Holding kids accountable to home reading: Reading logs?

To use reading logs or not to use reading logs? That is the question! 

Our middle school English Language Arts program has a commitment to lifelong reading habits, which means that we expect students to have a book going at home at all times throughout the year. We are also committed to holding kids accountable for that reading, because we know that our reluctant readers need some kind of accountability system to keep them going. What that accountability system looks like varies from grade to grade, and even from classroom to classroom. 

Over the years, we 8th grade teachers have tried many things, but we've always started the year with paper reading logs that track daily reading statistics, and a weekly reading response. Based on the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project's (TCRWP) recommendation, reading logs that track title, author, time of day, number of minutes, and number of pages read each day can become a data source for students to reflect on themselves as readers. Am I only reading at night and falling asleep with my book? Is that the best time to do active reading? Do I read in 5 or 10 minute bursts, when I'm in the car or waiting for the bus? Do I wait until the weekend and read for long stretches of time but don't read during the school week? Am I reading at a good pace, or am I slow (is my book too hard?) or fast (is my book too easy?)? How do I want to improve as a reader?

We only ask for the daily log to be completed for a limited time-- usually during the first couple months of school. During those first months, students do some analysis to look at their reading habits and evaluate how well they are meeting their goals. Later, we back off and ask students to track number of minutes and number of pages read each week, which they report along with their weekly reading response.

Here's the thing: Kids HATE reading logs! The good readers hate them because they just want to immerse themselves in their reading and not bother with tracking their minutes and pages. The struggling readers hate them because it's tedious and it shows that they aren't actually doing the reading they are supposed to. Mostly, it just seems like busywork without purpose. 

This led my colleague and me to really re-think reading logs this year. Something needed to change. Either we make the value of reading logs clearer to students (as TCRWP explains, just like athletes keep stats to find what's working and what needs improvement, so can readers use these stats to become better readers), or we find another way to hold students accountable for their reading. 

That thinking led us to this question: What do adult readers do when they want to have an active reading life? As active adult readers, here is what we do:

• We keep track of the books we read on a social media site (I use Goodreads). I post up a book when I start it, and then review it when I finish it.
  
• We talk about the books we read with others. I have been a member of an adult book club for almost 20 years. Knowing that I have to discuss a particular book on a particular day (and have something to say about it) holds me accountable to reading and thinking about that book.
• We get suggestions for our next reads from friends, through social media (like Goodreads) or from Amazon.com ("Customers who bought this item also bought..."), or by exploring more books by the same author.

Here is what we don't do: Keep a daily reading log, even a weekly reading log, of minutes and pages. We log the books we are reading as we change books. We are held accountable because we have people in our lives that follow our reading and talk to us about our books.

Yes, but... middle school students do need a little more accountability structure than I do as an adult reader with well established lifelong reading habits. Our compromise:

1. Students need to read at least 100 minutes (about 100 pages) each week. They will need to track this somehow on their own. They can decide when those minutes happen, although I will recommend that it's not all one chunk of reading on the weekend (there is value to smaller but more frequent practice).
2. They need to think about their reading, and show that thinking in a weekly reading response. I am afraid that waiting until the book is finished will result in very little writing about reading for reluctant readers. Writing weekly will keep them accountable for reporting their reading minutes/pages, and having to say something about what they read means they have to have read something. I will give them in-class time to complete this for the first month.
3. Writing about reading is a pointless task unless you use it as a way to communicate your thinking to others. We are going to have kids get into small Reading Clubs (3-4 students) who will hold short book discussions on Thursdays. We'll ask them to write their response first, and then discuss their books with others. 
   
4. Their written responses will be on Google docs, which they will share with members of their group (and me), so they can go back and see what they each read if they need a next book suggestion. We used to use Shelfari, which was a super easy and attractive platform, but they have merged with Goodreads and are not in use anymore. Goodreads is not very student friendly, and Google docs is familiar and easy for the kids because we use it all the time.

We are launching this next week. I hope the social aspect of Reading Clubs makes their home reading feel more fun and purposeful (and hold them accountable for doing their reading). I was reluctant to give up class time at first (so much to do! so little time!), but if I value the home reading program (which I do), then I should devote class time to it. We can ease off of weekly Reading Club time, and turn it into monthly Reading Club as habits get established. 

What do you do to hold kids accountable for reading at home? How do you track what and how much kids are reading? Do you use reading logs?

Constructing Social Justice Concepts Through Reading

I have been reading student blog posts centered around the social justice theme questions from our Nonfiction Reading unit. Throughout the unit, students needed to answer the three thematic questions using their NF book for text evidence support. The three questions are:

image from goodreads.com

• To what extent does power or the lack of power affect individual?
• What creates prejudice and what can an individual do to overcome it?
• What allows some individuals to take a stand against prejudice/ oppression while others choose to participate in it?

It has been a journey for some students to construct answers for these questions. All of them have gotten better with identifying who has/lacks power and who takes a stand against/participates in prejudice. They can point to moments in their books where people were treated unfairly due to their race, age, or gender. They are even seeing how the characters' lives are affected by this treatment and times when they've made attempts to overcome prejudice.

