Lindsey Hancock Warden
Book Access
When I first began working in my current placement, I was more than dismayed to realize that the school's collection of fiction and nonfiction books for secondary students was more than outdated and extremely small in size. Aside from the small classroom collections, there was no school-wide library present from which my students could readily check out books for free. Though our town of Cordova is a suburb of Memphis, it is still quite rural and does not have its own bookstore. My students are too young to drive into the city to access bookstore. Cordova does have one public library, but it is 10 minutes from our school, and the town does not have secure sidewalks or bike paths for kids to safely access the library. The impact of the lack of easily accessible books was clear as I got to know my first group of students, who did not seem to enjoy pleasure reading and generally believed that reading was very boring. Out of all of their tested areas on the state achievement tests, my students lagged behind in reading. Though I had made a habit of giving my students independent reading time throughout the week at my first school, this benefited us very little at first when I moved to HBA.
I was troubled to observe the lack of reading engagement among my secondary students. In an interview with Cindy Long for NEAToday (2016), Judy Newman explains that "the most critical skill for success in school or in life is the ability to read well. Reading is the only way to build usable vocabulary because in books, words are written in a context, with meaning and nuance." She goes on to explain that broad vocabulary forms the foundation that students will use to communicate their ideas to others (Long, 2016). Most importantly, Newman highlights that students are more likely to read books that they actually like. When I read this article, and weighed it against similar sentiments I had heard and read through my Teach For America training and my Johns Hopkins coursework, I knew that access to wonderful books and incentives to read them were critical to my students' academic and overall success.
As I began to research this problem as a teacher in a school without a library, one statement jumped out, “convenient access to reading material, regardless of student’s reading ability, was associated with more frequent reading” (McQuillan & Au, 2001). As educators, statements such as these are obvious given the daily reminders of student achievement we see in class; however, academic findings provide increased rigor to these statements. Moreover, as an educator in an urban area, poverty frequently decreases access to books at home. Income segregation of book access has been shown to cause severe gaps in student achievement (Neuman & Moland, 2019). Here in Tennessee, there are programs like Dolly Parton’s Imagination Libary, which provides early childhood access to books. Yet, once children begin school, this program ends, and it becomes the responsibility of the school to provide adequate access to reading materials (Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, 2019). Armed with this knowledge, I began looking for ways increase access to books in my classroom. Please explore the sections below to see how I have improved access to reading material and reading programming for my students.
Table of Contents
Reading Surveys
I knew that the first step I needed to complete before pursuing greater access to reading resources and materials in my classroom was surveying my students. I posted a brief survey to whiteboard, and asked my students to respond to the questions using their Seesaw app. The questions were:
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What types of materials do you normally read?
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What kind of materials would you like to have in our classroom to read?
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How often do you regularly read?
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What kind of environment would help you read?
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What kind of incentive would help you meet your reading goal?
For some of my survey questions, students did need some clarification. For example, I fed my students several ideas about reading environments, such as bright light or low light, or noisy or quiet, because they were not too sure what I actually meant by this question. My students also needed ideas for question five about incentives, such as class parties, a field trip, or a prize. After clarifying the meanings of some of the questions, my students typed their responses into Seesaw. I have selected a random sampling of student responses to interpret below.
In this sample, the student notes that he is already a reader of sci-fi books and graphic novels, but that he would like more graphic novels on the shelf. He notes that he wants to read outside, and would try to meet his reading goal for a celebration like a pizza party.
This student is more of a casual reader, and is particularly interested in reading about one type of subject: singers. She wants biographies, especially celebrity biographies, to read in the classroom and she reads best with some noise and the ability to be comfortable. She notes that a field trip would help her try to meet her reading goal.
This student mostly reads social media posts, which may explain why she is interested in having more access to books about people her own age! Like other students in the class, she has difficulty reading in complete silence and would rather read with music. She would also be willing to meet a reading goal for a field trip incentive.
