Results of a survey on independent reading

I asked one of my ninth grade classes to write my a quick note about how independent reading went for them this year. I asked specifically about how they felt about independent reading, how it had changed, if at all, over the course of the year, and what they foresaw for the future. A few kids were absent; I got thirteen responses.  Two were weakly positive; two were strongly negative, and nine were strongly positive.

I expected to get more responses like the two that were weakly positive, saying that reading "wasn't bad" but not granting that it was actually good.  Instead, most students seemed pretty enthusiastic.  Maybe they were just saying what I was obviously hoping they would say, but I like to think they were really pretty happy to get an English class that gave them a lot of time and encouragement to read what they were interested in.  The strongly negative responses were perhaps the most interesting.  One of the kids read quite a bit (a couple dozen books), and the other read very little (four or five books).  But both predict they will never read voluntarily.  This is probably true.  The tone of these comments is a bit defiant ("Reading didn't actually change my year in any way whatsoever"; "independent reading this year sucked.  I hated it."), but I think they were pleased to get a chance to vent their feelings about having to do something every day that they feel they're really bad at.

In the end, I think the independent reading was a good idea.  I have some ideas about how to change it in the future, but I still think this is a direction we should all be taking.

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Here are the responses, unedited except for redacting the name of one elementary school.

Weakly positive:

• It wasn't bad.  I liked it better than class work.  If the book was good, I liked it.  It got better over the year.  I'll probably read more.
• I think that the independent reading this year wasn't that bad.  It helped me read a lot, which increased my vocabulary.  I have read more this year than last year.

Strongly negative:

• My independent reading has greatly increased.  I still don't like reading, but if I have to then I will.  Reading didn't actually change my year in any way whatsoever.  I most likely will never read again unless I have to.
• I thought the independent reading this year sucked.  I hated it.  I never liked to read, and I never will.  the only time I would like to read is if I find a book that I actually like that doesn't happen often.  I Hate independent reading and I think you shouldn't do it next year.

Strongly positive:

• My independent reading got a lot better for me this year as far as how much reading i did.  Because of the amount of reading we did this year i will continue to read a lot and enjoy reading.
• I really started to like reading again.  This really going to help me in the future because I want to actually pick up a book and read compared to last year when I would spark note everything.
• By reading a lot this year, it made me read more books that I really liked.  I also read a lot at home.  I definatly became a better reader and really enjoyed the unit. I think that I will read a lot this summer and next year.  I haven't read more in my life than I did this year.
• Independent reading this year was at least for me an improvement over the past couple of years. At __________ our teachers never forced us to read that much because we would always be reading a book as a class.  The only problem was I didn't read that much compared to the others in our class.  I would like to keep improving on the amount that I read because my family do so much of it.  This was still a very good year for me even if it may not look like much it's probably the most that I've ever read in my entire life.
• I liked independent reading a lot more than assigned reading. It gave me an option to find a book I liked rather than a boring book. I didn't read many books over the course of the year, But I read more than I did last year. I would like to read more in the future.
• I thought that the independent reading this year was a great idea.  I hate reading as a class because I read slower so I have trouble staying up to date.  It has made me more enthusiastic about reading.  I think I will definately do more independent reading this summer.  At first I wasn't thrilled with the idea of reading on my own but as the year progressed I began to enjoy it.  Thank you for encouraging me to read more and thus making me enjoy it more. Definately do this next year.
• Independent reading this year has helped me advance to a faster reader.  I've read 3 books the whole way through this year, and I haven't done that before.  I've challenged myself with more challenging books this year and I've also figured out what genre I'm most interested in.
• Independent reading really opened my eyes to reading more.  Some books I really liked and some books I hated.  Independent reading in class really improved my reading skills.  I think you should continue to allow your students to do independent reading.
• I thought independent reading was great for me.  Whenever I have to read, I really feel like I am reading for myself.  Reading did change for me.  I have developed my interest and skills in reading. In the future, reading will be closer to my fashion.

The most exciting literacy scholarship being written today

For me, the most exciting literacy scholarship being written today is by a Rutgers professor named Chantal Francois.  Her work documents an amazing urban school that has devoted itself to creating a humane culture of reading, a culture in which reading is valued, in which books are everywhere, in which teachers know students' individual interests, in which the Principal leads by example, and in which students' reading skills increase dramatically.

