A few years ago, one of my students chose to read East of Eden and Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Lasher by Anne Rice, The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder, and The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan?ll before Christmas. And she wasn't especially unusual. Every year I get a few like her.
But how do you get the administrators and teachers in your school to make this kind of drastic curriculum change? I don't have any easy answers, but this is what I'd try to do:
Make sure you have a trusting, friendly relationship with as many of your teachers and administrators as possible.
Never overlook the importance of personal contact. You are going to be asking teachers and administrators to open up the language arts curriculum. For many, this is new territory, out of their comfort zone. Teachers are experts at resisting new curriculum initiatives but will often try something for a friend that they'd resist to the death if it came in an official memo.
So invite everyone to library breakfasts. Eat lunch with various groups around the school. Order books and magazines you know individual teachers will enjoy. Visit classrooms, and be generous in your praise of projects you see and teaching practices you hear about. Ask about your colleagues' families and special interests. In short, be a good friend.
Suggest only small changes at first.
Perhaps your fifth-grade teachers teach four class books, then do a great deal of skill-building exercises. Suggest that they substitute a student-selected book for one of the required books. Explain that you'll do whatever you can to help. Would they like you to bring a few cartloads of books to their classes, booktalk some of them, then let students check out books right then and there? Would suggested booklists help? How about if you took their classes to the library for 20 minutes of quiet reading time every day -- while they had the time off?
Be open to whatever your teachers suggest. They may want to be very restrictive about the kinds of books their students can read. They may want all kinds of intrusive, checking-up devices. Go along with all of this, even if you don't like it. Go along with almost anything at first to get your teachers to make the initial move into free-choice reading.
Later, gradually suggest more far-reaching changes.
Once teachers start allowing some free-choice reading, they'll start seeing a new enthusiasm for reading in their classes. Conveniently forget that you were the one to suggest this change. Compliment them on how well their students are doing. Point out to the teachers how good they are at encouraging avid reading.
Then suggest some more changes. Perhaps students could choose their own books again instead of the next assigned book. Or teachers could read selections from required books together with their students in class, and then those students who really liked the books could finish them, while the others could choose their own. I can almost guarantee your teachers will be shocked at how few students will decide to finish the required books. It's easy, when teaching required books, to fool yourself into thinking that everyone is enjoying them. It was a big shock to me, when I started reading only sections of books with my classes, to see how few students would decide to finish Huckleberry Finn or Catch-22 or Ordinary People on their own. These were books I had routinely taught for years, that I thought all of my students loved. Not!
What you eventually want to see in place is a reading program that is part of the curriculum and that requires students to always be reading something. Ideally, the program should allow students to switch books when they want to, and should allow for many different ways of assessment, such as response journals, conferences, class discussions, essays, or (in the lower grades especially) parental reports.
There are other things you can do as well.
Don't overlook the importance of coaches or activity advisers.
By junior high and high school, coaches are incredibly influential with students. Order lots of sports books and magazines, and cart them down to the athletic department. Offer to leave them there and allow the teachers and coaches to run a library branch. Tell them you won't worry if some books get lost, that you just want their players reading.
This is especially important to do, because athletes are at a higher risk than other students for doing little or no pleasure reading. They don't think they have time, for one thing, which is, again, why it's so important that independent reading be part of the curriculum. And many athletes, especially boys, don't see reading as a cool, masculine activity. That's why you want the coaches encouraging them to read.
Advisers to activities such as the chess club, Spanish club, or literary magazine can also function as on-the-spot librarians. Leave books and magazines of interest with them. Again, reassure them that it's okay if they lose a few.
Ask your principal to encourage all adult staff members to set a few minutes every day for pleasure reading.
While a sustained silent reading time -- when the whole school community stops working to read -- can be very effective, I think it's even better for students to see adults reading at various times throughout the day. So when students go to see the nurse, they might catch her just finishing a chapter in The Rainmaker. Or they might see a copy of The Bean Trees on the secretary's desk, or an issue of Time magazine on the principal's desk. Avid readers are people who are always stealing a few minutes, here and there, to read; let students see this in action at your school.
Overall, when deciding what programs to support, use a medical model.
The medical model is to find a treatment that's effective while keeping a sharp eye on side effects. I think this is a good way to look at reading programs.
For example, if a patient has cancer, we tolerate a lot of side effects to treat the cancer. Similarly, if students are barely literate and hate reading, we use strong medicine and tolerate unpleasant side effects. In Norfolk, the strong medicine that worked for us were comic books and trashy magazines. The side effects were that these students were not exposed to any better literature, took part in no class discussions, got little help with their writing, and were really segregated, for English, from the students in regular classes. We thought these side effects were tolerable because they seemed less toxic than illiteracy. And, once these students' reading scores rose to grade level, we found we could put them back into mainstream classes.
I think the controversial Accelerated Reader (AR) program could be looked at the same way. If you're a librarian in a school where teachers simply can't be coaxed into making independent reading a part of their curriculum without a program like AR, then you need to use AR to open up the logjam. The side effects of AR -- the necessity of students choosing books from a list, the expense, the inadequacy of a computer test for assessment -- are all less toxic, I think, than allowing teachers to continue to assign all reading.
My guess is that as kids start reading more, and enjoying books more, the side effects of AR will become less and less tolerable. Once kids find out how much fun reading is, they become less willing to read within the strictures of a program. When they find a series they like, they'll want to binge read until they finally tire of it. This is typical avid-reading behavior -- behavior you really want to encourage -- so when your students start approaching that point, it's time to work with teachers to find other ways of "holding students accountable" (the most sacred phrase in education) for their reading. Now is when you can suggest reading journals, conferences with you or the teacher, book club meetings for kids reading the same series or authors -- or any of a host of other things. I do think the best ways of assessing reading, ways that keep children involved and enthusiastic, are always personal. A reading mentor is worth a thousand computer tests.
Finally, celebrate your small victories.
You aren't going to change your school overnight. You many never manage to make any substantive changes -- you have entrenched school cultures working against you. You have many older teachers, with tenure, who see no reason to change the way they've been teaching for years. You have educational administrators who have never been famous for their courage and daring. And now you have state standards and curriculum guides -- mandating all kinds of specific skill teaching -- sweeping in on you from legislatures across the country.
The fact that avid readers can ace skill tests with their eyes closed and one hand tied behind their backs isn't something that's going to be widely believed. It's counterintuitive for educators to believe that a child learns more about reading while feverishly turning the pages of an Animorphs book than by finding the main idea in a canned paragraph.
You're clearly working uphill here. So allow yourself to feel that wonderful glow of accomplishment when even one teacher puts an independent reading unit into her curriculum. Or when one administrator starts to understand that spending money for a set of Babysitter Club books is more important than spending it on CD-ROMs -- or football helmets. Or when one child comes in with shining eyes and asks you for another book just like the one he? just finished.
Stop, take a deep breath, and smile. If the way to write is, as Anne Lamott says in her book by the same title, "bird by bird," than the way to nurture avid readers is teacher by teacher and child by child.
If every school librarian in the country could get just one teacher to change her curriculum, and a handful of children to light up at the sight of new books, change would begin. And I have great faith that once students and teachers rediscover the excitement of wide, avid reading, the educational crisis will be over.
