The Pyre

Developing lifelong reading habits in my students has always been a goal of mine. Along the way, other educators have inspired me with their reflections on evoking lifelong reading habits, including Donalyn Miller. I read Reading in the Wild a few years ago, but what I learned from this book continues to inform my teaching today. Shortly after reading this book, I collaborated with a colleague to create a framework for developing lifelong reading habits, which I shared in this blog post . I've been honing this framework every year since its inception. I'm sure I'll never be completely satisfied, but I hope that my efforts will pay off for my students for years to come. This quarter, my students and I have been making reading goals and monitoring our progress towards those goals. While readers make all kinds of reading goals, I started simple: I asked my students to make reading goals based on pages read by mid-November and the end of the semester. Then, they went back ...

Why read? As a high school English teacher, teaching students WHY to read is just as important as HOW to read. Inspired by Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher , I dedicate class time to developing lifelong reading habits in class. The first habit is seeking out and self-selecting reading material. One of the most important things I can do to support this habit is model it, so I show students how I use GoodReads as a method for finding books. I use this website (or app on my phone) nearly every week. If somebody I know suggests a book that sounds interesting, I add that book to my To-Read shelf on GoodReads. I currently have 70 books on this shelf, so when I retire, I have LOTS of options for reading material! In fact, while students were using GoodReads in class, I noticed a few of them rated This is Where It Ends   by Marieke Nikamp    highly. As I asked them about the book, it captured my attention, so now, this book is on my To-Read shelf! Some students don't...

A few years ago, I felt I was hitting my stride in developing lifelong readers. Inspired by Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide and Donalyn Miller’s Book Whisperer , I had given up on trying to “catch” kids who weren’t reading their outside reading books; instead, I focused my energy on observing my students as they read self-selected books in and out of class.  Then, things changed. Leadership in my department changed. Standards changed. Assessments changed. And I cowed to those changes. At the end of the 2014-2015 school year, my students completed a during-reading assignment over their outside reading book, which they selected from lists of banned and challenged books. The end assessment was an in-class writing, a letter to the district library coordinator advocating for the book to be included in high school libraries or requesting that the title be pulled from the shelves. In theory, this seemed a great assignment. It was aligned with the Kansas CCR standards, which requires st...