Francois's most recent article, "Reading in the Crawl Space," has just come out in the Teachers College Record.  It is a vision of where we should be going, a vision of a school that offers everyone what Scout and Jem got at their reading father's knee, a vision of a school that would lead us all, not only to the Common Core's "college and career readiness," but to happier, healthier, more moral lives. Everyone who cares about education should read Francois's work.

The best book I've read so far about teaching high school English

A lot of the good books about teaching reading are by and for K-8 ELA teachers.  I like Nancie Atwell's The Reading Zone, and I just read a good one by Patrick Allen about reading conferences, which said everything I have been groping toward over the past month or two.  I haven't read many books aimed at high school English teachers, but of the ones I have looked at, this one is the best:

The author, Mary Leonhardt, who taught for 37 years and ended her career at Concord-Carlisle, published a bunch of well-received books about reading aimed at parents, but this one is for teachers.  Leonhardt writes in a clear, common-sense style, and she is very wise.  Basically, she advocates a lot of self-selected reading and daily in-class reading.  No wonder I like it!

Students who need to read in school

It works to make kids do their homework in school

Leafstrewn has just gone through a remarkable episode in which the headmaster's proposal to cut the administrator of an alternative program for kids who are having a lot of trouble in school was met with such opposition from the faculty that she changed her mind.  The episode was remarkable mostly for the teachers' support for a program serving a small fraction of our students, support that will mean losing teacher jobs, but also because the headmaster admitted, quite gracefully, that she had made a mistake.  Everyone came out looking pretty good, and I was proud of our school.

The episode also reminded me of how effective this particular alternative program has been. Five students from my ninth grade classes last year are now in the program, and four of the five have spoken to me positively about it (the fifth I haven't happened to bump into). As the potential cut to the program was in the balance over the past week, I've been thinking a lot about what has made it so successful for my former students.  It certainly helps that the program has very good teachers and a caring and very hands-on administrator, but perhaps the key element of the program is that the students are made to do their homework in school.  As one of them told me recently, after I'd asked if he was doing the assigned reading, they have to get the work done, or they don't get to go home at the end of the day.

This is a simple but extremely important practice.  It seems indisputable that the number one proximate cause (as opposed to indirect factors like poverty) of student failure at Leafstrewn is failure to do homework.  Having an even better teacher might help, being more genetically gifted might help, and coming from a richer and more educated family certainly helps, but the line separating passing from failing is basically whether kids get their homework done. Certainly for my five students from last year who are now in our alternative program, had they all done their homework, they all would easily have passed English for the year.  (Another program here, the "Tutorial" program, essentially gives students time, space and encouragement to do their homework in school.) This makes me wonder, again, about the value of homework, and it makes me think that Bruce Baker is right and the (modest) success of programs like KIPP is mainly due to spending more money on, among other things, a longer schoolday.  It also makes me think, again, about the value of reading in school.

A student who doesn't read

I had a chat today with a former student who isn't in this alternative program.  I'll call him "Billy."  Billy is a bright, polite, very appealing kid whose family has not had it easy, to put it mildly.  When he was in my ninth grade class two years ago, Billy told me regularly that he wanted to drop out of school so that he could get a job and help support his family.  Like everyone else, I told him that he would be able to help his family better if he stayed in school.  Billy passed my class, barely.  He read virtually none of the assigned reading or our whole-class texts.  He did, however, read four or five Alex Rider books (which are at about a fifth grade level).  Those may have been the only books he has completed in high school.

Billy told me he had failed English in 10th grade and he was in danger of failing this year as well. I asked why. He said: "Because I don't do my homework."  I said, "Do you do the reading?"  He said, "No.  Never."  I said, "But you read in my class.  I remember you reading Alex Rider."  He said, "Yeah, because we read in class. I don't read at home.  I never read at home in your class either."  I don't think that's strictly accurate--I remember him reading Alex Rider at home as well--but it gets at an important truth.

Reading is the most important academic skill.  As I wrote last year, "Our school has kids under its control for over six hours a day.  There is no good reason we can't have them sitting and silently reading books for at least an hour each day.  Nothing else we do with them is as important; nothing else would be as efficient, productive, and individualized." Or, as a Mexican novelist recently wrote in the New York Times, "One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”"

If we think reading is valuable, we should be using time in school to have them do it. That a child as bright and wonderful as Billy--a student who devoured Alex Rider books during a six-week independent reading unit--can have read fewer than ten books over his whole high school career is shameful for our school.  We have taken care of Billy in many ways, and we have always treated him with gentleness and respect, but we have mostly not done for him what we would do for our own children--given him books he can read and time to read them.

