Spring is here, and that means it’s time for another Kindle Classroom Project update. Although Kindle donations have slowed down, there are a number of exciting things to report.

1. The project launched its second classroom.
A few months ago, a friend and generous donor asked me, “Why don’t you think bigger?” At the time, I was happy with the Kindle Classroom Project remaining as a singular noun. But then tons of Kindles arrived, so I had to rethink the project’s scale.

This Monday, a second set of ninth graders — this time in San Francisco — got their Kindles. I can’t wait to share pictures, profiles, and more. It took several hours over Spring Break to get the devices ready for deployment, but it’s so much fun. The teacher leading the project emailed me on Monday night and said the students are very excited to read.

2. There are now 43 Kindles in the collection.
In the last update about a month ago, there were 41 Kindles. March added two more Kindles, and I am very grateful, particularly because they’re from generous people from far away.

Kindle #42, a Kindle Keyboard, came from Marc in Minnesota. He found us by doing a Google search and filling out the form on the Kindle Classroom Project page.

Kindle #43, a Kindle Fire, came from Chris in Louisville, Kentucky. She also found us via the Internet. (The Internet is a beautiful thing.) Her Fire came not just with a came but also a kind and encouraging note for the student recipient.

3. There are now 232 books in the collection.
Part of expanding to a second classroom meant that I wanted to make sure that each of the 18 new Kindlers had something perfect to read right when they got their new Kindle.

So I splurged and invested about $100 to build the ebook library. (Comeback Kings, above, was one that I bought.) That money, along with donations, increased the total number of titles to 232 from 197. Yep, that means the library grew by 35 titles — or by 18 percent, if you like percentages.

This is important. Kindles are great, but good books might be even more important to the growth of the project. I’ve read in several places (including from Kelly Gallagher) that a good classroom library has 20 titles per student. This means that if there are 43 students using Kindles, there should be 800+ good titles in the ebook library.

4.  Generous contributors are donating physical books, too.
Although I encourage students to read on Kindles (for many reasons), some prefer physical books. In addition, until we attain a 1:1 Kindle-to-student ratio, we need to make sure physical classroom libraries are bursting with real-life, made-with-paper, physical books.

To that end, last week I wrote a post that named a few books that African American boys want to read. To encourage people to donate, I mentioned the Kindle Classroom Project’s Amazon Wishlist (all student requests).

Then came the books — nine so far. The funny (and sometimes challenging part) is that sometimes, there’s no way to figure out the donor. The books often arrive with no receipt or packing list. (There are worse problems in life.)

Thank you to Michele (San Francisco, CA), LeAnne (Fremont, CA), Denise (Alpharetta, GA), and Angela (Concord, CA) for all the great reading material! All four of them are repeat contributors. They’re not happy — oh no, they’re not — with donating just once.

5. I won a $250 grant for books.
Every once in a while, I search online for quick and easy ways to get grants and build the project. And every once in a while, I’m successful. Yes, $250 isn’t too much, but it’ll get 25 more ebooks, and I’m pretty happy about that.

* * *
What do you think will happen next at the Kindle Classroom Project? Will an anonymous donor click on the bright green button at the top of the page and make a huge contribution?

Or will Amazon find us here and donate a class set of Kindles?

Please let me know your predictions. 

 See?

Of all the strategies I learned in the NWP, #1 in effectiveness is the teacher writing and thinking aloud in front of students.#engchat

— Kelly Gallagher (@KellyGToGo) October 8, 2012

(Yes, he’s tweeting about writing, but I’m sure he thinks similarly about reading.)

Kelly Gallagher, author of Readicide and proponent of the Article of the Week, is my favorite overall English teacher. 

 Several years ago, English teacher Kelly Gallagher noticed that his students didn’t know much about their world, so he began assigning the Article of the Week every Monday to build background knowledge.

A few years ago, I adopted Mr. Gallagher’s Article of the Week in my ninth grade English class. Instead of assigning the AoW for homework, as Mr. Gallagher does, I made it part of my daily do-now activity.

Instead of having students write a general one-page reflection, I chose to focus on more discrete reading skills, particularly of nonfiction texts, like identifying an author’s claim and figuring out vocabulary in context.

It was OK. My students appreciated many of the articles, but the exercise seemed disjointed. Even though Article of the Week was a daily routine in the class, I’m not sure it went anywhere. Sure, it bolstered students’ prior knowledge and nonfiction reading skills, but what was it really about?

