‘I don’t read.’
At the beginning of the school year in my high school English classes, I always encounter at least a few students who adamantly declare their antipathy towards reading. When I first began teaching, over 20 years ago, this shocked me. I have long been an avid reader and the idea that someone could dislike such a pleasurable activity frankly mystified me. This speaks not only to my naivete, but also to how poorly teachers are often prepared to grapple with the teaching of reading. From my very first year of teaching, I recognised the urgency of helping students develop into readers, but it has been a career-long journey of trial and error and benefitting from the wisdom of brilliant educators such as Donalyn Miller, Penny Kittle, Lucy Calkins, and the like before I began to achieve some notable success in this endeavour. My latest discovery has been the reading conference, a crucial piece in the puzzle that has taken reading instruction in my classroom to the next level.
English is one of those subjects that encompasses limitless possibilities—and there are many things I desire for my students. I want my students to write a lot and find ways to better understand themselves and the world around them. I want them to develop their voices and find opportunities to make their ideas heard. But most of all, I’ve decided that I want them to experience the joy and satisfaction of reading, because this opens up more opportunities for learning than anything else.
In their beautifully practical A Guide to the Reading Workshop: Middle Grades, Lucy Calkins and Mary Ehrenworth mention the three key conditions readers need to thrive: 1. time to read, 2. access to books they find fascinating, and 3. expert instruction. Teachers face many challenges when it comes to helping students develop a love of reading, from carving out time for students to read independently to making good books accessible to students. Research on reading instruction repeatedly reinforces the importance of giving students time to read books of their choice in school, but one of the most daunting issues we face with choice reading is the instruction piece. How do we know if students are actually reading? How do we assess the learning students are gaining from choice reading and what do we do when we find students struggling? All too often, English teachers are expected to address students’ reading needs without actually being taught how. My very first year of teaching, I realised that I was woefully ignorant when it came to reading instruction and intervention and I have spent the past 22 years seeking effective ways to help students become engaged readers. Reading conferences are one of my latest and most effective experiments in this quest.
I’ve tried many choice reading accountability measures over the years, including reading logs of various formats, book reports, assorted handouts, and reading quizzes on Accelerated Reader, but reading books such as Donalyn Miller’s The Book Whisperer and Penny Kittle’s Book Love helped me realise why those assessments were so unsatisfying and ineffective. If I wanted my students to become authentic readers, why was I assigning them activities in which real readers—including myself—would never voluntarily engage?
I had to ask myself: What do real readers do? One important part of my own reading life is talking about what I read with others. So, I decided to try an experiment and take away all accountability measures for choice reading except for one-to-one conferences with me. The results were profoundly positive.