Homework in School and Social Justice

The proximate cause of these students' failure is that they don't do their homework, but they all share a deeper cause as well: Billy, the students I had last year who ended up in the alternative program, and every student I have this year who is in danger of failing, all come from families that are at the low end of the economic spectrum.  If we really want to "reform" education in a way that will help poorer children succeed, we should start by finding a way to do what our excellent alternative program here at Leafstrewn does, and give kids time to do their homework--especially their reading--in school.

Recording reading conferences

A month ago I wrote about reading conferences, and I said that I wasn't sure how to keep good records of the discussions I had with students.  Some of my brilliant colleagues, who have been thinking about these kinds of discussions too, have started recording their conferences using a voice recorder. Today I started doing this too, using my ipod.  I have the kids read to me for 30 seconds or a minute from wherever they are in the book they're reading independently, and then I ask them some questions.  I usually start with something like, "What do you think the author is doing in this passage?"  I try to follow up with "What specifics in the passage do you see that make you say that?"  And then we go from there.

A few thoughts after my first day:

1) It's a good thing we get used early to the look of ourselves in mirrors; I'm not yet used to the sound of my voice on a recording.

2) Maybe if I did this more my voice would improve?

3) All of my students have a fair amount to say about what they're reading--that's good!

4) I wonder if they would have as much to say if they were talking about a whole-class text.  I suspect that talking about the independent reading book makes the students the experts, and therefore empowers them--but I don't have a control group, so I don't really know.

5) It takes longer than I realized to get at an important question, or to get to something that makes the students stop and think.  When I wrote about this a month ago, it seemed easy and quick to get to those points; I think I had had an exceptionally good day of conferences just before I wrote that post. (I wrote, "One thing that's striking in doing these one-on-one conversations is how quickly we get to points at which the students need to stop and think before they respond.)  Listening to today's recordings, I am struck by how relatively smooth the conversations are.

6) I wonder if this is partly because in today's conversations I allowed the student to direct the conversations more than I often do.  A couple of days ago I was talking to colleagues about conferences, and we discussed using open-ended questions, so today I tended to start the same way with everyone, and I didn't have the explicit goal of coming up with a question that made the student stop and think. This way of questioning, which was partly modeled on the VTS method ("Visual Thinking Strategies"), showed me more clearly what the student was capable of on her own, but didn't lead to the "stop and think" moments that last month I was apparently so proud of facilitating.

6) Nevertheless, I do get something out of these conversations--they are possibly useful assessment tools.  From conversations today I learned that: student A doesn't know the historical background, so can't get the humor and nuance of the conversation; student B almost never refers back to the text, even when asked repeatedly about "specifics in the passage"; student C makes great connections between this scene and other parts of the book; students B, D and F are not very fluent or accurate in their reading aloud, but B and D nevertheless seem to understand the passage perfectly; student E doesn't seem to remember anything from the book except what he's just read to me; etc.

7) It seems to me that these conversations might be pretty good for diagnosing issues--and for instruction, as I was thinking before--but again, as with all instruction, it is SO INEFFICIENT!

8) My main instructional function in these conferences seems to be to push them toward a closer attention to the text and toward deeper thinking. This is really difficult!

9) I still haven't figured out how to keep a good record of these conferences.  In one sense I have excellent records--I have audio recordings--but in another sense these records are uselessly unwieldy.  From 13 conferences I have about a little over an hour of audio.  I did not try to take notes at the same time--but I probably should, so that I can later check my notes against the audio and improve my note taking...

10) I am still haunted by the sheer slipperiness of trying to improve reading comprehension.  I do think that making kids look more closely at text is a worthwhile exercise, but I also wonder how much my own reading comprehension "skills" have improved in the years since I was 12 or 13.  I know much more (background knowledge, vocabulary, literary terms, etc.), but are my actual reading skills (questioning, inferring, making connections) any better?  I am reading an apparently excellent 2005 overview of the research on comprehension acquisition (Perfetti, Landi, Oakhill), and it seems that their recommendations for instruction center on: 1) Reading more (and making sure the reading is "successful"--i.e. comprehensible input); (2) Instruction that tries in various ways to get students to pay more attention to the text and to their own understanding of it ("monitoring").  I take some comfort in thinking that reading conferences are one way to try to do #2--and that while I'm conferencing, the rest of the kids are doing #1.

