Reading in the Classroom Setting

Reading Practices

Observing students, I see the effects of low mental stamina. Short-form video media, memes, instant answers from Google, or worse, AI, have conditioned students to expect instant gratification, instant answers, and instant entertainment. Tell them what they need to know so they can go off looking for their next dopamine spike. The BRAIN ROT is real, and all of us, not just our students, need to go outside and touch some grass.

Poetry Showcase

I imagine reading practices I want to use in my future classroom, strategies that build mental stamina and foster a genuine joy for reading. If not joy, then perhaps curiosity and wonder. Silent Sustained Reading (SSR) and Book Clubs are two such practices that can get the job started. The former can improve mental stamina and ease reluctant readers into the practice of reading. The latter can spark an appreciation for reading and the benefits that come with it.

Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher (2022) deliver the grave news that "interest in books has fallen to an all-time low" and "teenagers have stopped reading altogether" (p. 45). I wish this news came as a surprise, but looking around, all of us hunched over our screens, doomscrolling, it's pretty obvious that we've become disinterested in any real, rigorous reading. We cannot, however, thrust a book into the hands of our students and demand they read for hours on end as a solution, just like I can't walk into a gym and bench press 300 pounds. It takes work to get where we need to go.

Start Slow. In my classroom, students would begin their day by reading silently for ten minutes (SSR). What they read, whether a novel, novella, or graphic novel, is up to them, as long as it is something they find interesting and challenging. Students may give up on a book they find uninteresting, but only after a week of genuine reading. I would have students explain why they want to select another book. The response "because it's boring" is not enough. A student needs to tell me what is happening in the story and what they don't like about the book. Perhaps the characters are flat, or the plot is drier than Aunt Margie's turkey. Maybe the student dislikes the setting or can't connect with the story. These are all valid reasons I would accept. We need to normalize putting down books that don't hold our attention.

By month two, students should be reading for the first fifteen minutes of class. In a perfect world, we'd work towards twenty to twenty-five minutes of SSR, but the reality is that most of us don't have those instructional minutes to dedicate to independent reading. The administration and school board are anxious about test scores, and the State has a list of standards we must teach. Cleverness, however, can be a friend.

SSR can kickstart the "independent reading habit" (Kittle & Gallagher, 2022, p 45), and we can use the students' reading choices to teach our standards. It may be helpful to present a selection of reading options. I can build what Kittle and Gallagher call Book Clubs by grouping students together based on their book selection. Students can create sketch notes and two-page spreads (Kittle & Gallagher 2022) to track their reading. Character maps can teach students to follow a character's development throughout a story or identify the character's relationship to the story's central theme. Other projects, such as critical reviews, can provide opportunities for students to analyze "how a modern work of fiction draws on themes, patterns of events, or character types from myths, traditional stories, or religious works such as the Bible, including describing how the material is rendered new" (CDE, 2013). These are just a few examples.

The Role of Reading

In the English Language Arts classroom, reading (and writing) should take center stage. Reading is crucial to developing literacy skills, encompassing reading, writing, comprehension, interaction, critical thinking, and synthesizing cross-disciplinary subjects. Deplatforming regular reading practice in exchange for test-taking strategies and teaching to the test harms our students. Reading teaches comprehension and literacy skills, which are assessed in State exams.

Planning an Effective Reading Experience for a Range of Readers

From my limited experience working with students, I have discovered that there is no one-size-fits-all plan or template for an effective reading experience. Planning an effective reading experience requires me to be responsive to the classroom community and its lived experience.

When planning for my classroom, I want to choose a text that reflects my students' lived experiences, community culture, interests, and values. The readings should challenge and unsettle my students, shake them up, and grab their attention. I must provide the why of reading a particular text so that they buy into the learning experience. This requires introducing them to activities that will be foreign to them, such as creating "Mood Meters" to track a character's emotional state, using a document or journal to write down "Powerful Quotes" that resonate with them, and identifying "Character Archetypes" and the role those archetypes play in their story and in stories in general.

