Check out what this elementary school is doing in Maryland (also in Iserotope Extras!):

What do you think? At the elementary school level, I think this is the way to go. Unless we carve out time to read — and to allow students to choose what to read — there won’t be enough reading.

But once students hit middle school, things get more complicated, and I value some non-reading homework, as long as it’s consistent, purposeful, and valuable. One of the biggest challenges my students face is unpredictable and scattered homework. Homework shouldn’t change every day and require different sets of academic skills.

What are your thoughts? If teachers shun conventional homework and substitute independent reading in its place, what do you think will happen? More real reading? Fake reading? Worse math skills? 

 If you’re a typical student in a typical urban public high school, here’s what you’re reading:

1. Teacher-assigned fiction. Usually in novel form, most likely in your English class.

2. Short teacher-assigned nonfiction. Usually handouts on paper, most likely in your other classes.

Here are two kinds of reading you’ll mostly never encounter:

1. News. Unless something huge happens in the world, you won’t read about current events. Teachers may use articles to enhance subject matter, but you won’t get your hands on a real-life newspaper or magazine, whether in print or digital form. Maybe you catch the news on TV?

2. Books You Choose. Even in schools that hold Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) or Drop Everything and Read (DEAR), you likely won’t read any books because (1) your school no longer has a library, (2) your teacher hasn’t built a classroom library with her own money, (3) you haven’t gone to your neighborhood public library in years because you’re scared the librarian will force you to pay your overdue fines, (4) adults in your life don’t much care if you read, (5) your friends think it’s uncool to read, and (6) it’s easier to fake-read than find a book you like. So fake read you do.

The problem with this model is not just that there isn’t enough reading happening in schools. It’s also that two really important kinds of reading aren’t happening in schools.

Current events teach young people about their world, and reading the news builds students’ background knowledge and expands their sphere of experience. And independent reading is the only way to consume enough words to build vocabulary, fluency, and analysis.

That’s why, the next time I teach, I’m going to (somehow) find a way to include current events and independent reading in my class curriculum. This will be even harder now that Common Core is pushing for more informational texts.

Then again, I can build from my past success with Article of the Week and The 1,000,000 Word Challenge. It’s just that my efforts need to be tighter and more robust. 

 Only two of my students passed the AP English test this year. What set these students apart?

It wasn’t their work ethic. Sure, they worked hard, but not more than their peers.

Maybe it was their performance on the multiple-choice section. But I don’t think that’s the case; all their practice exams placed them somewhere in the middle.

They’re good writers, for sure. One of them makes every word count. The other knows uses sophisticated language. And I’m sure the AP readers liked their generally-clean grammar. Yes, writing skill was likely a factor.

But I don’t think that explains their success.

Rather, the two students who passed are readers. They see themselves as readers and read a lot. They’d been readers before entering the class. They know what kinds of books they like. They have favorite books. They were two of the four students who attended an optional field trip to go see Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner.

Yes, it’s becoming clearer now.

In high school, I wasn’t much of a reader, and I still passed the test. So did many of my friends. But that’s because I was an expert on how to do school. In the suburbs, you can get away with that. At my former school, you can’t.

Here’s the thing: The AP English test does not grade you on what you learned in the 12th grade. It doesn’t ask you about Frankenstein or The Scarlet Letter or any of the books you’ve read. Rather, it determines how well you can read challenging, obscure texts. That’s why it’s hard on urban kids and English learners.

If you’ve been reading your whole life, and if you see yourself as a reader, you have a much better chance of passing. That’s why the two students who passed were at such a big advantage. That’s also why, like a few astute readers have suggested, it’s crucial for schools to build a culture of reading. It’s important to create literary nerds.

I’m happy for the two students who passed. But there were no surprises, no stories of students working hard and beating the odds.

Maybe the truth is better, though. Maybe it’s better to know that the gaps are wide and that it takes a concerted, multi-year effort to address them. Maybe it’s what’s necessary to convince us how important it is to make bold moves on reading.

Update: A very smart reader (go Molly!) just reminded me that the two students have one more thing in common: They both had a background at elite private high schools before transferring to our school. Hmm. This revelation might require a post on its own! 

 My friend Wil helped me find ipadio, a wonderful, free phonecasting service that I plan on using next year with my students. (Thanks, Wil!)

Phonecasting is a fancy word for podcasting. The only difference is that you use your phone and call up a number to record your voice, instead of using a microphone and computer.

The advantage of phonecasting for teachers and students is that it is way easier than podcasting. Students can record their voice anywhere — from their home, in a car, and even from your classroom.

This year, I had students record phonecasts and post them to iseroma.com, my class blog (check it out!), using Google Voice. It worked well, except I had to manually post each of my student’s podcasts to my website. This took forever.

ipadio does the same thing but also posts your phonecast automatically online. That means I can have my students call in, record their phonecast, and within seconds, their thoughts are published on iseroma.com.