I look forward to recording more conversations with students about what they're reading next week, and trying to put together the data into some kind of coherent record.  For now, I'm going to just try to get used to the sound of my own voice.

Conversations and discussions as (formative) Reading Assessments

After spending a few days thinking about little besides snow, I want to take an hour and try to write about reading assessment, and in particular about the kind of natural assessment that can happen in a conversation about a book.

All assessment is formative, and all assessment is also instruction
The only valid educational reason for assessment is to improve education; therefore, anything we think of as "summative" should probably be re-engineered to make it more formative. In addition, assessment is always, inevitably, teaching something, and we should consider, before we assess, what our assessment will teach.  But that's abstract...

Conversation and discussion as assessment
One good way to assess student reading is through conversation and discussion.  In a discussion about a text she has read, the student should get a lot of truly immediate feedback about her reading. 

While my students are reading in class, I go around and talk to individual students.  Sometimes these conversations are on a specific topic common to the whole class: in our grammar unit, for instance, I will have quick check-ins with kids about, say, prepositional phrases on the page they are reading; if I've assigned the class an essay about point of view, we will talk about that.  At other times, however, the conversations are totally individualized, organic exchanges in the style (I think) of Nancie Atwell, about particular issues in the books they are reading on their own, and sometimes about particular passages from these books (I usually stick to the passage they happen to be on just then).

Usually I have not read these books--and if I have read them, I don't remember the details all that well--so the student is of necessity playing the role of the expert.  This is a good role for a student to play in an assessment, since it empowers her to put on her best performance.  If, as in most classroom situations, not to mention most assessments, the student is not the expert, then she is put in a position of wanting to say what the teacher thinks is right, and it's hard for either the student or her teacher to get a sense of the quality of her own independent thought.

When I have a conversation like this, I think my job is to ask the student questions that will get at the quality of her reading and make her thinking more visible to herself and to me--so that she can see what she knows, how she knows it, and what she doesn't know.  I ask different questions depending on the student.  Sometimes I start out with a general question.  If the student is just starting a book, I might ask, "Are you liking it so far?" Whether the answer is yes or no, I might ask, "Why?"  Or: "What's good about it?" Sometimes, instead of starting with a question, I start by having the student read to me for a half a page or so.  This is another kind of assessment, and one I don't even have to give feedback on--the kid can hear, herself, where she is stumbling.

When students have to stop and think
 As I follow up, either on my original question or on the passage the kid read to me, the questions narrow to a particular focus, and very quickly we get to a question that the student doesn't know the answer to already.  In some cases these questions are ones that I would expect to be obvious, like, "Why is the main character so angry at her friend?" In that case, the student's confusion is very interesting, since we would seem to be identifying a basic problem with comprehension, yet doing so in a way that might seem inherently interesting, and in a way that encourages the student to find out the answer, rather than, as on a standardized assessment, putting the emphasis on the student's failure to figure out what the teacher or state already know, and with little opportunity for immediate follow-through.

In other cases the questions that give the student pause are more difficult or literary, like "Why do you think the author started the book with this scene?" or "How could you tell that she was angry?"  In these cases, too, we are noticing what the student has already considered and what she has not given a thought to.  (At other times, the students get something obviously wrong, and the teacher can follow up in a gentle and friendly way and allow the student to figure out for herself what she was confused about and why.)

One thing that's striking in doing these one-on-one conversations is how quickly we get to points at which the students need to stop and think before they respond.  This stopping and thinking is a pretty big difference between thoughtful intellectual conversations and the usual adolescent repartee. As I remember from my own youth and observe in my students, adolescent conversations are mainly about loud, immediate disagreement or loud, immediate agreement. The loudness and immediacy overwhelms most of the potential for thoughtful critical analysis.  One-on-one conversations in the classroom, conducted in a whisper and aiming less at feel-good agreement or dramatic disagreement, are dramatically different, not least because they lead to so much stopping and thinking.

My guess is that this stopping and thinking is when much of the learning happens, as students see what they understand and what they don't, and as they think through new ideas that they haven't thought about before.  For the conversation is not only assessment, but is also a form of instruction.  In my questioning I am instructing them in ways of looking at a book, in categories of literary thought, in literary vocabulary, and so on.

