One of the spearheads of our department at school is literacy. There is a plan in the works to provide our students with forty-five minutes of purely literacy related activity each week. Since I am in a literacy project group at my school, I am involved in providing the head of department and the school principal with advice and ideas on how to go about improving literacy in our students. The head of my department was planning to fill these fort-five minutes each week with student-centred instruction. For example, student A has trouble with spelling verbs, so that is what that particular student will be working on. Whereas student B might have difficulties with reading for meaning, and this is what this student will be working on during those same forty-five minutes. Yet another student, student C might be experiencing some trouble in a particular maths topic and is working on this.
After doing some, albeit quick, research, I came up with a practice called Sustained Silent Reading (SSR). This is a time during which all students are reading. They are allowed to pick their own reading materials and they don’t have to do any assignments or reports on the reading material afterwards. Quite some researchers are enthusiastic about this practice. However, SSR has some flaws. For example, some less motivated students might be pretending to read instead of actually reading. Other readers might be inclined to choose reading materials that are below their actual reading level. Yet other students are continuously walking from the bookcase towards their table and back again and not getting much reading done.
Everything and everyone stops for Sustained Silent Reading.
Kelley and Clausen-Grace (2006) have developed an approach in a key stage 3 class (11 to 14 year olds) to prevent and eliminate those flaws in SSR. Their method is called R5: read, relax, reflect, response, and rap.
Read and Relax:
Students make sure they have reading material with them at the start of the class. They choose a spot to read anywhere in the classroom. Students were not allowed to get up during the reading period. If we could implement this reading period into the students’ schedules at the start of a day, they could be allowed to have their breakfast if they haven’t eaten that yet at home. The teacher logs each student’s reading progress using a class status sheet which had the students’ names, book titles, dates and the page they were on that day. In the research performed by Kelley and Clausen-Grace this documenting took about 5 to 10 minutes each lesson. When the documenting was done, the teacher took some time to sit down with one or two students to talk about their goals and plan sheet.
Reflect and Respond:
In order to control student engagement and the applying of reading strategies, the students are asked to keep a reading log. After reading they were required to write down date, author, title, genre and a brief response to the text. This last bit was facilitated by a number of prompts on the log sheet. Over the course of Kelly and Clausen-Grace’s research, the students were asked to add or change the prompts to effectuate ownership of the log sheet. Sometimes an R5 lesson is started by quickly revising certain reading strategies, this can be combined with the log sheet by asking the students to specifically take notice of their own use of this strategy while reading and writing something about that at the end of the R5 lesson.
Rap:
In this portion of the lesson the students are asked to report to their “elbow partner” to talk about what they have just read. Then the students are asked to report on their elbow partner’s reflection in a whole class discussion. This part of the R5 lesson is extremely important in creating a literate community.
I really like this idea by Kelley and Clausen-Grace. However, there are some conditions for this approach to succeed. First of all, there needs to be a wide variety of reading materials available for the students to choose from. They have to be able to pick something that interests them. Our school library is quite limited, but I can see a fruitful collaboration with our city library on this front. Furthermore, a comfortable and safe reading environment has to be created. This might prove to be a difficult hurdle to take. If we’d implement this in our department, the R5 lessons would be held in regular classrooms with regular classroom furniture. Would there be a way to make the classrooms more comfortable during the reading period? Thirdly, almost all teachers will be required to teach these R5 lessons and they’d have to be schooled in this method of ‘teaching’ literacy.
The beautiful thing of this approach is that it not only increases the amount of reading done (reading miles), but it could also improve reading skills, spelling, and world knowledge. I think, if organised properly, it might be worth a try.
What do you think? Do you have any experience as a teacher or a student with Sustained Silent Reading and/or R5? Let me know in a comment!