After learning more about my students' reading habits and preferences, my next steps were to begin finding resources for obtaining high-interest books that I knew they would enjoy. I was transparent with my students about desiring to increase their reading enthusiasm and skills by providing them with interesting books, so this ended up being something that the entire class was excited about. Please continue reading to find out how I gathered books for my students.
Classroom Library & Range of Texts
I inherited a large classroom library from my first placement school, but it did not travel with me when I moved to Heritage. Therefore, my first step in improving access to independent reading books for my students was to build my own robust classroom library for students to check out books from. Click on the photos below to view some of the ways that I have acquired and organized books for my students to access in the classroom.
As I was stocking my classroom library, I was very conscious of the types of books I was primarily selecting. While free and cheap books are awesome, I knew that my students needed texts that featured diverse characters and reflected their own lived experiences and the experiences of their different classmates back to them. The few books that my school already had on the shelves were mostly classic literature and period literature, like Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and other authors that I find amazing as a former English major, but whose work my students would be hard-pressed to be very interested in given their ages and reading backgrounds. Most of the few books that we did have available were nothing like the books that my students wanted to read. Therefore, I was very intentional in selecting a range of texts that I enjoyed at my students' age, texts that my students requested, and texts that I felt would peak their interests due to the subject, cover art, or characters. I also hoped to select some texts that would help open my students' eyes to others in the world around them. When I thought about my vision for my students to become active, global citizens, I did not feel that only having free and easy access to material by deceased, European authors was supporting that vision. I wanted a large range of nationalities, races, religious backgrounds, and voices to be represented on my classroom shelves.
Much has been said in the literature about aligning curriculum to the culture of the student. However, exposure to different culture also provides great benefit to students. The biggest benefit seen in studies is the reduction in negative attitudes towards other races, since “exposure to multicultural education led to a reduction in students’ racial attitudes” across all ages and SES status (Okoye-Johnson, 2011). This effect is especially true in white students (Hughes, Bigler, & Levy, 2007). Hence, it is important for educators to recognize their role in the non-academic lives of their student. There is a real possibility to remove previously imprinted stereotypes merely through exposure. This means that educators can incorporate this material without needing to overtly preface the lesson with a conversation about racism. In doing so, they become more effective at countering racial stigmas.
Furthermore, in truly multicultural classrooms, introducing curriculum that addresses all of the various cultures leads to an overall increase in classroom positivity and respect (Hurtado, 2001). This was shown in that same study to improve behavioural issues. By introducing opportunities to engage in multiculturalism through access to a diverse range of reading material, I felt that my students would drastically improve their worldview and build their compassion for others.
Given these goals, the following titles are a sampling of some of our collective favorite books by diverse authors that I added to my classroom shelves using the strategies outlined above. The accompanying student writing excerpts, which are located inside of the black boxes, are from their journal docs where they keep track of the "windows" or views into other cultures that they gain from their independent reading books, and "mirrors," or texts and characters that reflect back on their realities from the texts (Moran 2018). When I started this initiative in my class, I encouraged my students to try to find something they could relate to in each new book, and something they were surprised by or learned. It was more than wonderful to log in weekly and read my students' journals about their reading, as I could really begin to see them developing an understanding of how differences and unique qualities between people is a positive thing.
Muñoz Ryan, P. (2000). Esperanza Rising. New York: Scholastic.
This student found many similarities between herself, and the main character of Esperanza Rising. Both are children of immigrants, though the student notes that she is American-born and Esperanza is not. The student also points out other nuances, like the fact that Esperanza works to contribute towards supporting her family, and the student does not. I think this sample is important because it shows that even texts that serve as obvious mirrors can assist students in thinking through topics as complicated as citizenship, child labor, and inherent privilege just from the simple independent reading of a chapter book.
Spiegelman, A. (1996). The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon.
I was rather surprised by this student's interpretation of "windows" and "mirrors," because I did not consider the connection between Jewish people during the Holocaust and someone who might feel ostracized due to being on the autism spectrum. I particularly love this student's articulation of how religious persecution works. The understanding that people can do bad things to others just because of something as small as a religious or cultural disagreement is key, and this shows me that this student is building compassion for people with religious and cultural differences. The student understands that even though Christians can be made fun of or sometimes "have it tough," he can practice his religion freely here without the same kind of risk as other groups of people throughout history.
