The Independent Reading Approach That Worked for Us (and Some That Didn’t)
Ah, the days of elementary school—games of four square at recess, field trips to local museums, holiday-themed art projects, the distinct smell of purple mimeograph ink (we realize we’re severely dating ourselves here, but there’s something about that smell Gen Zers and Alphas will never understand).
One of Steph’s fondest memories of elementary school was independent reading day in fourth grade: everyone brought in a pillow to keep at school just for this purpose (Steph’s had a Little Mermaid pillowcase, obvi) and got to spend time stretched out on the floor, just reading. (Are we now slightly grossed out at the thought of lying on a school carpet? Yes, but no matter. We clearly survived.)
Many of us, when we become English teachers, have fond memories of independent reading as kids and long to instill a love of reading in our students as well. We tend to be readers, and our teacher credential programs inundate us with data on the importance of reading and creative strategies to engage students in literature circles and book clubs. In this age of teacher influencers, we’ve seen plenty of photos and videos of adorably reading-themed classrooms and resources. And the YA genre is better than ever.
But for many years, independent reading was a real drag in our classrooms.
Yep. No cozy reading corners or bright-eyed literature circles for us. Just two cranky teachers demanding silence and lamenting our measly stacks of about ten reading logs for four overfilled classes of sophomores.
Anyone like us out there? Willing to admit that you’ve never really figured out how to make independent reading fun? That you basically gave up and focused on what you could get kids to buy in on?
Here’s the thing: independent reading in secondary English classrooms is a real battle. But, and this took us some time to say confidently, it’s a battle worth fighting, and one in which you can make some progress.
As you can imagine, with a combined couple decades of classroom experience, we did, in fact, try a lot of things to encourage independent reading in our classrooms. It took us over a decade to find an approach that we (and, we think, a decent number of our students) actually enjoyed. But we did find that approach, and whether you’re looking for validation or ideas, we wanted to share our history of independent reading trials and how that led us to a relatively easy-to-manage system that worked.
The Failures: Independent Reading Approaches That Didn’t Work for Us
Before we share the strategies that didn’t work for us, we want to acknowledge that these are tried-and-true strategies that work for many teachers. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them, and we know they’ve gotten many students excited about independent reading.
But we also think there’s value in acknowledging the challenges and pitfalls of common strategies. We don’t always do this in education. We know what we’re “supposed” to do, what strategies a “good teacher” uses, and so we either sit quietly in meetings with our colleagues or emphasize our few-and-far-between successes, unwilling to admit that things just aren’t going that well in our classroom. When we all do that, however, we’re all left to struggle on our own instead of collaborating to figure out what will work for our students.
Reading Logs
Honest show of hands, please. How many of us have used reading logs to track independent reading?
Reading logs are the easiest way, from our perspective as teachers, to assign and hold students accountable for independent reading. It takes minimal time or effort on our end to set up, and if you make it credit-no credit, minimal time or effort to grade.
But it did.not.work. for us. Our students rarely completed them, and when they did, we all knew they were fictionalized accounts of reading that never took place at best and flat out plagiarism (from another student or from page 57 of the book) at worst. Because we refused to accept garbage reading logs, we entered a death spiral of specific requirements, terrible grades, and frustration on everyone’s end. And, let’s be honest, little real independent reading was happening (and our true readers opted out because they found the assignment boring).
Reading Counts and Accelerated Reader Tests
For many years, our school paid for access to Reading Counts! (now retired) and Accelerated Reader, programs where students earn points for reading by passing multiple-choice quizzes. Because—in an effort to align grades with the California state standards, which specified that students would read a certain number of words each year—we awarded points based on how many words a student read, we had students taking tests on ridiculously long books far above their reading or interest level. We also now cringe to think about how wildly inequitable this is when we have readers at a variety of reading levels, reading speeds, and language proficiencies.
Even when we switched to just requiring students to take a test each grading period and recording their score in the gradebook, we had students retaking tests from elementary school or guessing their way through nonfiction texts just to get credit.
Once again, frustration, low grades, and little independent reading abounded.
Summer Reading
Our school tried so hard to make summer reading work—assigning students to watch a film adaptation and compare it to a book, creating a committee to find engaging schoolwide YA reads and develop activities to generate student interest, moving summer reading to “first month of school” reading. Students regularly failed the schoolwide summer reading test, and it became a lot of effort (and money) for, once again, little actual independent reading.
We’ll add as a side note, while we’re talking about what our school did instead of what we specifically did, that for many years, our school tried to make independent reading a part of homeroom. This was a disaster. There were huge variations in how strongly teachers enforced reading in their classes, those of us who did try to enforce it were constantly battling students with no grade to hold them accountable (defeating the point of a “safe” homeroom class), and we fought about it as a staff for years. Do not recommend.
