Motivating Our Adolescent Readers

Many secondary reading teachers will tell you that the biggest battle we face in our classrooms is motivation.  By the time our students reach middle school, many of them have lost that love of reading they used to have when they were young.  Remember circle time when you were in elementary school?  The teacher would sit down in front of her students, pull out a book, and captivate every child in the room with a read aloud.  What happened over the years that caused reading motivation to decrease so sharply in adolescents?  In my reading intervention class, many of my students struggle to read because they simply don’t read.  From their perspective, reading has gone from an engaging, exciting experience to a chore assigned by a teacher for the purpose of learning.  Around 4^th grade as text complexity increased and reading became more demanding, my struggling readers had difficulty navigating through the challenges of their texts.  So many of them simply stopped reading and fell out of love with it.

As a reading intervention teacher, I strive to bring reading back into the lives of my students.  Following the advice of Kelly Gallagher from his book Reading Reasons: Motivational Mini-Lessons for Middle and High School, I make it a point to show my students the importance and relevance that reading will take in their own lives.   Some of my favorite lessons in Gallagher’s book focus on the idea that reading makes you smarter.  In one of these lessons, which Gallagher calls “Rustproofing,” he compares playing basketball to reading.  Gallagher explains to his students that when he used to coach basketball, he noticed that Monday practices were always the hardest because his players came back from the weekend with rusty skills.  Having a couple days off made his players not as sharp.  As a teacher, he noticed a similar situation with his students returning to school in the fall after having an entire summer off.  Those students who did not read over the summer became rusty at the skill of reading.  They were out of reading shape.  After making this comparison, he has his students estimate the amount of time they might spend reading during a five-year period.  To do this, students estimate the amount of time they spend reading each day for 7 days, multiply that number by 52, divide the minutes by 60 to get the hour total, and then multiply that number by 5 to estimate how much they might read over the course of five years.  Students are often shocked to realize that over the five-year period, a person who reads 30 minutes a day will read about 780 hours more than someone who reads only 30 minutes a week.

If you follow up the lesson by sharing this chart depicting the relationship between students’ time spent reading and their percentile rank on reading tasks, students can clearly see the impact of reading.  Students who spend more time reading each day have a higher percentile of reading achievement.

Percentile	Independent Reading Minutes per Day	Words Read per Year
98	65	4,358,000
90	21.1	1,823,000
80	14.2	1,146,000
70	9.6	622,000
60	6.5	423,000
50	4.6	282,000
40	3.2	200,000
30	1.3	106,000
20	0.7	21,000
10	0.1	8,000
2	0	0

 Source: http://www.devstu.org/research-individualized-daily-reading

Look at how many more words the top readers are exposed to in the course of a year.  Students who read more have the opportunity to learn thousands, even millions, of more words each year than our non-readers.  Let’s encourage our students to join the Million Word Club and help them see the need for reading in their lives.  Maybe we can help them fall in love with reading all over again.

Helping Students Find Great Books

      In his book, Igniting a Passion for Reading,  Steven Layne argues that it is our duty as educators to help students to become lifelong readers. I strongly believe, as he does, that it often only takes one great book that a student can't put down to convert a non-reader into a reader.  It is the single most important job we have as educators to help students each find the book that does it for them.   I have personally witnessed students enter my reading class --swearing that they'd rather eat their own vomit than read a book from cover to cover --later become so enthralled with a text that they were literally bumping into people and furniture because they could not put the book down between passing periods.  This magic only happens when teachers model reading themselves, share the books that they are reading with students, and "book talk" their books each day. Steven Layne suggests putting a display in your classroom with a cover of the book that you are currently reading as a way to spark spontaneous discussions about books.  A colleague of mine lists the books she is reading under her email signature as another way to communicate her love of reading with both student and staff.  Little things like these can make a huge difference for readers and non-readers alike.
       Sharing technology tools like What Should I Read Next?  with students will also help students to locate great books more independently.  The website provides suggestions for books based upon the "favorites" entered by students.  The website  goodreads is another fabulous tool to introduce in your classrooms as a way to remind students that reading can actually be fun. What do we look forward to most after reading a great book ourselves?  Discussing it with others who have read the same title.  We need to facilitate these experiences for our students.  Everything we do in the classroom does not need to be attached to a worksheet.
      The research speaks for itself.  We only need to look at the latest report card put out by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to be reminded of the
fact that reading more often leads to greater literacy gains.  At a conference this fall, Jeffrey Wilhelm, professor and director of the Boise State Writing Project, said something that truly resonated with me:  "Teachers show what they think is important by what they devote their time to in the classroom."  For me, the answer is simple:  If I wish for my students to become skilled readers and critical thinkers, I need to devote time daily to matching students with fabulous books.  A non-reader is just a reader looking to you for that first suggestion.
 

Book Blessings: Entice Our Students to Read

In his book What Really Matters for Struggling Readers, Richard Allington, an expert on best practice in teaching children who are struggling readers, suggests teachers use “book blessings” to give students a quick introduction to a book they might have otherwise never noticed.  Here’s how it works:

• Think about the young adult books that you have read and enjoyed.  These can be recent reads or even books that you read when you were in middle school.  Gather a few of these books and display them in your room.
• Each day, hold up one of these books and mention the title and a few words of information on the book.  You could even read a passage of the book aloud to the students.  Share with them any information that will get them interested in that particular book.  The goal is to entice students to read.  In a way, you’re selling the book to them.
• If you can bless a few books a week, you will help students notice a range of books that are available and maybe even capture the interest of a student and get him hooked on reading.  Let’s work together as a building to create a literature-rich school environment.  Science teachers, let kids see you reading.  Math teachers, pick up a young adult book and find out what kids are reading.  Let the students see how important reading is to you, and hopefully that enthusiasm will spread.