Next year, I’ll use ipadio to make reading more public. Reading is too private, too internal. Socratic seminars are a good way to assess how students are reading, but they don’t hone in on the reading process itself.

I’ll have students do think-alouds while reading a new text live. With ipadio, they’ll record the cognitive reading strategies they employ. As a class, we’ll be able to compare and contrast what different readers  do when they get stuck. We’ll also be able to see how various readers bring different prior knowledge to a new text and what connections we make.

Even more compelling, students will be able to track their growth as readers because all of their ipadio phonecasts will be saved automatically. 

 It’s Spring Break, which means I get to think about bigger things.

The past few days, as I procrastinate on some of my library school assignments, I’ve been rereading some of my favorite English teacher books: The Reading Zone, Readicide, The Book Whisperer, Lifers, and With Rigor for All.

The books run the gamut. On one side, Nancie Atwell argues for a total reading workshop, where students spend nearly all their time reading fiction of their choice. On the other side, Carol Jago says that English classes should involve the close study of teacher-assigned classics. Then in the middle, there’s Kelly Gallagher, my personal hero, who advocates a 50-50 hybrid model, where students read what they want half the time and what the teacher wants the other half.

Gallagher’s approach sounds the best, but it’s tough to pull off, especially when you consider that he’s a fan of non-fiction as well. He says students should read newspapers and magazines (online and in print), and I agree with him. He also assigns an Article of the Week, geared to build background knowledge and a better understanding of the world. I like that idea, too.

In my perfect class, we’d be doing all of that: a workshop where students read independently and voluminously, a whole-class study of a novel, a current-events component, and a series of mini-lessons devoted to developing reading skills in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

I’d like to think it’s all possible, but I’m not sure it is — especially because I haven’t even considered writing and projects yet.

Still, by the end of my English class, I want my students to see themselves as readers of a variety of texts and to know how to handle different genres. I want them not to be afraid of reading a book in full. I want them to be able to read their way through a newspaper or magazine. And I want them to read online content, too.

I’m just not sure how to pull it off. 

 An article today in The New York Times, “A Field Trip to a Strange New Place: Second Grade Visits the Parking Garage,” emphasizes the importance of teaching background knowledge in order to teach reading skills.

Writer Michael Winerip summarizes the challenge:

Experiences that are routine in middle-class homes are not for P.S. 142 children. When Dao Krings, a second-grade teacher, asked her students recently how many had never been inside a car, several, including Tyler Rodriguez, raised their hands. “I’ve been inside a bus,” Tyler said. “Does that count?”

When a new shipment of books arrives, Rhonda Levy, the principal, frets. Reading with comprehension assumes a shared prior knowledge, and cars are not the only gap at P.S. 142. Many of the children have never been to a zoo or to New Jersey. Some think the emergency room of New York Downtown Hospital is the doctor’s office.

Therefore, teacher Dao Krings takes her students on field trips to places considered mundane to most. They build prior knowledge by looking at signs, reading parking meters, and visiting public garages.

After all, it’s much easier to understand a story involving a car ride if you’ve been on a car ride.

My teaching hero, Kelly Gallagher, who assigns an Article of the Week to build prior knowledge, would agree with Ms. Krings’s approach.

At the end of the article, however, Winerip writes that some teachers and principals do not consider the field trips worthwhile, especially because they take a lot of time. I see their point. But the alternative that many schools have adopted — more test prep — doesn’t work to build prior knowledge. Test prep assumes a shared experience.

Field trips may be costly and cumbersome, but they’re a great way to help students connect what they know to what they read.

Another option? Lots of voluntary reading and lots of conversations. If students read voluminously and then share their knowledge with their peers, the whole classroom builds its prior knowledge.

Which makes the next text easier to read. 

 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. 

 My decision this semester to focus my Kindle project on voluntary reading (rather than teacher-assigned reading) is starting to pay off.

Out of my Advisory class of 18, 10 students are reading on Kindles. It’s fun to watch. My hope is to get a class set of Kindles so every student can try one.

My favorite thing to do is to talk with students about their reading. Which books do they choose, and why? What do they like about their books? What questions are they grappling with in life, and how does reading help them answer those questions?

When given choice, students like reading, and often, they select books long considered dry or tedious. Yes, they choose classics!

Today, I checked in with a student who just recently borrowed a Kindle. I asked him what he was reading. He replied, “Animal Farm. It’s kind of funny.”

My student didn’t know that I’d taught the novel for several years, that I thought it was only an OK book, and that most students endured it just to get to the engaging mock trial project we did at the end of the unit.

He didn’t care about all that. He is reading Animal Farm, and he likes it.

Although this is just a guess, I think that the Kindle has something to do with his selection. The Kindle does an excellent job at eradicating negative peer pressure. Nobody knows what you’re reading. Nobody knows if you’re reading fast or slowly. Nobody cares if your book has a colorful cover.

