There’s a rather alarming set of statistics in a book that many teachers read as part of professional development activities this past summer.
The book is called “Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters,” by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst. In it, Beers and Probst share data from multiple surveys that show a steady and then precipitous decline in independent reading by young people, particularly teenagers.
For example, a Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report survey indicates that 61 percent of high school students (ages 15-17) and 46 percent of middle school students (ages 12-14) don’t ever get a chance to read choice independent books in their school.
Only 26 percent of surveyed students in the middle school years say they “read books for fun” and that drops to 14 percent in the high school years. In both cases, those numbers dropped considerably from a similar survey done in 2010.
Clearly, something is going on.
The first impulse might be to blame technology as the culprit for taking time away from reading. Beers and Probst acknowledge that the small screens that dominate much of our world, particularly the lives of young people, but they say technology is just one factor in what appears to be a trending drop in reading books for pleasure.
There is also a decline in family literacy priorities — of parents reading aloud to their young children, of keeping a home filled with books, of becoming models of readers to their children.
And Beers and Probst also point a finger at the current educational system, where a Common Core-focus on “close reading” strategies and “finding evidence” emphasis in school texts has essentially made reading a chore for learning as opposed to a path to understanding the world through characters, setting, challenges and beautiful and powerful writing.
When every reading task becomes an act of preparation for a test, the reader naturally sees books and articles and other texts as merely another graded assignment.
They lose their love of reading, the pure enjoyment of story as transformative event.
Beers and Probst’s book — “Disrupting Thinking” — is a call for teachers and school administrators to rethink the way we use texts. They don’t advocate completely doing away with explicit teaching of reading, including how to defend your claims with evidence and teaching phonics and specific reading skills to early readers.
Instead, they push for finding a balance of classroom literacy practice — more independent reading time, more student choice in books, more small discussions among peers, more student-led recommendations and more available books of many genres.
The book has me thinking about the variety of texts I use in my classroom. We read current events news articles with an eye to the world. We read poetry to understanding form. We dive into novels and some short stories, and yes, I explicitly teach finding and using evidence to support what a reader is thinking about is a key element.
I wonder if I am doing enough, though, to nurture a love of reading. Not just for today, in my sixth-grade classroom, but for tomorrow. For the days ahead. For their lives. All research and data show that independently well-read students do better in most educational environments and content-area classrooms like science and math.
A wider reading experience allows you to see small corners of the world that might otherwise remain invisible. Reading helps us be more empathetic to those who are different from us.
I’m rethinking my teaching approach, which is what good books make us do, and trying to identify where my teaching approach works and where it might need some rethinking. “Disrupting Thinking” has surely disrupted me, in a good way.
Kevin Hodgson teaches sixth grade at the William E. Norris Elementary School in Southampton and is co-director of outreach for the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.