Guiding Readers Toward More Complex Texts
An Equity Project
Right before we were sent home for three months in the spring of 2020, a student was struggling to check out books in the library.1
“I don’t want any other types of books,” the 1st grader exclaimed when our library media specialist Micki Uppena shared that all the Dog Man books were checked out. Her offer of related titles was met with resistance, specifically foot-stomping and pouting. To Micki’s credit, she remained calm as she multi-tasked, checking out other kids’ books.
Reflecting on this moment later, we realized that while student choice is important, a student’s limited beliefs about themselves as readers can also inhibit their decision-making for that next book.
Also of importance is our responsibility as educators to help our students identify as readers, beyond just helping them acquire reading skills and strategies. Experiences like this one led Micki to engage in an equity project2 around a driving question:
“How might we organize the book selection process so that it leads to both student choice and developing their reader identities?”
The rest of this article describes the process along with the experience + our findings.
The Process
Within the driving question, three subsquestions were developed. These smaller inquiries would be more focused on aspects of the project and could give us data to understand its impact. After brainstorming a list of factors and influences related to this topic, three questions arose:
Are students who come in individually more likely to be more adventurous in text selection vs. around peers? (Do they take more risks? Are they pushed outside their comfort zone?)
How can we frontload the selection process to support both goals?
Who will come in and choose the books: as a class or individually?
An additional wondering related to this action research was: what influence do peers have on a student’s book selection? Readers can encourage friends to read a series, an author, or within a genre. This is a good thing. But could they also discourage each other in expanding beyond their limited reading diet?
Micki decided to take an environmental approach to this equity project. With funds from a state award our school received, we were able to purchase books that would be available for students to take home that were “adjacent” to more popular literature.
With books now on order and an initial plan in place, we took a moment to unpack the purpose of this project.
The Goal: To support readers in developing their capacity to select books that were both good matches to their interests and current capabilities, and to become more confident readers who are willing to take “reading risks”.
Expected Outcomes: Kids reading widely and becoming adventurous in their book selection, which can lead to more complex and sustaining reader identities.
The Plan
Identify books the students were already enjoying through the library checkout system, and then order more complex texts within that genre.
Post book trailers online prior to coming to the library so students could preview the titles before selecting one.
Observe students as they perused the new books with peers and eventually selected one title to keep.
The Experience + Our Findings
Students responded in one of three ways.
They selected a familiar book right away.
They selected a more complex text after some consideration.
They became stuck and unsure about which book to pick.
For the last group of students, there was a lot of wavering between a familiar text and a more complex one. For example, one student couldn’t decide between a Who Would Win? series book and a longer informative text about animals. (At first I tried to help him make a selection, but thankfully paused when I remembered that this would conflict with the purpose of this project.)
Once each class of students found a book, they debrief as a whole group with Micki. She facilitated a discussion about how it went for them: the positives, the challenges, and what they might do after this experience. During this whole process, I took observational notes about what students were saying and doing. I shared my notes with Micki after all the classes had come through the library.
We took some time to read through our notes and then form a few conclusions from this experience, such as the following:
Students would voluntarily set up a fair system to determine who would get the one book they both wanted, i.e. “Rock, Paper, Scissors”.
Students usually started out choosing books by themselves, then got opinions of classmates.
It seemed like the more access to books and to book discussions, the greater the student’s reading identity.
What I discovered is that we probably spend too much time helping our students and not enough time preparing the environment for learning. Considering the complex and unpredictable nature of education today, I see the future of instruction more focused on thoughtful preparation and attention to the design of the learning experience. We need to be more adaptive to the changing interests and needs of a diverse student population. Subsequently, that would also mean less lecturing, explaining, and even demonstrating skills and strategies.
As I write this, we are almost two years to the day from when we sent the students home with nothing more than a bag of books and some hope that they would use their time at home to read them. But what did they do if they found a book boring? If so, did they know when to decide to drop a book, and were they successful in finding another one? I fear we have made our students too dependent on school to be learners.
Projects like this remind me that our roles as educators is to help students navigate new terrain, to be challenged and to take risks in order to develop the confidence needed to engage in lifelong learning. Guiding readers to consider a more complex text instead of resting within the safety of a familiar book is a step in that direction.
