Week 5: Fostering Reading Culture
"But have you tried making your lessons fun?"
This is one of the all-time top-five worst things you can
say to a teacher. It also happens to be the first, and often only advice that non-teachers (including administrators) give to frustrated teachers.
Well, I have found the reading-skills equivalent, thanks to Annie Holmquist from the Foundation for Economic Education website, who unironically writes:
Holmquist is a researcher, not a teacher (nor a parent). But she still
thinks that she has an important and overlooked opinion about whether teachers are
doing their work correctly. She admittedly bases this blog article on a single
interaction with a parent who believes his kid’s teachers are “killing his
child’s interest in reading.”
So, let’s pretend that teachers don’t know their own work,
and that this armchair expert is correct: that teachers are the reason kids don’t
like to read. So, what can teachers do to improve the enjoyment aspect
of reading?
How to make students love reading
· Realize they just hate reading because they haven’t found the right book. Fill your classroom with books to choose from. Make sure that all your personal favourites are on display. Don’t bother purchasing titles for your classroom that you haven’t or wouldn’t read. You clearly have the better taste in books, right? So get them hooked on the really good stuff that’ll fatten up their brains.
·
It doesn’t matter what books they choose;
they just need a gateway to reading. It’s the Harry Potter method: get your
students reading as much as possible, using the easiest, least-challenging,
sloppiest prose (like Harry Potter). Or use picture books! A whole bunch
of Gen-X favourites (Baby-Sitters
Club, Nancy
Drew, A
Wrinkle in Time, Anne
of Green Gables) have been repackaged as graphic novels for the new
generation. Those are probably good. Once they get hooked (it’s like heroin for
the brain), they’ll probably graduate to good writing eventually.
·
Give positive reinforcement for reading. Make
a celebration-of-reading bulletin board with candid snapshots of unaware students
reading. Use #caughtreading humiliate
praise them online as well as in person.
·
Make reading social! Kids love
socializing. Assign reading partners from both sides of the divide—nerds with
illiterates—and have them read aloud to each other so that the non-reader can
at least hear what some of the words are supposed to sound like. Assign different
novels to small groups. Have at least one A-student and one F-student in each
group so that they all average out above passing.
·
“Reading is a muscle. The more they read, the
more they’ll want to read.”
·
Reading shouldn’t be a chore. Making reading
a skill to practice (and everyone knows practice is the only thing worse
than learning) makes reading a chore. Chores are bad. Everyone knows
this. No one who has ever been a just a student can figure out what teachers
are thinking with this one. How could it possibly be enriching to learn how to get something done that we don’t like?
·
Throw out reading logs.
Amateur and professional teachers agree: reading should be fun
and any activity that makes reading un-fun is to be avoided. Just trust
the experts—people who have been students for up to 13 years, themselves!
Bibliography
Heick, Terry. 12 Common Reasons Students Don't
Read & What You Can Do About It. 2021. website. 13 February 2021.
<https://www.teachthought.com/literacy/12-common-reasons-students-dont-read-what-you-can-do-about-it/>.
Holmquist, Annie. Do Schools Teach Kids to Hate
Reading? 3 August 2017. website. 13 February 2021.
<https://fee.org/articles/do-schools-teach-kids-to-hate-reading/>.
Kristen. How to Make Kids Hate Reading. 2021.
blog. 13 February 2021.
<https://chalkandapples.com/how-to-make-kids-hate-reading/>.
"My Goodness Why Didn't I Think of That." Know
Your Meme. 4 January 2021. meme. 13 February 2021. <https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1982173-my-goodness-why-didnt-i-think-of-that>.
This was an effective post to use satire and humour to help gain a lot of perspective and important reminders about keeping it simple and using very trusted techniques to best get students reading. The humour helps highlight the obviousness and importantance of little strategies, consistent practices, useful structures and effective recommendations. Too much advice comes from non-practictioners and it shows. There is much to take away here and consider and hopefully these reminders help others!
ReplyDeleteI'll have to admit that it took me a second to interpret your post and I appreciated the challenge. I can see that the items listed are actually things that most teachers do to help support and foster a reading culture such as providing lots of choice among texts to read and sharing reading successes - along with others that clearly wouldn't help such as the reading logs.
ReplyDeleteOverall - I think this is one of the more interesting posts I've read and I couldn't agree more with unwanted advice that just keeps on coming. Which practice do you think does the best job of fostering a reading culture school wide?
Hello
ReplyDeleteI do agree that reading needs to be fun and interest driven. Most of your points do line up with best practice of teaching as well as librarianship.
One point that I had not considered though is about the reading logs making reading a chore for students. I had not thought of it in this light. Personally I only use reading logs in conjunction with a contest or as some way to measure progress towards a reward/goal of some kind. However, it does make sense that for those students who are not avid readers, reading and then tracking that reading could take some of the joy out of the experience for them.
While I also tend to get very annoyed at advice from outside of the profession, it is never a bad thing to listen to others input. (Even if you decide to discard it immediately afterwards)
Hi Lisa,
ReplyDeleteFirst I love your sarcasm, you are a skilled writer. I laughed several time while reading this. You have some really great points, and I agree with all of them.
I really agree with your point that anything that makes reading a type of chore needs to reassessed for value, and most likely tossed-out. Free reading (not the assigned textbook type readings) needs to be fun, and associated with pleasure and comfort. If students don't make positive associations and connection with reading, then they will not read when not required to. It is also a good reminder of the importance of setting up a comfortable reading environment in a classroom or school library.
I was in a grade two classroom the other day, and I saw something brilliant. The teacher did not have much space in her classroom, but she had bought large dog beds her students. Before anyone freaks-out pause for a second. They were comfortable (I think they may have had memory foam), durable, made to go on the floor, and machine washable. The best part, and most important part was that they were rectangular. The stacked on top of each other in the corner of her classroom, and saved a lot space. It was pretty amazing to come in a see one or two kids sprawled out on each bed across the classroom, relaxing and enjoying their books.
I also agree with you about the reading logs. They don't inspire trust, and I have seen so many students write down fake numbers, or scrawl things down five minutes before they are due. Setting challenges or requirements of reading a certain number of books in a year (ex. Donalyn Miller's 40 Book Challenge) can be much more effective then reading logs.