I think part of the problem was that I approached Article of the Week as a teacher-centered activity. I chose the articles, and I wrote the questions. Students never became part of the process. To them, it was just another assignment that their teacher gave out.

Really, the point of Article of the Week is threefold:

1. To build students’ background knowledge,
2. To improve students’ reading skills of nonfiction texts,
3. To encourage students to be consistent and critical consumers of current events.

My previous version of AoW met my first goal and partly met my second goal but did nothing with the third. That’s why I’m thinking that when I teach again, I’d like to connect Article of the Week more closely with the notion of following current events.

I’m not sure yet what this means, but here are some of my ideas:

1. Make AoW more student-generated as the year goes on. The first quarter, I’d choose the articles. Then, we’d look at a newspaper together and choose an article for the entire class to read. Then maybe by second semester, groups or individual students could select their own.

2. Make AoW part of independent reading. Students should always be reading fiction, and fiction should be the center of independent reading. But that doesn’t mean students can’t read the newspaper, right? One idea I have is to begin each class with a newspaper or magazine and then finish each class with a book. That’s a ton of independent reading, I know, but if I find somewhere to teach with long blocks, maybe it’s possible.

In our complex world (and in the world of the Common Core State Standards), Article of the Week is crucial. Our students need to know about their world and be able to read about it. That’s why I think it’s important to think about ways to make AoW an even larger part of our curriculum. 

 Most high schools don’t include very much reading in their curriculum. Here are some of the reasons I’ve heard:

1. Students don’t read very well. We have to find different ways for students to access the content.

2. Students don’t like to read. In this Internet age, let’s use more technology.

3. There isn’t enough time. If we devoted our classes to reading, we wouldn’t be able to meet all the standards.

Although these claims have flaws, I won’t try to prove them wrong. After all, even if they’re true, they don’t help students become better readers. And I don’t think anyone would argue that reading is an unnecessary skill.

Most people think that the best way to get good at something is through practice. That’s what Malcolm Gladwell writes in Outliers: The Story of Success. And that’s what reading experts Stephen Krashen and Kelly Gallagher and Nancie Atwell all say.

But the problem is that young people are not reading very much at all. According to To Read or Not to Read, a 2011 study from the National Endowment for the Arts, 15- to 24-year-olds read an average of seven minutes per day.

You read that right: Seven minutes per day — vs. about 2 1/2 hours per day of television.

(When students tell me they’d prefer watching the movie over reading the book, I respond, “Of course you would. You’re good at watching TV. You’ve had so much practice.”)

So if young people aren’t reading, and practice is the best way to get better at something, that means that schools must aggressively increase the amount of reading that students do.

It’s not easy, but it must be done.

The first step is to encourage all teachers — not just English teachers — to include reading in their lesson plans every day. Reading is different in each discipline, and students need to know how reading a science text is different from reading a math problem.

The next step is for schools to commit to an independent reading program — and to make it a source of pride for the school community. Most schools rely on the English teachers to carry out independent reading, but it must be a school-wide effort. Students must choose books they like, have time to read them, and talk about what they’ve read.

(Amazing things can be done: Principal Ramón González of M.S. 223 in the Bronx spent $200,000 last year to purchase books students would like. He also hosts a principal’s book club.)

The final step is for English teachers to figure out how best to distribute the study of fiction, nonfiction, and independent reading in their classes and across the school. Right now, most English teachers teach novels, short stories, and poetry, which excludes the majority of text that people read. (No, I’m not making an argument here for Common Core.) There should be a shift away from fiction as the pretty-much-only genre in English classes.

But whatever happens, the key thing is that there just has to be much more reading. Educators like to talk about 21st century skills and how students need to learn how to collaborate and analyze various electronic media and be able to assess bias and credibility in sources. That is all true.

But to do that, students need to read a lot and learn how to read at a much higher level. And if that’s going to happen, high schools must make the teaching of reading a priority. 

 I’ve always felt comfortable about teaching writing. The credit there goes to Nick Ferentinos, my high school English and journalism teacher, who made sure I could put a sentence together.

But teaching reading? What’s that supposed to be about?

Maybe I had no clue because I was trained as a social studies teacher. But then I realized that even high school English teachers — who focus on writing and literature — didn’t always have the answers about teaching reading.

So a few years ago, when I finally admitted to myself that I had become an English teacher (after several years of denial), I decided to do some reading about reading.