Having the right tools and knowing when and where to use them are most important for planning an effective reading experience.

A Powerful Quote. | This is usually accompanied by a paragraph responding to a prompt related to the quote.

Supporting Students as Readers

Reading is hard. You're not simply deciphering words, but decoding meaning, tracking the plot of an unfolding story, identifying relevant and central ideas from informative texts, inferring subtextual meanings, and every other aspect of meaning-making when reading texts. It is a challenge, especially when you under value the act of reading.

Additionally, as a teacher, I am competing against mixed messages. As a society we speak on the importance of reading, but we don't do it (Kittle & Gallagher, 2020). Families aren't reading, independently or together--but before we make claims of parental neglect, we must acknowledge the time consuming challenges faced by families today. Inadequate wages that have failed to keep up with inflation, the American housing crisis, food insecurity, families working multiple jobs to make ends meet, family responsibilities, and all the social and economic failures drowning the average American places a much lower priority on reading. And let's be honest, this is valid.

Nevertheless, my desire is to support my students as readers.

Students need to have a buy-in if they're going to read. I believe in student choice. While there will be whole-class novels that not every student will enjoy, I need to prioritize giving students the choice to read texts they find interesting and engaging. I strive to move beyond the archaic ideas we have about reading and reading practices. I want to introduce students to a variety of reading formats. Graphic novels, novellas, high interest-low difficulty books, book series, and the like can be just as effective as the traditional novel.

For some students, getting started is the hardest part. It is easy to feel lost and overwhelmed diving into a book when you're a reluctant reader. Guiding questions and text-based questions can give students a place to start, a focal point. Asking them to identify main characters, setting, the conflict, and emerging themes may seem elementary, but it is a place to start students engaging with their text in thoughtful and meaningful ways. Whole class novels can benefit from text-based questions, drawing students' attention to important parts of the text, or getting them to think more deeply about the reading. Likewise, employing meaningful activities such as those mentioned above can help encourage a student's reading comprehention and engagement.

Supporting the Individual Needs of Readers with Learning Differences

IEPs and 504s provide significant data, plans, and instructions to help students with learning differences succeed. I adhere to their direction. However, it is also important to have some strategies and tools to address learning needs and differences. I confess my own sensitivity to this issue as I fall into this category.

English Language Learners (EL) have to learn a new language while meeting the learning goals of the classroom. I am lucky to be part of a program that directly addresses strategies for supporting our EL students. It might be useful to obtain copies of books in a new arrival's home language or dialect whenever possible. These students can read the text and work on responding to activities and text-based questions in English. They get to practice literacy in their home language while also developing English fluency through practicing reading and responding to learning activities in English (be sure to scaffold).

Having EL students write down words and phrases that they don't understand can help develop vocabulary guides to support their reading. Reading along with audio books is another option that directly supports English Language Development (ELD) as students practice their English listening skills.

Students with ADHD wrestle with focus, memory and retention, information processing, and distractions. Allowing extra time on reading responses, proportionate breaks, engaging in active reading, and locating students in places that minimize distractions (Mandiota, 2021) are some of the more obvious supports I can provide. Using text-to-speech software and audiobooks can be excellent tools to help my fellow neurodivergent readers become stronger and more engaged readers.

IEPs and 504s provide requirements we must abide by, but it is also essential that educators keep informed on the strategies and tools that support our readers with learning differences.

Literacy Rich Critical Thinkers in the Classroom

Literacy is a term that moves beyond the ability to read. Literacy encompasses reading, writing, comprehension, interaction, critical thinking, and synthesizing cross-disciplinary subjects. Students must become active readers, and I must lead them to connect their reading to their lived experiences. Essential questions, I believe, should introduced before students begin reading. Reading strategies should lead to deeper thinking and cross-disciplinary connections.

In February, I began each class with a snapshot of a book written by a Black author.
Each day we reflected on the importance of Black History Month and listening
to the diverse voices, stories, experiences, and perspectives.

Reading