choosing a book class survey 1
“I want monitored reading to work, but it feels like I can’t conference with many students… too many of them are not settling during our self-selected reading time; in fact it seems like they are up, choosing a new book almost every day!” (a frustration shared by a 6th grade language arts teacher) Or the students are just plain talking instead of reading — a common struggle I experienced ….
When a teacher I am working with shares her frustration about making the monitored reading (self-selected independent reading) component of our language arts program work, I recognize how much trust it takes to share this perceived struggle. Too often I have talked with teachers who have trouble making their monitored reading time effective; Jo (name changed for privacy) and I decide this is an opportunity to try some strategies that will assist her students in learning how to choose books that will keep them engaged. Since then I have shared these ideas with many teachers, practiced them in many classrooms — mine and other teachers’ — so that we can find a way to engage students in reading and becoming life long readers.
I decide to open the conversation by asking Jo’s students, “What do you do when you choose a book?” We invite students to create a bulleted list of strategies like “read the title”, “look at the author”, “choose a book my friend recommended”, or anything they think about. We encourage students to make this list completely anonymously so they will be open and honest. As students work on their list, I begin to ask for a show of hands for a series of questions. The response to the first question, “How many of you find it is hard to choose a book that you want to stick with?” is initially very limited. So we share some of what the research says: that at the middle school level, even children who used to easily select a book they’ll enjoy begin to find it more difficult to stay engaged in a book. One student makes a personal connection that sounds like she has been feeling there is something wrong with her. As more students share their challenges, we realize we are creating a safe environment for this conversation. After a few minutes we ask again, “So, it sounds like many of us are finding it a challenge to choose a good book.” This time many more hands go up, with smiles. There is a sense of relief in the room.
We then make our purpose clear to the students by asking, “How many of you would like to find ways to be better at choosing a book? Would like to be enjoying reading?” As most hands are raised, we share that this is our goal for them; the time we take to talk about choosing books will help all of us. We want to encourage the students to feel capable and also to create opportunities for them to learn from each other.
I ask students if there has been a time when they did find a good book that kept them engaged. We have the students turn over their anonymous paper and write “I stuck with it” on this side. I ask them to list books they stuck with and also what they did in choosing that particular book. At the end of this first session, I begin to ask students to share some of what they wrote. In this way the students begin to hear from each other some of the strategies that are used in choosing an engaging book. Jo and I also realize that the list of books they stuck with will create a collection of peer-recommended book titles.
When Jo and I tally the students’ responses on the “Choosing a Book Class Survey”, we find some amazing correlations. We use one copy of the the “Choosing a Book” grid to record each strategy students say they use. If a student uses four or five different strategies, we tally each unique strategy. This provides a view of the culture of the class. When Jo looks over the survey, she finds that in her classes where more students are generally engaged in reading, there are lots of tallies and they are recorded throughout many of the strategies. In her class where few students tend to be engaged in self-selected reading, there are not many tallies recorded at all, and most of those are in the simpler strategies of “look at the cover”, “look at the title or pictures” and “read the back”.
We realize we may be on to something: knowing the strategies students tend to use and those strategies that they should be using, we can have class conversations, Think Alouds, and mini-lessons specific to the needs of those students.