Raising Kids Who Read Read online

  Successful programs for silent classroom reading tend to have certain elements in common:

  Students need at least a twenty-minute reading period to get into their books. Teachers set the duration dependent on the reading stamina of their students.

  Students must freely choose what they read. Choice is enormously important for motivation, but there must be teacher guidance and teacher-set limits. Given the chance, some students will pick books that entail no reading at all. (As researcher Nell Duke ruefully noted, “independent reading time” too often turns into “independent find Waldo time.”) Teachers must not only monitor text difficulty, but also ensure that students are exposed to a variety of genres.

  Students must have ready access to a good number of books (figure 10.3).

  Figure 10.3. Classroom library. Classroom libraries are highly desirable to facilitate silent pleasure reading. Unfortunately, classroom libraries become less common as kids advance through the grades.

  Source: © LiMarie_AK via Flickr.

  Students should have some opportunity to feel a sense of community through reading with book discussions, recommendations, and the other sorts of activities that avid adult readers practice.

  The teacher should be actively teaching during this time: fielding questions, helping students select books, and conferring with students. The alternative is that the teacher reads her own book at the same time as the students, with the idea that she’s modeling what a good reader does. But students can’t see and appreciate what she’s doing. Teachers teaching during reading time seems to be essential. Some of the most careful experiments indicate that without this feature, students don’t benefit from silent reading time in class.

  Setting aside time in the classroom for silent pleasure reading is the best solution I can see for a student who has no interest in reading. It offers the gentlest pressure that is still likely to work. Everyone else is reading, there’s not much else to do, and a sharp-eyed teacher will notice those who are faking it. Freedom of choice also allows the greatest possibility that when the reluctant reader does give a book a try, he’ll hit on something that he likes.

  Given that I’m recommending this practice, you probably think there must be good research evidence that it boosts motivation. In truth, I’d say the latest data indicate that it probably improves attitudes, vocabulary, and comprehension. A lot of the research was not conducted in the best way, and the best experiments don’t always support the practice.

  I think the squishiness of the findings is attributable to the difficulty of the teaching method. I’m sure classroom pleasure reading is easy to implement poorly: stick some books in the room, allocate some class time, and you’re done. But think of the teacher’s responsibilities when it’s done well. She must help students select books that they are likely to enjoy. That means really knowing each child, and a middle school teacher likely has more than one hundred students. If a teacher is going to be able to confer with students about what they have read, she needs to have read the book herself. Hence, she needs comprehensive knowledge of the literature appropriate to the grade level. And although I’ve said that silent pleasure reading is a good way to gently persuade reluctant students to give reading a try, let’s not pretend this is easy. A sixth grader who believes that reading is boring has a pretty firm sense of herself as decidedly not a reader; a teacher must be a skilled psychologist to get around that attitude and get the student open to reading.

  The skills and knowledge demanded of the teacher are one obstacle. A more serious one may be the attitude of some parents and administrators. If you walked into a sixth-grade classroom and saw the students sitting around reading novels, would you think that the teacher was kind of taking it easy? Would you think that the students were learning anything? Don’t be that parent.

  Other Features of Great Reading Classrooms

  Silent pleasure reading is not a literacy program. If it’s present at all, it will be just part of your child’s day. If you visit your child’s class, what else might you see as part of a classroom that will aid reading motivation?

  Teachers who motivate readers are skilled in setting classroom activities that students find engaging and require reading if they are to be completed. Middle and high school students often hunger for school work that is less abstract and more related to their interests or to current events. It takes an inventive teacher to create lesson plans that account for this interest, and are rigorous, and meet school or district curriculum requirements. For example, I met a middle school science teacher who got his students interested in testing surface water quality in the neighborhood around the school. The students liked the possibility that their findings would have practical significance to the people living nearby, and it made them much more open to tackling challenging reading in science reference books.

  Second, as in younger grades, teachers who motivate reading are those who avoid praising performance (“you read that really well”) or student characteristics (“you’re an excellent reader”). As with reward, praise offered for performance makes the student focus on performance and worry about errors, and ultimately it may lead him to choose work that will not stretch his abilities in order to ensure good performance that will earn praise. Better options are to praise a student for sticking with a difficult task or picking a book from a genre she had never tried before.

  Third, teachers who motivate are not controlling. It’s hard for students to be engaged when they know they have no voice in whatever comes next. Classrooms offer many opportunities for teachers to unwittingly control their students, for example, by talking too much, giving hyperdetailed instructions, interrupting students, or making decisions that seem arbitrary. In contrast, students are more likely to be motivated if their teacher listens to them, shows concern about student interests, acknowledges when work is challenging, and explains why work is being undertaken.

