Recent data shows that over the past two decades the reading competency of American students has lagged. These findings demand immediate action. With all the many programs our teachers adopt and school districts purchase, and with all the debate over different approaches to teaching reading, it is urgently time to reinvent the teaching of reading, acknowledging that it is the key to improving students' overall success in school, impacting every single subject area and our children's future success in the workplace.
This, the 21st century, is the century of the critical reader. The 21st century reader is absorbing the world on a screen, on a mobile phone, on an ereader. More than ever before, every child needs not only to decode words and not to simply answer an adult's questions such as "Who is the character in this story?" but more, much more: to navigate the cacophony of words in a universe of information, opinion and stories. They need to be able to input their own questions in that Google bar, and marshal information that matters to them, and that can change their lives.
The way we've taught reading until now does not match what the 21st century child needs to know, and to know what to do when navigating this complex and varied universe of information and opinion.
Imagine if you enrolled your child in a soccer tutorial and for three quarters of the hour long practice the coach described soccer using words instead of action. In place of drills or scrimmages, players were lectured on the precise angle to hold their foot when kicking the ball, or the theory behind a good offensive play. This is how reading has been taught for years in our schools. Teachers lecture about "reading comprehension strategies" and "decoding skills" instead of giving children the real and authentic opportunities to actually read from varied and meaningful resources in school. They are reading less than seven minutes every day, if that, independently, by the middle school grades.
With this in mind, the simplest solution and the key to stronger reading is to treat reading as practice. Teachers need to reduce the amount of time spent talking about the benefits of reading and allow students to sit down and read. It really is this simple. It is widely accepted that math aptitude comes from working through problems and exercises. It shouldn't be hard to see then that the muscles for reading well are cultivated by absorbing words and practicing how to synthesize new ideas and new information for a new world.
Raising voracious, passionate readers means allowing children to take charge of their reading lives. A highly popular method for teaching reading is the "whole class novel" approach; it has never been proven effective by any measurable data but it is the single most common method for teaching reading anywhere in this country. Researchers (I have a particular affinity for the tireless work of Richard Allington on this subject) have been campaigning for years to say that reading at one's own independent reading level is a dynamic and effective way to build students' reading stamina, confidence and capacity for reading at higher levels.
What I am proposing is exquisitely simple, and therefore not costly. Children building capacity to read at and beyond their levels means they have to read from a deep variety of texts and for a wide variety of purposes, from a video game manual to a graphic novel to a blog on a subject of interest to the back of a cereal box to a classic canonic text. My idea is the converse idea to what has arisen from the ratcheting up of anxiety in our schools' decision makers by poor data outcomes, who resort to the purchase of snake oil remedies when instead they could solve a very simple problem with a very simple solution. It's as simple as this: children learn to read by reading. People get really good at what they do by doing it. Let's bring reading back to the classroom.
Let's let our children read.
Follow Pam Allyn on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pamallyn
1) Do not compete with other parents over whose child is reading the hardest, thickest chapter book. If your child is not ready for Harry Potter, but your friend's child is, let it go. Forcing a book onto a child who is not ready for it turns them off to reading. It also sends the message that he/she is not good enough, and that it is his/her job to impress you and other parents.
2) I always told my daughter that everything has limits. There is a limit to how many toys she can have, a limit to how many cookies, etc. But I told her there was one exception--books. Because from an early age she liked to be like her parents and accumulate her own books on shelves in her room, and "have" them rather than check them out, I took her to used bookstores and library book sales, etc., and handed her a tote bag. I told her she could have as many books under $1 that she wanted, and to only take ones that she fully intended to read. I know that for some families this would not be affordable, but to the extent financially possible, let your child become a book collector if he/she is inclined to do that.
Pam, great article, and I could not agree more!
Too many gadgets and screens these days. Too few books.
I would just add: Let us sit down and read with our kids too!
Pam Allyn is a great advocate of reading aloud as well - and we parents can help a lot, by continuing to read aloud in the family even after our kids learn to read on their own.
Reading aloud is not all about literacy, in fact it also helps to strengthen family ties and improve our communication with kids.
Read Aloud Dad
www.readalouddad.com
But seeing students quietly reading is considered a "waste of time" in the school setting because they don't appear to be actively doing something. So assignments are given to read at home. Like students are going to sit and read for an hour at home, unsupervised? You think parents will enforce it?
Students need to read books at their reading level and just slightly above. Too easy and they don't improve, too hard and they don't improve. This is another fact that parents and even some teachers can't accept. Everyone thinks to improve you must read challenging material. Nope. You need to read just right material and a LOT of it.
This isn't new.
There is no magic bullet.
Reading out loud does not improve reading. However listening to the teacher reading aloud does. Even at the high school level.
The one thing that doesn't do squat is reading software and computer programs. They just move money from schools to the coffers of the private for profit educorporations.
Books.
OH, and LIBRARIANS.
There's your magic bullet.
Read a book. Read a lot. And get a librarian into every school library.
Go to Whitehouse dot gov, to the education petitions and find the one on putting a librarian in every school as part of the ESEA reauthorization and sign it.
Do it today.
I signed it.
Thank you.
Please, pass it on.
Our librarian set up a site so that students can write 2-3 lines for a book review on their selected books.
Instead of this, we have just chosen to pathologize kids who don't just "pick up reading" from the scattershot way its taught.
If children develop an aversion to reading early on, it's a lot of work to get them past this. And most of that work involves going to tutors who have to employ a systematic reading program like the one I've described.
Test-prep is happening in ever-earlier grades. So many US children start school without having acquired a love of reading (or any appreciation for the pleasure to be found in it) and there doesn't seem to be much development of it in the primary grades. For a lot of kids, reading has always been associated with drudgery and frustration. I don't have any advanced degrees to legitimize all the research I've done on this subject, though, so few people in a policy-making position pay much attention to me. They don't pay much attention to Stephen Krashen, either, and he's the guru on this subject.
Our current, archaic model of education promotes it, using ages and grade levels to group students rather than ability levels.
Allowing students the time to read, read what they want and read a lot of it is the only way to improve reading. But they'll all do it at their own pace.
My mother was a teacher and she always said that kids need to associate positive feelings with reading as much as possible at the beginning, because it was often much more difficult to turn non-readers into avid readers later on in school.
As a family we have spent a lot of time in bookstores and libraries through the years, and always made sure there were plenty of books around the house. They really don't need to be encouraged to read because they pick up books on their own. And we talk about the books everyone is reading, too. My youngest just started the first Harry Potter book this weekend, which made his older siblings happy because they're looking forward to talking with him about the stories and characters.