Alexie, S. (2009). The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie was a fan favorite in my classroom this past year. I think that every student read this book at least once! The following journal entry was one of my favorites, because the student speaks to many elements of his identity and the identity of the main character in the book. I feel that his reading and interpretation of this book demonstrates a keen understanding of how people from many different backgrounds may have challenges in life, and his closing sentence ("it is important to remember them too") demonstrates developing empathy for others. There is not a high population of American Indian people in our area, so it was very neat to see this student make connections between his experiences and a character from a culture that sometimes feels very different and far away for my students.
Crutcher, C. (2009). Whale Talk. New York: Greenwillow Books.
Typically, my students like to gravitate towards texts that feature characters of the same gender as themselves. I enjoyed reading the many different connections this student made in her journal to characters in a book that primarily discusses teenage boys. She makes a connection between the setting, and our actual setting of Cordova, Tennessee. She mentions that the characters are bullied, not athletic, and that one character is adopted. This last connection is key, because my student demonstrates in this sample an ability to deeply recognize and empathize with that character, despite having different genders and races. Through their practice with reading diverse works about diverse groups of people, I believe that my students will be able to transfer these mindsets to their real interactions with others, and potentially experience greater access to fulfilling relationships, community partnerships, and friendships with people they might have initially written off as too different for them to reach out to.
E-Book Access
In addition to improving my students' access to physical books within the classroom and school, I also brainstormed ways to provide two other methods of access. First, I wanted to improve the range of books that my students were able to access because I knew that my classroom library was still too small to meet the interest needs and reading level of every student. Second, I wanted my students to be able to access amazing books at home even if their families did not have large physical numbers of books or the means to obtain physical books from libraries and bookstores. In order to meet these needs, I added two apps to my students' school tablets.
The Epic! app is free for my students to use at school, and can be easily and cheaply purchased by parents for use at home on their same school tablets. This app allows students to instantly access over 35,000 free books that they can search for by genre, topic, or reading level. Though this app is geared towards elementary students, the majority of my students were reading on fifth grade or lower grade equivalent levels, making Epic! an amazing option. I find that it is very important to remember that our students are very technology literature; sometimes access is a simple matter of directing students to the appropriate resources to improve their ability to access things like low-cost, high-interest e-books. Click on the photo above to learn more about Epic!
The Libby app facilitates connecting a library card number from local libraries to the Libby e-reader, allowing students to choose from tens of thousands of library titles and read them instantly and for free on their tablet, cell phone, or computer. Students can access this app either at home or at school, making it an ideal mode of access to fiction, nonfiction, and reference books. This app allowed students with even the most discerning tastes in books and book topics to find titles that were fascinating to them. No longer limited by the smaller number of physical books I could provide access to in the classroom, Libby gave my students the ability to access the massive Shelby County library system without ever leaving their seats. Click on the image above to learn more about Libby.
Epic is a particularly neat app, because it allows me as the teacher to build a classroom library collection within the app itself. It is also completely free for teachers, so as I began to utilize this app for the first time, I thought about choosing books to upload automatically into my online classroom library to supplement the physical books that I already had, and to meet the needs and requests that students had earlier suggested in their reading surveys towards the beginning of the year. The photos below are sample books from two of my Epic library collections. Books about celebrities and graphic novels are two of the ideas my students gave me for books or genres they would like to read. By supplementing our physical classroom library with free, online collections like the ones shown below, my students always had a great book at their fingertips! This simple idea of soliciting my students' advice about books, and then actually following through, totally changed the reading culture in my classroom. Whereas most of my students previously hated to read, many could no longer get enough of it. Instead of going to the bathroom or getting water during every class transition, many stayed as long as possible to open up their e-books or choose one off the shelf. This is the power of putting material that our students actually want to read in front of them.
