During my grad school-required classroom action research, I posed the question: How to engage middle school students in independent reading? Through reading conferences, journal writing, and classroom discussion, I begin to explore what students do to choose a book for enjoyment.
I also decide to ask two students to be co-researchers with me each day. During self-selected reading (15 minutes of the language arts period), I choose a student who is usually on-task and one who is often restless, and ask both to observe their classmates. They sit with a clipboard and a log sheet with two simple directives: “Observe someone who is not reading. What are they doing instead?” and “Choose someone who is reading: How do you know they are reading? (not pretending?)”
Because I am writing an action research paper for the grad class, I keep an audiotape recording of my reading conferences with students and at the end of class I briefly interview two or three other students. I choose to interview students who have been on task and those who were clearly not engaged. Each afternoon I listen to the tapes and transcribe key comments. In this way I have multiple perspectives of each day: my student co-researchers’ observations, my observations, and the taped interviews.
I ask Lisa* to be my co-researcher the first time. She is a quiet student, who has had several awkward moments this year when she felt she didn’t fit in. She quietly confessed she “read(s) too slow”, not realizing others read at the same pace. She came to school with braces one day and a month later with glasses. There were many self-conscious, uncomfortable days before she adjusted to her new features. In spite of this, she is cheerful and hard-working, so she eagerly accepts the “job.” Recently, I book talked about Just Ella (by Margaret Peterson Haddix, Simon & Schuster, 1999) and Lisa requested to read it, as I knew she would. During Monitored Reading (MR- our self-selected reading time), she looked around more than she read her book. Eventually she replaced it on the bookshelves and sauntered back to her desk. After class I asked Lisa what happened. Her eyes met the ground as she whispered, “It was too hard to get into.” I know Lisa is interested in books and wants to read, but for some reason it is hard for her.
I want Lisa to observe the readers and non-readers during MR so she can see what an engaged reader looks like. When she is the co-researcher, Lisa is able to document engaged readers –it seems she knows what on-task behaviors look like. Her log records three readers she observed:
“Leo* is reading his book with his head down, really focusing on the story. Mark* is head down reading his book and enjoying it. Jill* [Lisa’s good friend] is reading her myth and is so into it that she doesn’t even look up when I pass her.”
A few days after being my co-researcher, Lisa is written up by another co-researcher who chose to observe her as a model of someone who is reading:
“Lisa looks like she’s into a book (eyes move; plain, bland face; usually holding book with one hand and leaning her head on the other. She smiles every once in a while like her book is funny.”
Lisa’s reading log shows she has read several thin books (usually less than 50 pages) – some are information books on animals, storms, or photography. Other books are fantasies like Stellaluna, (by Janell Cannon; Scholastic Inc., 1993) or The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (by Jon Scieszka; Scholastic, Inc., 1989). Lisa read a light-hearted novel, Crash, by Jerry Spinelli (Dell Yearling, 1996), after she heard me read large chunks of the book as a read aloud. When the book was placed on the class bookshelf, Lisa selected this for MR and took several weeks to finish it. Her next three MR novels are not completed according to her log record. After a few more thin books, Lisa finds the author, Lemony Snicket, and becomes engaged in “A Series of Unfortunate Events” (The Austere Academy. Scholastic, Inc., 2000). According to her journal, Lisa knows she “wants to find comical books.”
Even without the purpose (or pressure) of a grad class, I found using the idea of setting up a “co-researcher” seemed to benefit my students on other occasions. Thinking they are helping me gave them a purpose to learn from their peers…. And become more self-aware in the process.