After poring over 50+ titles, I’ve found a few favorites:

Readicide, by Kelly Gallagher
This book has it all. It argues that testing is killing our students’ interest in reading. Mr. Gallagher believes in a hybrid approach to reading instruction: part independent reading, part reading that the teacher leads. He also likes a combination of fiction and non-fiction, and his Article of the Week gets kids to know about their world. Start here first.

The Reading Zone, by Nancie Atwell

After getting inspired by reading Readicide, this book will help you think about how to build a reading culture in your classroom. Ms. Atwell, author of the famous In the Middle, is the expert of the workshop model. She believes strongly in the right of students to choose their books and to improve by reading voluminously.

Lifers: Learning from At-Risk Adolescent Readers, by Pamela M. Mueller
This book reminded me that “reluctant readers,” as most people call them, aren’t mean-spirited or ignorant about reading. Rather, most of them have felt failure and disappointment about reading for years. Ms. Mueller writes several case studies of students struggling with reading and offers an excellent intervention model to encourage kids not to give up.

* * *

I hope I can inspire the teachers with whom I work to take the time to read about reading this year. It’s not easy during the school year, but sometimes, reading a good book is a great means of professional development.

What other books about reading do you suggest? What should I read next? 

 According to Politico’s Byron Tau, President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday was written at an eighth grade reading level.

Even worse, Tau analyzed all the SOTUs going back to 1934, and Obama’s addresses scored among the lowest on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. (In contrast, President John F. Kennedy’s speeches required college-level reading skills.)

While political blogs debate the significance of Obama’s relatively simplistic prose, I am wondering about a different question: If Obama’s speech is so easy to read, then why did seniors at my school have such trouble understanding it?

A quick answer, of course, is that our students have poor reading skills. Indeed, it’s altogether possible that some of our seniors read at an eighth grade level. I don’t dispute that we need to build our students’ reading skills.

(Short aside: I don’t like how adults put down young people’s poor reading skills yet do very little — if any — reading themselves. End of rant.)

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. Instead, my hunch is that our students struggled with the text because of their lack of background knowledge concerning current events, the federal government, and politics.

After all, it’s much easier to read something when you already know something about the topic you’re reading about.

I am reminded of Kelly Gallagher, author of Readicide (my favorite teaching book), and his emphasis on building students’ background knowledge as a crucial component of teaching reading. Mr. Gallagher tells a story of teaching about 9/11 and realizing that a number of students thought al-Qaeda was a person. His response, the Article of the Week (which I launched last year at my school and which two of my colleagues are improving), aims to build students’ schema so that they can approach new texts.

Our students’ struggle with the State of the Union address fuels my passion to learn how to teach reading well. It’s much more than teaching reading strategies. It’s about making sure students don’t go into a text cold. It’s about encouraging curiosity and questions. And it’s about showing students how to attack a text rather than feebly slogging through word by word. 

 One of the best things about my school is that we have a period of Sustained Silent Reading three times a week in our Advisory class.

Unfortunately, we don’t do SSR very well. Here are some of the problems:

• We don’t spend enough time reading. Twenty minutes, three times a week. That’s only an hour of reading if the students are reading.

• We don’t have enough good books. Our school library barely exists, despite the hard work of a teacher volunteer, and even though we have books, very few are high-interest and at the students’ reading level.

• Most of us aren’t experienced in matching students with books. We might not read enough for our own pleasure. If that’s the case, we certainly don’t have a good understanding of young adult literature.

• We cave. When our students complain about SSR, we don’t stand firm. Instead, we let them do homework or read a book assigned for their English class.

Those are some problems, but I think the main problem is this: We say we care about reading but we really don’t put in the investment to show we do.

If we did, we’d see students reading in the hallways at lunch. We’d see more newspapers and magazines on campus. There would be discussions about the presidential race or the Penn State scandal or the Occupy movement. More students would be doing Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week. More teachers would be participating in book clubs.

If we truly cared about reading, students would be reading, and there would be so much more to talk about, so many more opportunities to connect students to bigger things out there in the world. 

Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week is becoming more popular. I’m happy about that. After all, it was one of the most successful parts of my English 9 class last year.

Several people have asked me for more examples of my AoWs. So here are most of the ones I used last year. There are about 30 of them:

http://bit.ly/aows10-11.

Feel free to use them, modify them, get ideas from them, discard them.

You’ll see that some are “once-onlys,” like the article on Osama bin Laden’s death. Others are local to San Francisco or California. But in general, many are still usable this year.

Let me know what you think!

Also, I’m interested in finding out how you use AoWs in your class. I use AoWs as warm-ups, while Mr. Gallagher uses his for homework. How do you use yours? 