Book Clubs and Literature Circles
We are definitely not the teachers to come to for suggestions on how to make a book club or literature circle work. When we tried them in our standard-level classes, students didn’t read, which meant meetings became an enormous waste of time with poor-quality student work.
In our AP Literature classes, book clubs worked a tiny bit better in terms of participation, but without us there to push and guide them, students didn’t get to the level of depth required to effectively discuss the book on the AP exam.
We know these are pitfalls that can be overcome with time, effort, and lots of revision, but in a job with many battles to fight, this wasn’t one we ever felt compelled to take on.
Creative Projects
We love the idea of having students complete creative projects to demonstrate their comprehension of a book they read independently. But in our experience, students’ final products were often so superficial that even when nicely completed, it was difficult to tell if they had actually read the book.
We spent years refining our end-of-novel flip book project for our AP Literature students, but to produce the results we wanted, we had to make the requirements so specific that it’s not an assignment many of our standard-level students would have enjoyed or experienced success with.
Requiring AP Lit Students to Read “AP-Approved” Titles
In an effort to give our students additional practice with challenging literature and build up their “pool” of go-to novels for the novel-based prompt (Q3) on the AP exam, we spent many years requiring them to read from a list of the books that had been referenced on the AP exam over the years.
While well-intentioned, this really took away from our desire to instill a love of reading in our students, and we had many students who selected books that were far too challenging for them or didn’t participate at all. Not only were students not enjoying their independent reading time, but they weren’t reading the novels with the depth needed to use them on the AP exam, so we weren’t accomplishing any of our goals with this approach.
The Winner: The Independent Reading Approach That Did Work for Us
One summer, Kate read a blog post (we wish we still had it to link!) that inspired her to reexamine our approach to independent reading, encouraging our students to read just for the sake of reading, even in AP Literature.
In addition to our perennial concerns about students not getting the benefits of reading, we were increasingly concerned about the “go-go-go” pace our students (and we) were living at, and we thought it would be valuable even (and perhaps especially) in AP Literature to clear space in our curriculum to show students the power of resting and recharging by reading a book that makes them happy.
We decided to devote one day each week to independent reading in our classroom. Our school already had one “short” day each week where students started late because of staff meetings in the mornings, and those days frequently felt too short to do something meaningful with. Those became our independent reading days.
Students were required to put away everything but what they were reading (we did allow Chromebooks because our district provided students access to Sora, a digital library, but we monitored to make sure students were reading). We played relaxing music, and we all read, us included.
Our AP students loved it. The joy on their faces as they picked up the latest book in their favorite middle school fantasy series made our decision worth it. Many students opted to read our class novel, and their relief at having time to read was almost palpable.
Our standard-level sophomores didn’t love it as much (though some did!), and there were certainly a few students whom we frequently had to stand next to while we did our own reading, but most of our students did read during that time, even if they only read one book all year or refused to move on from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Unlike our years of fictitious reading logs, we actually knew our students were reading something for about 25–30 minutes each week (for this group, we still had them start with our weekly bellringers since we knew a 40-minute reading period would be a challenge).
We also began incorporating First Chapter Fridays into our weekly bellringer menu. Initially, we just picked a book from our classroom library and read the first chapter aloud; once the pandemic sent us all home, we switched to creating First Chapter Friday Nearpods, an approach we continued even when we returned to the classroom.
Because our school’s English department made independent reading part of students’ grades, we still needed students to complete some sort of assignment to show that they were reading, but we wanted it to be more meaningful and less tortuous than the reading logs we’d used for years.
We developed a Reading Check-In form that was conversational in tone, asking students to share what they were reading, how they felt about it, what their reading goal was for the next week, whether the book was meeting their expectations, what the book made them think about, etc. Students had to submit the form once per six-week grading period according to a schedule we posted (which they loved and made grading more manageable for us), and we “wrote back,” asking questions, sharing our own thoughts if we’d read the book before, and offering suggestions to help them meet their reading goals. The rubric for the assignment was based on the depth of student responses and whether they had followed directions, not on their comprehension of the book: all we were looking for with this assignment was engagement with the reading process.
Did this approach to independent reading solve all our problems? Of course not. But it made a significant difference. Reading became something relaxing in our classroom, and we felt we had successfully created a culture of reading, even if some students never fully bought in. The Reading Check-In forms students submitted varied in quality, but they were much less painful to grade, and the conversations we had with students who did turn them in made the time we put into it worthwhile.
Interested in trying out this method for yourself? Grab our Independent Reading bundle: it includes the Reading Check-In form (print and digital) and rubric, our end-of-novel flip book activity if you’re looking for something more substantive, and six classroom posters with quotations about reading from well-known authors.
Want to hear more? Check out our podcast episode and YouTube video where we talk about our ups and downs with independent reading in more detail. Want to join the conversation? We’d love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.