Another feature of Epic that supports my evidence of increased access to reading material in my classroom is a points feature that assigns points to each book that my students read through the app. In my eighth grade class of just seven students, we set a goal to read 100 books through the Epic app last year. As you can see in the e-mail document below, my students surpassed this goal! This evidence adds another important plank to my access interpretation. It demonstrates that I not only provided heightened access to reading material for my students through building a robust and diverse classroom library, and building an online library presence, but that my students actually used these resources throughout the year.
School Book Report Fair
As a celebration of student reading progress last fall, I organized a book fair to coincide with our annual Parents' Day at Heritage. I drafted a letter for my class, and sent home the attached with each student. Students were to design a poster presentation over a book they had read, and depending on whether their book was fiction or nonfiction, to explain certain elements of each book. For nonfiction books, I had my students discuss how the author organized the information and what they learned from the book. For fiction books, my students identified the parts of plot and discussed the book's theme. We invited parents to come view the presentations, which made it a really fun celebration of the new reading culture in my classroom. We also invited students from the younger grade levels to view the presentations so that they could see that reading was very important to the middle school students. My hope was not only to assess my students' deep dive into a book of their choice, and to let their parents know what we were working on in class, but also to spread a love of reading to other children at our school.
The directions above outline the requirements for my students' reading fair projects. In the photos below, please click to view my students' completed products and to see their excitement over their chosen books.
My favorite part of the reading fair project was getting to hear my students speak before an audience over their books. It was good to see my students so excited to present, and really attempting to be professional because they truly cared about getting younger students interested in reading. I have selected a few sample presentations to include below. These videos depict some excerpts from student reading fair presentations that I feel demonstrate particular enthusiasm for their chosen book, or particular attention to detail that is indicative of the time students dedicated to the book and the preparing of their presentation over it. I was proud to partner with my students to help their new love for reading spark the same love in others!
Introductory Video Clips
Conclusion
In conclusion, access to high-quality, high-interest, and diverse reading material seems like such a simple thing. Many students, and even teachers, tend to take access to something as simple as books for granted because they are typically so widely available in most schools. When I found that was not the case at my school, I took action to improve outcomes for my students. Knowing that reading is essential, and that access to material my students would actually want to read was the only way to get them to take part in such an essential practice, I surveyed my students and solicited their feedback. I used their feedback to stock both a physical and digital classroom library with hundreds of titles. I provided access to a large range of diverse books, and required my students to journal in their Google Drives over what lessons they were learning from these diverse authors and characters. I planned a day to celebrate reading, and my students engaged in a project where they shared their reading with others, including younger students. Thanks in large part to these efforts, my students' reading scores on their state achievement assessment improved by an average of 2.4 years from the fall to spring. You can read more about my students' incredible reading growth in the Quantitative Growth section. When a classroom establishes a culture of reading, growth and gains manifest themselves across the board. Heightened access to free and interesting books allows students to build themselves as readers, to learn about the world and all its many different people, to practice academic skills, and to share their love of reading with others. My simple change in the way things had always been done at my school impacted my students, and those around them, in a lasting and beneficial way.
References:
Hurtado, S. (2001). “Linking Diversity and Educational Purpose: How Diversity Affects the Classroom Environment and Student Development.” In Orfield, G.E (eds.), Diversity Challenged: Evidence on the Impact of Affirmative Action (pgs. 187-203). Cambridge: Harvard Education Publishing Group.
Hughes, J.M., Bigler, R.S., & Levy, S.R. (2007). Consequences of Learning About Historical Racism Among European American and African American Children. Child Development, 78(6): 1689-1705.
Long, C. (2016). Independent Reading in the Classroom Critical to Student Achievement. Retrieved from http://neatoday.org/2016/02/02/independent-reading-classroom-critical-student-achievement/
Moran, K. (2018). What Are Mirrors and Windows? Retrieved from https://www.weareteachers.com/mirrors-and-windows/
Okoye-Johnson, O. (2011). Does Multicultural Education Improve Students’ Racial Attitudes? Implications for Closing the Achievement Gap. Journal of Black Studies, 42(8): 1252-1274.
*Images are personal unless otherwise noted