Now's the Time

Closures Provide a Welcome Opening for Independent Reading

Skylar Devos – Director of Content and Pedagogy

These are strange times. We at IBD are teachers and parents, too, and we know. Our hearts and thoughts are with all teachers and their students right now.

You’ve likely felt the need to step back from some of the highly-structured, work-intensive practices that characterize many of our classrooms; in the absence of these, we suggest that this may be an excellent time to focus instead on opening up the world of student-selected, pleasure-driven, independent reading. But like everything right now, even this raises questions and difficulties. We hope the following resources and suggestions might be helpful.

Why independent reading? Why now?

Well, honestly, we’ve always been big fans of independent reading. Some of you may remember the video (see below) we put together on the subject, and users of our materials know that the first unit of the school year always starts with a focus on building independent reading systems in the classroom. So the question here is really, why choose to focus on independent reading right now?

There are plenty of reasons, but we’ll go with a few obvious ones:

Students who have access to books they want to read (see more on “access” below) can do this on their own with very little face-to-face guidance or instruction.
There is no need to coordinate common readings, established pacing, or end-of-chapter work for students who may or may not have much capacity to engage in that kind of work right now: Essentially, we want to encourage students to read as much as they’re able, and we know that everyone’s available time and access to texts may be completely upended in our present circumstances.
Students who need some kind of escape right now can find it in a book.
Conversations about books between teachers and students, and between students and students, offer opportunities to connect in meaningful ways, and this kind of connection seems especially important right now. There’s no obligation for anyone to open up—that wouldn’t be appropriate —but there is an invitation inherent in any conversation about reading. Tell me about your reading life at the moment. How is this book connecting with you right now? What are you enjoying about this? What’s difficult? How can I help?
Independent reading is worth the investment—and often gets pushed into the background the rest of the year. We get it: Under normal circumstances, everything in the classroom feels more pressing and urgent. Now that normal circumstances have gone out the window, we have a chance to bring this to the foreground and emphasize the significance of simply reading.

Ensuring access to books

The first priority here needs to be that all students have access to books they want to read. For some students, this is never a problem: Well-stocked shelves at home aren’t likely to be depleted in the near term. For other students, though, access has always been difficult, and the closure of both schools and public libraries compounds the problem further.

We know of no solution that is 100% satisfactory, but there are many options that can help close the gap at this time. The drawback is that if a student doesn’t have physical books at hand, every alternative requires a device of some kind. The silver lining is that it hardly matters what kind of device: E-books and audiobooks can be accessed through any smartphone, tablet, or computer.

Your local library’s website is still one of the first places to look. If a student doesn’t already have a library card, many allow online applications that allow the user to check out e-books—and that’s all we’re going for at the moment. The Libby app is one of the smoothest, simplest interfaces for downloading and reading e-books from the library, but students who have different programs on tablets or e-readers can have titles sent to these as well.
Students with qualifying disabilities—including learning disabilities, visual impairments, and physical disabilities—can automatically qualify for free access to www.bookshare.org, a collection of more than 800,000 titles supported by the U.S. Department of Education. These texts are coupled with audio versions and other features.
Like several other resources, OpenLibrary.org allows users to download any number of public domain works, but the really cool part is that users can also borrow copyrighted titles without any connection to a physical public library. A great place to start is their “Books We Love” page.
Take a look at collections of public domain texts, like Project Gutenberg and Google Books. Look, we know that Project Gutenberg may not be for everybody, given that most of its content is at least 100 years old, but there is great stuff to be had here: check out their top 100 list for a sense of what can be found within: Titles like Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, Frankenstein, everything by Dickens or Austen or Brontë. It’s a gold mine for the right reader.
Audible.com has opened up free streaming of a large selection of their audiobooks for “as long as schools are closed.” Maybe you typically prefer your students work with actual text on a page or screen, but this is no time to discriminate. (Even in less unusual times, audio books have a lot to offer any reader.)

There are other options too, of course. Families who have access to Amazon Prime can access a rotating collection of free e-books, and students who have the means to track down and purchase books can always find cheap copies on sites like abebooks.com, ebay.com, and, of course, Amazon’s used selection. Naturally, though, we like what’s free! (Heads up: If you just start wading through free e-books on Amazon, you’ll quickly end up overwhelmed with racy romance novels, so proceed with caution.)

Implementing independent reading

In a perfect world, all of us had a thriving, vibrant culture of independent student-selected reading in our classrooms before any of this happened. Our students already knew what they liked to read and how to find it, and our classrooms had systems in place for us to talk about this reading one-on-one and with peers. But of course, crisis finds us as we are, not as we wish to be, and even if we did have these wheels turning in our classes, they’ve been somewhat upended.

So let’s recap a few key things real quick. When it comes to student-selected independent reading, we like to emphasize the importance of

Student Choice: Connecting readers to books

Of course, entire books are devoted to the subject of connecting readers with books, but for the moment we need to aim at a narrower target. Our question is essentially, given what I know about my students, how can I direct them toward an accessible resource and help them navigate toward something they’ll enjoy?

Again, some portion of your students already knows what they like to read and already has it on their shelves at home. But even these students are probably getting a bit stir-crazy and ready for something new.

I want to start off with two cool resources we’ve been looking at lately, both aimed specifically at connecting readers to books featuring authors and characters from a diverse range of backgrounds. The smartphone app We Read Too is “a directory of hundreds of picture, chapter, middle grade and young adult books written by authors of color featuring main characters of color.” Readers don’t access the content through the app, but they can use it to discover titles they might never have come across before. The commendable organization We Need Diverse Books also maintains lists of lists to answer the simple question, “Where can I find diverse books?” Both of these are worth exploring.