Disadvantages of this method of assessment
The major disadvantage of these individual conversations is that each student can't get very much of my time.  If it takes a couple of minutes for the class as a whole to settle down enough for me to start talking to kids individually, and if each conversation takes four minutes, and if also I want to quickly check on what progress the other kids in the class have made, then I can get through four conversations in a twenty-minute independent reading period.  That means, for my sixteen-student classes, that I can talk to each kid individually for four minutes each week.  That's not very efficient.

Another disadvantage is that the assessment is not uniform.  I'm not checking each kid against the same benchmark, so it's not easy to compare.  Another disadvantage is that these assessments are often random, coming organically out of whatever passage the kid happens to be reading right then.  Of course, these two disadvantages are also advantages, since the lack of uniformity means that the assessments are better suited to the individual students and the randomness of the passages often sparks my thinking in ways that I couldn't have anticipated.

A last disadvantage is that it's been hard, at least for me, to keep good records of this kind of qualitative, individualized assessment, so it's hard to measure progress and to follow up.  I have to confess that in my preliminary experiments with this kind of assessment, I haven't yet figured out a good record keeping system.  It needs to be very simple, because I, like Ben Franklin, am not very organized.  I'm going to work on this over the next month or so, and I'll follow up with another post, in which I also give some more specific examples of these kinds of conversations.

Conclusion
Most people think about assessment in the same way Mr. Google does (google "reading assessment" to see what I mean): that is, as standardized tests, usually written, administered, by all-knowing adult authorities, upon children who are probably all too aware that (1) they're being tested and (2) that the assessment is of very little interest to either the adult or kid except as an assessment. So perhaps the best thing about using an informal conversation about an independent reading book as an assessment is that it doesn't feel like an assessment.  All of what I'm saying here seems incredibly obvious--probably even when Rousseau said it it seemed pretty obvious--but it might be worth reminding ourselves that assessment is about more than just testing.

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Post Script: Similarity to what happens naturally in a literate family; limitations of school
The kind of conversations I've discussed are essentially like the conversations that we have with children in our own homes, starting with the conversations we had when we were reading picture books to them.  The fact that I think doing this in a classroom for four minutes a week is worthwhile is quite amazing, given that many four-year-olds get this kind of treatment for twenty minutes every single night.

This points, perhaps, to the limitations of school.  There's no way that I can possibly do as good a job, as an English teacher responsible for the reading and writing of 85 children, as I do as a father responsible for the reading and writing of two children.  In a sense that's okay--as long as what they do with me is worthwhile--but it's worth remembering the limitations of the system in which we work.

Do students need to "build reading perseverance"?

I was at a Metco conference all day today, and one of the workshops I attended was on the Common Core.  It was interesting in lots of ways that I'll have to mull over for a while, but one minor thing I was struck by was the way the presenter talked about independent reading.  The presenter, a high-school principal, told the story of a teacher in her school who twice a week puts high-interest YA books on every desk, and for the first 30 minutes of the period has the students just read.  When one of the students was asked why he thought they were spending 30 minutes twice a week in reading, the kid said, clearly repeating a phrase the teacher had instilled in him, "Well, we're going to have to take the SATs, so we have to build up our perseverance."

Later in the workshop, the presenter put up a slide of "tips" for ways ELA teachers can prepare their students for the Common Core and the tests that will stem from it.  One of her slides was titled "FOCUS ON READING", and it had two "tips". One was about reading in the content areas and the other was this:

"Students need to build reading perseverance"

I wasn't sure what I thought about this.  On the one hand, I was happy to see teachers encouraged to have their students do in-class reading of pleasurable texts--particularly in connection with the Common Core, which does not, as far as I can see, pay much explicit attention to reading volume or making sure that students are actually reading.  On the other hand, I was like: What?!  Perseverance?!  That is so depressing!  We "persevere" in things that are difficult, painful, discouraging.  Reading a good book is not supposed to be difficult, painful and discouraging; it's supposed to be entertaining, engrossing, FUN!

Maybe I'm just lucky, but my experience is that for well over 90% of my students (whether in the Metco program or not), they don't have much trouble sitting and reading silently.  This year, I had one girl who complained the most about how much she disliked reading; over the past couple of weeks I have had to tell her more than once, when we were having a discussion or doing a writing activity, to stop reading and put her book away.  Reading is fun--that's what we need to be helping our students to discover.

More on other stuff later; it was an interesting day.