  What to Do at Home

  On the early side of this age range—the elementary years through middle school—much of what I’ve said in previous chapters about getting younger kids reading is still applicable, with some minor adjustments that I am guessing I don’t need to spell out. But the challenge is different for middle and high schoolers. Compared to a nine-year-old, a fourteen-year-old has many more opportunities to avoid that home environment that you’ve tried to shape as a literary oasis, and they have a much stronger sense of themselves as “not a reader” or “a reader.” In chapter 9 I mentioned that older children use more types of digital technologies. They also have greater access to them.

  Are Gadgets Killing Reading?

  Most of the parents I talk to are convinced that digital devices are having a profound and mostly negative impact on reading. The research on this issue is more limited than you might guess, because we’re predicting a long-term consequence of the use of digital technologies and these technologies haven’t been available that long. That said, I think the digital age is having a negative effect on motivation, but not through the mechanism that most parents fear.

  Concentration Lost

  A lot of teachers think that kids today are easily bored, and they blame digital devices for making them that way. Why are they to blame? Some observers—including prominent reading researcher MaryAnn Wolf—have suggested that habitual web reading, characterized by caroming from one topic to another and skimming when they alight, changes the ability to read deeply. Nick Carr popularized this sinister possibility with the question: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” In that article (and in a follow-up book, The Shallows), Carr argued that something had happened to his brain. Years of quick pivots in his thinking prompted by web surfing had left him unable to read a serious novel or long article (figure 10.4). This does sound similar to the mental change many teachers feel they have seen in their students in the last decade or two; they can’t pay attention, and teachers feel they must do a song and dance to engage them.

  Figure 10.4. Does multitasking affect the brain? Trying to do two
or things simultaneously demands frequent shifts in attention and could—the theory goes—exacerbate the web-generated tendency to read by skimming.

  Source: © david goehring via Flickr.

  I doubt that reading on the web renders us unable to concentrate, and although a formal poll has not been taken, I suspect most cognitive psychologists are in my camp. Yes, video games and surfing the web change the brain. So does reading this book, singing a song, or seeing a stranger smile. The brain is adaptive, so it’s always changing. If it’s adaptive, couldn’t that mean that it would adapt to the need for constant shifts in attention, and maybe thereby lose the ability to sustain attention to one thing? I don’t think so, because the basic architecture of the mind probably can’t be completely reshaped. Cognitive systems (vision, attention, memory, problem solving) are too interdependent for that. If one system changed in a fundamental way—such as losing the ability to stay focused on one object—that change would cascade through the entire cognitive system, affecting most or all aspects of thought. The brain is probably too conservative in its adaptability for that to happen (figure 10.5).

  Figure 10.5. The architecture of the mind. The adaptability of the mind may be compared to a home’s floor plan, where each room is like a cognitive process. You can expand or shrink rooms without affecting the overall design, but trying to move the living room from the front of the house to the back—a major reorganization—would be very disruptive.

  Source: © Slavomir Valigursky—Fotolia.

  More important, I don’t know of any good evidence that young people are worse at sustaining attention than their parents were at their age. Teens can sustain attention through a three-hour movie like The Hobbit. They are capable of reading a novel they enjoy like The Perks of Being a Wallflower. So I doubt that they can’t sustain attention. But being able to sustain attention is no guarantee that they’ll do so. They also have to deem something worthy of their attention, and that is where I think digital technologies may have their impact: they change expectations.

  I’m Bored. Fix It

  Despite the diversity of activities afforded by digital technologies, many do have two characteristics in common. First, whatever experience the technology offers, you get it immediately. Second, producing this experience requires minimal effort. For example, if you’re watching a YouTube video and don’t like it, you can switch to another. In fact, the website makes it simple by displaying a list of suggestions. If you get tired of videos, you can check Facebook. If that’s boring, look for something funny on TheOnion.com. Watching television has the same feature: cable offers a few score of channels, but if nothing appeals, get something from Netflix (figure 10.6).

  Figure 10.6. Omnipresent entertainment. You have diversion in your pocket, so there is never a reason to be bored, even in the few minutes that these people are waiting for the Metro in the Washington, DC, area.

  Source: © Jeffrey, via Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jb912/6483730553/in/photolist-aSWPcP-dqq4jD-fSELGZ-6DYhtp

  The consequence of long-term experience with digital technologies is not an inability to sustain attention. It’s impatience with boredom. It’s an expectation that I should always have something interesting to listen to, watch, or read and that creating an interesting experience should require little effort. In chapter 4, I suggested that a child’s choice to read should be seen in the context of what else she might do. The mind-boggling availability of experiences afforded by digital technologies means there is always something right at hand that one might do. Unless we’re really engrossed, we have the continuous, nagging suspicion there’s a better way to spend my time than this. That’s why, when a friend sends a link to a video titled, “Dog goes crazy over sprinkler—FUNNY!” I find myself impatient if it’s not funny within the first ten seconds. That’s why my nephew asked me, “Why do I check my phone at red lights, even though I know I haven’t received any important messages?” That’s why teachers feel they must sing and dance to keep students’ attention. We’re not distractible. We just have a very low threshold for boredom.