For a large database of award-winning texts that’s easy to explore, the Young Adult Library Services Association has an excellent site that you can browse by award or genre, in addition to more typical search features. And it’s hard to go wrong with GoodReads lists like their Young Adult collection. NPR’s beloved Book Concierge is another favorite, with a gorgeous layout of book covers that makes it feel almost like you’re browsing actual shelves. (Despite the caveat, we all know we still judge actual books by their covers, at least to some degree.) Lastly, it should come as no surprise that the New York Public Library is great at making recommendations: You can browse their staff picks and thematic book lists, and even ask for a personalized recommendation via tweet or email.

Some of these lists and sites are very easy for students to explore—they’re well-designed, user-friendly, and clearly organized by theme or genre. Nonetheless, if you’re able to walk your students through a few of these—for example, in a short recorded video or screencast—that would be ideal. Think of a few different scenarios and show how different readers might track down books that appeal to different interests, and then take a moment to show students how to search for these on their local library site (or any of the other resources listed above). Encourage students to list as many books as they can while they explore, because there’s no knowing what will actually be available for digital download from the library or from other sources—best to have numerous backup options on hand.

Opportunities for students to talk about their reading

Getting students talking and writing about what they are reading is an opportunity to help them enhance both their own comprehension of their work and their own enjoyment of it. With independent reading, we’re not talking about end-of-chapter tasks, daily double-entry journals, or formal final essays. Instead, we want to allow students to get lost in the world of their books, and then to have time to process that in community with others on the other end.

Getting book clubs and book circles rolling in a time like this seems like a stretch (though if you can manage it, we bet they’d be wonderful), so we’re going to approach this with the expectation that students are mostly reading their own individual selections, independent of their peers.

Two relatively lo-fi, asynchronous solutions are emails and forums. At a minimum, you can take our approach to reading letters (laid out in our Creating a Text-Based Culture and Foundations for Inquiry units at middle and high school, respectively) and convert it to email. Again, if you haven’t used reading letters in the past, or if it’s been a while, consider using this session as a framework for a video introduction to the practice. Write your own reading letter as a model or use the one included in the session, and take a moment to explain to students how you’ll respond to their letters when they write.

Better still, get students talking and writing to one another. A simple forum that allows students to share their thoughts and respond to one another would be great, here, and you could post questions that any student reading (nearly) any text could respond to, like “Tell me about something you notice about the main character in your book that makes them ‘come to life’ in your view,” or “What is something that has really struck you about your reading so far?” Ask them to respond to their peers: “What do you notice about their posts that either connects to or contrasts with your own reading? Explain.” Set up your expectations around courtesy and allow students to jump in as they are able. Or, rather than just broadcasting their thoughts to the whole class, give them a specific audience. In The Reading Zone, Nancie Atwell explains that she sets up a system where students write to her for a few exchanges, then write to a peer of their choosing for a few.

Student posts aren’t limited to reading letters, of course. Quick book reviews and recommendations would be great, and if your class is fortunate enough to get to meet up periodically via video conferencing, students could use this time to do a quick book talk about what they’re currently reading. Even if you don’t get to meet up, technologies like FlipGrid are amazing for this kind of work: Just ask students to make a 90-second video of their book talk and post it for the group. (New to FlipGrid? Here’s one of many quick tutorials on what it is and how to use it.) What’s a book talk? Well, it’s about as informal as it sounds: A student takes a minute or two to share about a book they’ve been reading (what it’s about, something that struck them, a bit about the characters perhaps, why they loved—or didn’t love—it, and what other kind of reader might enjoy it). It’s not a formal book report; it’s more of an invitation to one’s peers to pick up this book next.

Again, though, consider what your students have access to: If none of these online options are possible for a particular student, you may need to set up a quick phone call every couple weeks for a simple reading conference.

Ah, yes. The good old reading conference: Still an option during these times! We all have a lot on our plates right now, but if you can touch base with your students on a one-on-one level just a couple times during the rest of this school year, it will likely mean a lot. Reading conferences can be relatively brief: You’ll want to check in to see how the student is doing, of course, but after that you can stick to a few simple talking points to see how things are going.

Debbie Miller recommends some of the following questions for early conferences:

What kinds of books do you like best? Why?
What are you reading now? What books do you have in your stack (or on your list)?
What’s one thing I should know about you as a reader?
How can I help you grow as a reader

Atwell, again, includes some other conversational notes once students are in the middle of something, suggesting that teachers ask students if they’re understanding what they’re reading, if they’re enjoying it and getting “in the zone” with this particular book, or if they need any particular help or advice. Students may need to know that it’s okay to drop a book that isn’t really “grabbing them,” or they may need some new ideas for what to read next.

Reflective practices

Book talks, reading letters, and conferences all engender some degree of reflection, of course, but we like to take some time to focus on a few particular practices. One of these is setting clear reading goals (as outlined in this in-class session) and reflecting on them periodically; another is taking time to think about one’s own “reading autobiography.” As for the reading log, we don’t like to be too doctrinaire about its use: It’s just a log. It’s not a daily accountability form—it’s a way for readers to look back at what they’ve been doing over a period of time, the same way that you or I might look back at our 2019 reading lists on GoodReads. In fact, by all means, if your students are old enough, have them log their reading on GoodReads instead.

Rethinking accountability

We recognize that teachers have likely been given differing expectations from their districts about grading, record-keeping, accountability, and all of the other things that we had easy systems for in the classroom and no clear systems for outside of it. In terms of what you have to do for your district, use any number of the items above for what you have to do. But in terms of what you choose to do and the spirit with which you choose to approach this, our recommendations are few:

Have grace for your students. Seek connection during this time. Have grace for yourself.

If you want to try out some of the things we’ve suggested in this collection, keep it simple and remember that all you’re trying to do is to get books into your students’ hands that they will love so much they want to share them with others.

That’s it.