 I’m a big reader of the news and a big believer of teaching current events.

Despite what some adults say, students really like reading about what’s going on in the world.

Last year, I had my ninth graders read an Article of the Week. According to course evaluations, the AoW was the second most popular activity — after The 1,000,000 Word Challenge.

But the AoW was the only news my students read in class. Independent reading focused exclusively on fiction. In other words, my students didn’t have the opportunity to choose news for themselves. And that’s crucial.

As Kelly Gallagher argues, students need more exposure to the news so they can participate more actively in their communities. Though Gallagher and other teachers inundate their students with newspapers and magazines, I’ve not been able to find a workable solution.

The news in print is expensive. Time quoted me 59 cents a copy, which comes to about $600 for a class set per year. The New York Times Upfront is more affordable but comes out only once a month.

The best scenario would involve buying several newspapers and magazines so there would be a good variety. But this idea would be even more expensive.

With the tough economy, I haven’t been able to find a news organization willing to donate free copies of their product to my classroom. “We used to do that” was the reply from several representatives.

I suppose I shouldn’t be annoyed about raising funds to purchase periodicals. After all, much of my time last year involved building my classroom library through DonorsChoose. Something feels weird, though, about asking for big money for newspapers and magazines, which quickly get tossed in the recycling. I care about the news, but a book has a much longer shelf life. My dream is to find a news junkie willing to donate $1,000 a year so I won’t have to worry. (All teachers should have personal perpetual donors.)

Another option is to go electronic. Students could follow several news sources on their Google Reader or follow current events in some other techy way. Problem is, our school is far away from a 1:1 environment, which I find crucial for the kind of voluminous reading I’m suggesting. (My dream is that every student has a Kindle, and we use Calibre to fetch the news and send it, free, to their e-reader every morning.)

With school coming up soon, I’m a little lost about how to figure this out. Maybe this year my focus should be on access, to make sure my classroom has at least one copy of every major (serious) periodical. Classrooms should be places of ideas, and just as books should abound, so should the news. 

Kelly Gallagher is my hero.

Author of Readicide, Gallagher champions a hybrid approach to reading instruction. Make sure the kids read a lot on their own, but don’t forget to teach the classics, too.

Part of Gallagher’s curriculum is the “Article of the Week,” designed to build students’ schema and understanding of the world. Each Monday, he passes out an article and a brief assignment, which students complete before Friday. Gallagher came up with AoW after a lesson in which several of his students thought Al-Qaeda was a person.

I decided to try AoW this year with my ninth graders for three reasons:

• I wasn’t teaching enough non-fiction in English 9.
• It seemed like a great way to teach reading strategies.
• I wanted students to realize there’s a big world out there.

Instead of assigning the article for homework, which at my school would mean varying completion rates, I decided to incorporate AoW in my daily routine. It’s the first thing students do every day when they enter class.

On Monday, students get a new AoW. Here’s an example. On the front side is the article, sometimes abridged but never altered otherwise. On the back are four quick assignments that students complete in five minutes each. (Our class meets four times a week.) After the five minutes, we talk about our responses for no more than five more minutes. Then we make a transition to our next activity. Simple and quick.

Although the daily questions vary, I’m settling in on four basic strands:

• Block 1: Main Idea / Author’s Purpose / Audience
• Block 2: Reading Comprehension / Analysis
• Block 3: Vocabulary
• Block 4: Making Connections / Response

Because the articles change but the questions stay mostly the same, students have improved their non-fiction reading skills significantly. With weekly practice, they can determine the author’s purpose, for example, much better than they could a few months ago. I’ve also noticed that they attack vocabulary with more confidence. It’s been fun to teach rhetorical devices as they appear in real, high-interest articles.

Article of the Week has been great not only because it offers a highly structured beginning-of-class activity that focuses on building reading skills. In addition, it expands students’ minds and experiences. Article of the Week has built my students’ empathy.

I try to choose articles that are about my students and completely not about them. For example, one was about street kids in India, while another was about toy guns in Iraq. Variety counts, too: This Monday, the article could be focusing on Proposition 19, while next Monday, it could be focusing on anti-gay bullying.

I’ve made a lot of changes to my English 9 curriculum this year, and Article of the Week has probably been the most successful one. It’s easy, it interests students, it builds their reading skills, and it makes their world bigger.

If you’d like more examples of my AoWs, just let me know.

Thank you, Mr. Gallagher!