  If I’m right, there’s good news; the distractibility we’re all seeing is not due to long-term changes in the brain that represent a pernicious overhaul in how attention operates. It’s due to beliefs—beliefs about what is worthy of sustained attention and about what brings rewarding experiences. Beliefs are difficult to change, true, but the prospect intimidates less than repairing a perhaps permanently damaged brain.

  Some people focus less on cognitive changes wrought by digital technologies and more on behavior, specifically the raw amount of time they consume. How can one have time for anything else, including reading? Isn’t it inevitable that people will read less if they devote more time to things other than reading?

  The Displacements

  There’s no time for reading! This idea is not new. It’s called the displacement hypothesis, and though it comes in several varieties, the basic idea is that when a new activity (like browsing the web) becomes available, it takes the place of something else we have typically done (like reading). Evaluating whether that’s true is tricky because lots of factors go into our choices. For example, if you simply ask the question, “Does television displace reading?” you’re thinking that if it does, you’d expect a negative correlation: more TV goes with less reading, and less TV goes with more reading. But the wealthier you are, the more leisure time you have. So even if television does bite into reading time, we may not see the data pattern we expect because both activities are facilitated by free time.

  So has reading been displaced by digital technologies? On balance, the answer seems to be no, although most of the research in this country has focused on adults, not children. Researchers have examined correlations between time spent on the Internet and time spent reading, statistically controlling for other variables like overall amount of leisure time as well as could be done. The correlation in most studies seems to be nil or slightly positive (in the direction opposite that predicted by the displacement hypothesis). Research on television viewing does indicate that heavy viewing (more than four hours each day) is associated with less reading.

  Given the enormous amount of time devoted to digital technologies, how is it possible that they don’t shove reading aside? One answer is that most people read so little there isn’t much to be shoved aside. In 1999, when they had virtually no access to digital technologies (outside of gaming), children (ages eight to eighteen) spent an average of just twenty-one minutes per day reading books. In 2009, when access was much greater, they averaged twenty-five minutes. These data are a little deceptive, however, because they are averages. It’s not that every child in 1999 read for about twenty-one minutes. Rather, some read quite a bit and some (about 50 percent) didn’t read at all. So for half of kids, there was no chance for digital technologies to displace reading.

  For the kids in 1999 who did read, it may be that reading provides a sort of pleasure that digital technologies don’t replace. They like the fun that digital technologies provide, but it’s a different sort of fun than they get from reading. Notably, magazine and newspaper reading did drop during the decade that followed, arguably because that sort of reading can be done on the Internet (figure 10.7).

  Figure 10.7. How television affected reading. When television became widely available in the 1950s, both reading and radio use dropped, but not across the board. People read less light fiction because television offered light drama. People saw television news coverage as thin, so they still read newspapers. This pattern of data led to the functional equivalence hypothesis: an activity is more likely to displace another if it better serves the same function. If it serves a different function, it’s less likely to displace it.

  Source: Wikimedia. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Family_watching_television_1958.jpg.

  So I’m offering a mixed message. Good news: I doubt digital activities are “changing kids’ brains” in a scary way, and I don’t think they soak up reading time. B
ad news: I think they are leading kids to expect full-time amusement, and for some kids, reading time isn’t soaked up only because there’s little to soak up. It’s already dry as a sun-bleached Saltine.

  Positive Steps

  The preceding section leads to a rather glum conclusion. But don’t despair. There are positive steps you can take, even with a sulky teen, that might tempt him to read.

  Shatter Reading Misconceptions

  Danny Hoch has written and produced one-man performance pieces that have won two Obie awards. In an interview, he described one theater-goer’s reaction to his one of his shows:

  This kid came to my show, like, “Yo, homeboy,” with his hat to the side and his pants hanging off his ass. He came to my show four times and paid to get in, and he brought his friends, and I was blown away. He’s like, “Hey, man, yeah, you know, I never seen anything like this. What is this?” And I said, “What do you mean, what is it?” And he said, “What do you call this that you’re doing?” And I said, “Theater.” And he said, “Nah. No, bullshit, it’s not theater. What is it called?” And I said, “No, really, it’s theater.” And he said, “No, dude, if it was theater, it wouldn’t be about me.”