Reading Reasons, Continued

Continuing with my reading of Kelly Gallagher’s work, I want to reflect on the next three of his building blocks for turning kids into readers.

His fourth building block is for teachers to stop grading everything they assign. This may seem like letting students off the hook, but not grading does not need to be the same thing as making them unaccountable. In my many (many, too many) years of teaching college writing, I came to dread each new pile of papers or exercises my assignments generated.

“If you assign it,” I used to say, “you have to grade it.”

How foolish I was. I eventually invented ways to make my adult students accountable for their work through, in addition to other means, classroom exercises. Students worked in pairs or small groups with material they had had to prepare before class. They were, in other words, accountable to one another and, as I floated from group to group, to me.

Gallagher only grades about ¼ of what he assigns. Check out Reading Reasons for the creative ways he holds students accountable for the work he does not grade. Not burning himself out grading everything allows him to give meaningful feedback on the work he does grade. This is essential whether you are teaching reading or writing.

His fifth building block is to provide structure to his reading program. He has his students keep a reading log and, frankly, as I read this I thanked heaven that I am not a high school teacher. Keeping track of four or five sections of teenage logs seems much more than daunting to me. I am not a regular classroom teacher. At the longest, I’m with students 90 minutes a day for a week or two. Reading this section and a recent visit to my son, who is a high school social studies teacher, reminded me of why teachers should be paid much more than they are.

The sixth building block leads into the guts of Reading Reasons: Kids have to understand what reading has to offer them. I'll be looking at some of those reasons as I go on trying to make this blog a bit more of a habit.