Should students read 20 minutes a day?
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
While initially thinking about this question, I wanted to clearly state "no". No, we shouldn't be assigning students to read 20 minutes a day. Mandating a student to read can make this practice feel like drudgery, equated with homework and its ilk. But this issue deserves more attention; it's not that simple.
Yes, I do know the effect that voluminous reading has on achievement and building a lifelong habit. If you Google the phrase "read 20 minutes a day", you will get page after page of articles, posts, and videos praising this practice. Reading log templates sometimes accompany the content. One has to get to the seventeenth page of search results before they can find the first article that questions this practice.
The article I found on the seventeenth page is worth reading. Can Reading Logs Ruin Reading for Kids?, written by Erica Reischer for The Atlantic, cites two studies that demonstrate the potential negative effects of assigning reading to students and using reading logs (a common practice when assigning daily reading).
When rewards or mandates are used to coax kids to read, they may lose their internal motivation to read independently.
In comparison to students who were assigned to read daily, students who are encouraged to read voluntarily showed an increased interest in reading independently.
Still, I understand teachers' interest in holding students accountable for reading regularly. We know that some kids will not read regularly without some level of expectations. So maybe the answer is "no", but what can we do? Consider the following alternatives to assigning 20 minutes of reading per night.
Co-create Reader Expectations with Students
If we can build learning community norms with students, then they will likely have more ownership in what is decided. (Teachers are the same way.) Today, I happened to visit a few classrooms that were engaged in this discussion. One group decided that, instead of expecting 20 minutes a day, they would read 100 minutes a week. "Some evenings, we get really busy," acknolwedged the teacher.
Confer with Students
Students cannot fake their understanding of a book when we ask them thoughtful questions about what they read. With conferring, students can connect with a couple students each day during independent reading time to discuss what they read, offer personalized instruction regarding skills and strategies, and craft goals for the future. The accountability piece can still be a reading log, just as long as students know they are responsibile for maintaining it for that next conference. Teachers generally keep some type of conferring notebook to organize their notes.
Bonus: Check out this Edutopia article for more information on reading conferences.
Reader Responses
High school English teacher and prolific writer Kelly Gallagher shares his solution to balancing engagement and accountability with independent reading. In his book Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About it (Stenhouse, 2009), Gallagher describes his use of "one-pagers" (pg. 82) to evaluate student comprehension. These brief written responses can reveal students' understanding of what they read. Skills such as prediction and persuasive writing are also assessed with these one-pagers.
Gallagher understands as a practitioner that fine balance between student engagement and classroom expectations during independent reading.
If the teacher infuses the recreational reading experience with too much accountability - chapter questions, worksheets, double-entry journals - then the experience ceases to be recreational. However, if students are never held to any accountability, many of them will not start reading.
Co-creating reader expectations, conferring, and written responses to what students are reading seem like reasonable improvements to the tired practice of assigning a set amount of time for students to read daily. What works for you? What do you struggle with? Feel free to share in the comments.