During the 2017-18 school year, I got serious about data collection for freed reading. I’d heard enough doubts that what I was doing was making a difference that I wanted some numbers to go alongside the anecdotes and student quotes that I shared. Last year, I taught two classes, one for freshpersons that scored below the fortieth percentile on the statewide reading assessment, the other an Honors U.S. Lit course for juniors. I used freed reading in both courses, and here’s what happened.

I’ll cover what happened with USLH in another post, so let’s focus on Reading Strategies. The students started the year reading an average of about 75 pages a week, stayed there for basically half the year, then really took off, ending the year where my USLH students began their junior years. My target for a typical ninth-grader is to be reading at least 100 pages a week by the end of the year, but they smashed past that. They did the reading, but what did I do to get them there?

Protected Time

Students got time to read every day for 10-20 minutes in class, and I fiercely protected this from intrusions by the curriculum, their peers, and themselves. Their homework every single night was to read for 15 minutes. I checked this once a week, so it was flexible. Have to work one night? Double-up the next night. To check their reading, we converted the time goal to a page goal (see the next section). Students kept track of the goal on these bookmarks, then I recorded the information once a week on a clipboard for when they inevitably lost their bookmarks. I’ve tried tracking reading a number of ways, and this is the simplest way I’ve found to ensure that the students are at least as mindful of their goals as I am. For the “page by” sections, I add their weekly goal number of pages to the page they are currently on in their book. Some students figure out what to do and take it over after a few weeks. Others don’t. If they are close to finishing the book, I write “finish and start” as the goal on their bookmark and tell them to do the math.

Regular Goal-Setting

To make our initial goals, we follow Penny Kittle’s suggestion in Book Love: have students keep track of how many pages they read in 10 minutes, then have them multiply it to get how many pages they should be reading in a week. In our case, it was 75 minutes in class and 105 minutes as homework for a total of 180 minutes. I spotted them five minutes and had them multiply by 18. We are on trimesters, so every six weeks they collected their reading in a log that made the growth visible. I have included this example, so you can see what students end the year being able to see. Here is a blank copy that you can duplicate. It will automatically make the bar graphs for you. I make it as an assignment in Google Classroom so that it automatically makes a copy for each student that I have access to in one folder.

To set a goal for the next six weeks, we looked at their weekly averages. After that first timed goal, we used reality as a basis for future goals. Sure, a student might in theory be able to read a certain amount (and should!), but continually telling students they should be reading 80 pages a week when they are reading 40 doesn’t do any good–even that might be requiring more effort than they ever put forth before. Constantly asking for double growth would be unreachable and discouraging. We honor reality with the rule of 10%. The next goal is 10% higher than the previous average, rounded to the nearest 5 pages. These small wins build momentum. I also don’t set goals above the class target. If I have students reading hundreds of pages a week, I’m not going to keep pushing them greater volume. We’re focusing instead on reading a balanced diet (Don’t know what this means? Subscribe to my email list for a free, 3-day course on it!).

As part of this work, we also celebrate every six weeks the students who read the most average weekly pages, the 3 students who saw the biggest growth between six-week sets, and the growth of the class as a whole. These practices dispel myths about who is/is not reading. And when students see the class average, they are sometimes inspired to step up their game.

3. Systematic, Sustainable Practices

In my free, 3-day email course, I review all my whole-class practices, like books talks and conferring, to support this growth. That’s where the rest of the work occurs. While the practices themselves may not be new to you, the particular ways in which I use them to achieve growth for my students may be new. My approach keeps the practices going over the year and gives you tangible ways to move all students at once toward freer reading.

The Legacy of Freed Reading

The freshpersons represented in this data set are currently sophomores. Many of them visit me regularly. Thirty percent of them have told me that they plan to take USLH with me next year. For many of them, this will be the first honors course of their high school careers. They are all students of color, who are disproportionately “selected” for my reading class and disproportionately absent from my honors course. While there are many reasons they may be wanting to pursue USLH, I can’t help but wonder what role seeing their reading growth played in convincing them that they could do honors work, that they had it within them all along.