The harder part is constructing the general answer behind the example, to come up with ideas such as "Lacking power pushes some people to action to gain the power they deserve", or "Prejudice is often created through the environment they've grown up in and their family's beliefs", or "The best way to overcome prejudice is to get lots of people on your side to protest against it". These abstractions are slowly built through book discussions, targeted questions during conferences or blog comments, by reading others' blog posts, and by mixing up book groups so connections can be made between books with similar themes.

Most students were able to finally construct generalized answers by the end of the unit. Some never quite got there. I think there is a bit of a developmental divide there. For all students, though, the time spent thinking about social justice issues is time well spent. It opens a little window into our imperfect world so they can look at modern-day situations with a more critical eye.

Or will they just compartmentalize all that thinking into "stuff I needed to know during the NF unit"? 

image from npr.org

I just finished reading Delirium by Lauren Oliver, a dystopian novel in which 18-year-olds are "cured" of the dangerous disease of love. Throughout the novel, Oliver constructs societal norms through propaganda, starting with revised nursery rhymes in childhood, through citizenship training in the schools, through reading Romeo and Juliet as a cautionary tale, through police raids and media messages. This propaganda blitz means that young people grow up eagerly anticipating the cure "procedure" so they can live future lives that are safe, predictable, and "happy". Of course the main character rebels against this, otherwise we wouldn't have a story.

But I was fascinated by the construction of the society, and how the social justice theme questions so neatly dovetailed into the events of the story. What creates prejudice (or thought control)? How can an individual take a stand against it? If all of society believes in the rightness of a wrong, what does it take to break out of that individually as well as systemically?

I hope that some of my students will begin to notice parallels between the books they are reading and the "big questions" we talk about in class. I hope that they notice parallels between the "big questions" and the events in our modern world. I hope they examine their own lives for bias or participation in oppression, and find ways to take a stand.

Student Feedback About Blogging in Book Clubs

I wanted to come back to Blogging in Book Clubs one more time, this time to share student feedback about the experience. Their last post for the unit was a response to what they learned by reading another student's post. In the student sample below, the student made some very sophisticated connections between his book Farewell to Manzanar which dealt with Japanese-American interment during World War II, and another book, Getting Away with Murder, which described the Emmett Till murder case in 1955:

While I was reading Abdullah’s power and the lack of power blog, i realized that there were many in his book which were related to mine, even though the settings and the plot of the stories were different. First of all, I noticed that the amount of power that the US government had over the Japanese Americans in Farewell to Manzanar was the same as the amount of power that the whites had over the blacks in Getting Away With Murder, and that this was certainly an abuse of power. This abuse of power however, led to inspiration for both the blacks and the Japanese Americans to stand up against this abuse, like for example when a couple months after all of the Japanese Americans were put into Internment camps, thousands of them decided to stand up against their abuse so they started huge mobs and riots inside Manzanar. By reading Abdullah’s blog, i was able to relate and connect to many of the events in his book to mine. I also learned that there were several other races that were discriminated in the US throughout the history of America apart from Japanese Americans.

Later, I asked students to do a quick reflection on the unit using a "3 stars and a wish" format, usually 3 things they learned or liked, and one suggestion or thing they wished had been different. This time I asked for one "I learned", one "I liked", one comment about the blog, and a wish. Here are the top types of comments about the blog experience:

Deepening understanding:

• I was able to understand the Social Justice Question better by reading other people's answers. 
• Blogs helped me have a clear understanding about my book. 
• I learnt many different points and it made me think in different ways. 
• I thought the blog helped us learn about others' issues and writing and analyze our own.

Tech skill: 

• I learned how to make and format a blog post correctly.

Writing to learn:

• It helped me express my thoughts more clearly. 
• I liked the blogs because it made organization easy. 
• I liked how we could express our own interpretation of the social justice questions. 
• Blogs were good for writing down our thoughts.

Engaging: 

• I really enjoyed doing the blogs. 
• I liked being able to blog rather than write in a notebook. 
• I liked the blog because I have bad handwriting. 
• The blogs were a fun way to share information. 
• I liked how easy it was to share ideas on the blog.

Discussion forum: 

• I thought that it was a safe and fun way to talk about your book. 
• I liked using blogs because you can have a proper conversation and this way you won't forget what you've said. 
• I believe blogs were a good way to communicate and share different opinions. 
• I liked the blog because we could have a discussion on it over more time instead of class.

Negative reactions:

• I wasn't very fond of blogging; I would rather write it down. 
• I don't like blogs because it piles on the amount of work that had to be done. 
• The blog work was good but people should've been more reflective. 
• The blogs were hard to remember to do. 
• I think we could have used the blog in better ways by having more cyber discussions.

So not everyone loved blogging. That's OK. I'll probably structure it better next year, now that I know what I'm doing. In general, though, most students liked the blog and found it to be beneficial in some way. It's good to hear from them what worked and what didn't work.

