Teaching is often a constant cycle of problem solving. How do you get your curriculum to match what your students need? How do you organize your room to support the best learning environment for all students? How do you scaffold, how do you foster independence, how do you do both? And how do you do that all day every day for all students all the time?? If you have answers, by all means, please let me know. For now, I want to share a small slice of my problem solving cycle around independent reading time.
The Problem: For independent reading time, students begin the year by sitting at their desks. Management-wise, this is a great place to start because book boxes and students can be in central locations. But quickly, this seating arrangement becomes too noisy, too talkative, too "exciting" for real independent reading time. And don't get me wrong, I'm cool with my kids talking about their books, that's great positive energy! But 24 excited voices quickly become a circus. So as we graduate from sitting at our desks, we start to Read Around the Room. In my class, that means that students pick a spot somewhere in the room where they can read from their book bags without (too much) distraction. I'm all about student choice, so at first I let students pick these spots. Well, that resulted in us roaming around the room for 12 of our 15 minutes of independent reading time. Wanting to still facilitate student ownership of their learning, I took another approach. We had a classroom meeting about the problem and discussed how we could choose a reading spot quickly and do our best work. Students suggested great ideas, and I filtered them on our anchor chart so that we had a written record of the conversation. After that, we only spent 7 of our 15 independent reading minutes choosing a spot. Progress, but still, we didn't have our eyes on text enough. How could I simultaneously support student independence while also fostering the best reading environment? Telling students where to sit could undermine the ownership they felt in their learning, yet if I continued to let them wander, we would continue to waste precious minutes of reading time where students are developing their concepts of print, letter identification, word identification, and decoding skills. What to do?!
The Solution: After much philosophical debate (mostly internally, but also with my trusted colleagues and ever-patient boyfriend), I found a happy medium between student independence and teacher support. Introducing, Read Around the Room reading spots! I quickly whipped up these simple picture cards, printed out a bunch, laminated them, and taped them all around the room. Then, in our next reading mini-lesson, I taught into our previous discussions...
"Class, we've talked a lot about choosing a spot in the room to do our best reading. We even wrote out some helpful tips to remind us what to look for when we choose a reading spot. Today, I want to show you how you can know if you have chosen a great reading spot. See these cards? These are our reading spot cards, and they are all over the room marking out where we can do our best reading! When you grab your book bag, you can look for one of these spots. When you're sitting in a reading spot, you'll know that you have found a great spot to read your books. Today and everyday, you can use these spots to help you decide where to sit! And once we sit down, we can dive right into reading!"
And guess what?! Students got their book bags, found a reading spot, and opened their books. On the first day, it took 4 minutes. Then next day, 3. And for a week now, it's been a consistent answer to our independent reading problem. Students chose where they want to sit from the available reading spots, and they have more time with eyes on text. And they know they are being successful because they've found a reading spot quickly and have their books open right away.
Viola, so much thought into such a simple idea. But it only came about because I wanted to solve the problem of independent reading without contributing to the problem of teachers usurping ownership of learning from their students. Each classroom is going to have their own answers to these "student choice vs. teacher guidance" questions. I can only speak from my experience in kindergarten, and even then, each class is going to have different needs, different vibes. So if these reading spot cards speak to you, please give them a shot and tell me how it worked! And if they don't, no worries. The only thing I'd say is that the more teachers can debate their role in supporting student learning without dictating or controlling unnecessarily, the more students will see that their learning is truly theirs.
Teach on!