It’s just you and the author’s world. And right now, my student is enjoying a little George Orwell. 

 I love reading and I love technology. That’s why I love having Kindles in my classroom.

This semester, I used my five classroom Kindles (now six — thanks, Wil!) in two ways: (1) to promote independent reading in my Advisory, (2) to promote close reading in AP English.

Here’s what I’ve found:

1. Some students love reading on the Kindle.  One of my advisees reported that she read much more this semester than ever before. Usually, I let my advisees borrow a Kindle for a month. She wouldn’t give hers back!

2. The Kindle is not as good for close academic reading as it is for immersive independent reading. One of my students in AP English said she liked annotating books on the Kindle, but most said the device was difficult to navigate. Specifically, the lack of page numbers on many titles led to student confusion and difficulty in following along in discussion with the rest of the class.

3. The Kindle is great for students who struggle with reading. One of my students used the Kindle’s text-to-speech to help her through a challenging book. The ability to change the font size on the Kindle also helps readers persist through frustration.

4. The Kindle is not great at helping students find books to read. Although my classroom Kindles hold many high-interest books, my students have trouble selecting new ones to read. That’s partly because the Kindle interface does little to connect readers to new books. Yes, you can view the book’s title, but it’s not in color. Yes, you can search the Amazon store, but that’s not ideal. After all, there’s nothing on the Kindle that’s equivalent to having a large classroom library with physical books with colorful covers.

5. The Kindle’s tech novelty wears off quickly for students — but that’s a good thing. Some students’ excitement for the E-Ink Kindle may drop over time. But what I love about the Kindle is that there are no distractions. It’s a reading device, and that’s what it’s for.

For next semester, I plan on focusing my Kindle project solely on independent reading in my Advisory. Instead of distributing my six Kindles to two different projects, I’m going to put more resources into what the Kindle is good at: immersive reading.

Because my students are seniors and ready to graduate, I have just a few months to ensure that they become lifelong readers. I look forward to the task of connecting my students to high-quality books that speak to them and challenge their perspective of the world.

One more thing: I have exciting news! This Friday, my student Antonio and I will be on The Kindle Chronicles, Len Edgerly’s podcast “all about your Kindle.” It’s an honor to be on the show, which I’ve listened to for more than a year. I hope you’ll check out the podcast this Friday! 

 It’s Finals Week, so that means that instead of helping my students with their exams and projects, I’m thinking about ways to improve my teaching next semester.

Topic #1: Reading.

I must say, I’m a tad obsessed with reading. It sort of makes me crazy, actually. My general feeling about reading is that everybody says it’s important but nobody does it anymore.

In To Read or Not to Read (2007), the National Endowment for the Arts concluded that 15- to 24-year-olds read an average of 7 minutes a day.

When I wrote my AP English syllabus in August, I decided that my students and I would study 12 books this year. That’s a lot, but I did the math: If students read 20 pages a day, six days a week, we could get there.

It just hasn’t happened. I mean, we’ve studied six novels so far. But it’s pretty clear that all my students haven’t really read them closely (if at all). Here’s why:

1. My students don’t yet read consistently on their own. They might read on Monday but then skip Tuesday. We need to build daily habits.

2. If the book is difficult, my students read really slowly. I can’t fault them for this. If I want them to study the books and annotate them, I must meet them where they are.

3. When you’re overloaded with work, reading always comes last. If I’m a student and have three hours of homework, most likely I’m going to put reading off until the end (when I’m most tired).

It’s pretty easy for me to figure out what’s going wrong about reading, but it’s really hard to figure out how to make things better. But I do have some ideas. I’d like to hear yours, too. Here are mine for next semester:

1. Read four books (more) closely, rather than six superficially. My fear is that I’m lowering the standard and that my students will follow suit and read even less. But I was looking at The Scarlet Letter today (which we’re reading in January), and no normal person can actually understand that in two weeks. After all, “physiognomy” and “ignominious” are run-of-the-mill words in the novel.

2. Require reading and evidence of reading every night. This semester, I broke up the reading into chunks — sort of like college — and told students to make their own schedules. Wrong! If my students don’t yet read every night, I must force it on them. But the question is how. I’m not interested in reading quizzes or thought journals. Annotations work for students who do them, not for ones who don’t (or who fake them). In addition, I don’t want to have to check their reading every day (including weekends). I’ll have to think more about this.

3. Spend more time in class reading and talking about reading. This semester, I focused on writing, especially on Mondays, when we did AP test practice essays. If I’m going to make progress with reading, I’m going to have to devote much more class time to it. I just don’t know exactly how.

4. Build the social aspect of reading. This semester, I tried online video chats to promote reading, especially on weekends. But the technology just didn’t work well enough. So my latest idea is to do more in-class group activities with the books and to do regular one-on-one conferences with my students on their reading.

Please let me know what you think — and if you have ideas.