Student Blog Samples for Nonfiction Reading

image from kidblog.org website

We are entering our fourth and final week of the Nonfiction Reading unit, using blogs as a response tool. As I explained in my March 29 blog, Launching Blogging During Book Clubs, students are reading nonfiction social justice books in a book club structure, and responding through face-to-face discussions, Reading Notebook summaries and vocabulary work, and through our class blog using Kidblog. Students have used the blog in several different ways. Here are some samples at different levels of thinking:

Students started by doing some background research on the social justice issue reflected in their book: civil rights, Japanese internment, or child labor. They blogged about their learning, and then read and commented on the others in their same-text group. Below is a pretty average blog post (picture not shown, but there is a link included) about the civil rights issue with a better-than-average comment. I like how the blogger very succinctly summarizes the main idea of Nonviolent Social Change, and answers the prompted questions about public awareness and freedom of speech in a smooth way. I like how the commenter picks up on freedom of speech and pushes the blogger to think in a new way about the implications, linking it back to the Six Principles.

For our book club, we are reading a non-fiction books about black civil rights. I have researched about civil rights, to further understand the book. Mostly involving Dr. King Jr. Martin Luther King’s teaching on the theory of nonviolence, called the “Six Steps of Nonviolent Social Change.”  He shows, in these six steps, the way to protest for civil rights without violence. Instead of fighting violently, Martin Luther King Jr. instructed the blacks to fight mentally against the whites. Dr King states that one should not protest against the person doing evil, but the evil itself. Public awareness helps in the fight for their cause, because if more people hear about the protests than more people can share their thoughts on the subject. Luckily freedom of speech is one of the promises of America, because without freedom of speech all the blacks protesting would have been arrested and put in jail, or killed. In the photo shown under, the practice of nonviolence is shown. The blacks in the picture are shown holding up signs to protest against segregation, instead of physically fighting the whites.

I can see you understand the Six Principles of Nonviolence very clearly. However, you seem to think big of freedom of speech. If everyone should have equal freedom of speech, doesn’t that mean a white man could say anything to a black man? How would the black man respond, or react, to that? And how would that reaction fit the Six Principles of Nonviolence, which aspects specifically?

Once students got into their books, they broke it into four parts. For each part, they had to choose one of the thematic social justice questions and blog about how their book answers it. Below is a bare-minimum blog about child labor, answering the question: What allows some individuals to take a stand against prejudice/oppression while others choose to participate in it? The commenter, who is reading a different book about a different issue, gives a positive response but has a limited understanding of what "digging deep into the question" should look like.

In the book “Kids at Work”, the only person who took a stand against child labor was Lewis Hine. But many people participated in child labor because they were business owners who wanted profit for the kids working. Hine took the stand against child labor because he knew that is was wrong for children’s lives to be wasted away by work instead of a meaningful education.

good description and really good digging deep into the question

Students discussed their book and their responses to the social justice questions in same-text and mixed-text groups after each of the four parts. After reading their blogs on each of the three questions, I noticed a general trend that students did not answer the first part of one of the questions: What creates prejudice/ oppression, and what can an individual do to overcome it? Usually students explained what the prejudice/ oppression was in their books, and then talked about attempts to overcome it. This difficulty with cause-effect relationships is something I'd also noticed in Social Studies. I asked them to discuss the cause of their issue within their third same-text book club, and then blog about what they learned, wondered, or understood in a new way based on the discussion. The blog sample below is from a more advanced student who already had a good understanding of the cause of racism; however, I like how he showed his open-minded approach to his group members and added new thinking in his blog post. The commenter, a very advanced student who is reading a different book about the same civil rights issue, found a connection between their books, and added a provocative question to push the blogger even further into the issue of racism.

Today, in our discussion, we discussed the second essential question (What creates prejudice and what can an individual do to overcome it?) and what we wrote as a response to the question. At first, I said that segregation existed because of slavery and how the laws that supported were abolished but the idea of blacks being “lower” than whites never went away. After discussing that with my group they had similar ideas but I learned that it was also because mistreating blacks had almost become a way of life for the whites and it was how they were expected to act and it was also how they were raised, even though    this didn’t apply to all white, since some were more sympathetic than others.

I like how you explained that discrimination had become part of the lifestyle of white people. I agree as I have found in my own book, “The Voice That Changed a Nation”, that racial segregation in the United States had much to do with a sort of discriminatory tradition that ensured that blacks were always below whites in society. Do you think that earlier ideas of blacks being below whites by some natural order affected people even as recently as the 20th century?

Blogging during book clubs has had unexpected advantages for me as a teacher. Students' thinking is so very clearly visible, unlike a discussion where I miss 80% of what students say because I am bopping from group to group and their words disappear once they are spoken. I can access their thinking at any time from any place, and give them individual feedback via comments. It has also allowed an opportunity for differentiation, especially pushing my higher-level students to make new connections and dig deeper into issues. It supports lower-level students as well, because as they read the thinking of their peers, their comprehension is solidified and broadened.

Despite my earlier trepidations (see March 16th: Blogging in Book Clubs), I am pleased with the outcome of this technology integration. It has lifted the level of thinking, writing, collaboration, and my ability to give feedback beyond what was possible through talk and Reading Notebooks alone. Kidblog is easy to use and looks professional. This is definitely one technology integration plan that worked!