Technique 23: Accountable independent reading - Lesson structures

Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 23: Accountable independent reading
Lesson structures

Independent reading is critical to student success in every subject. It is a base operating system that supports nearly every academic endeavor. Even a problem-set in math assesses, in some part, students' ability to independently read a short passage about drawing colored beans randomly out of a bag or the details of how many lawns Tyson mowed when.

As they progress toward adulthood, advanced study, and professional careers, students must be able to read complex texts specific to each discipline independently, even when those texts are challenging. To be a lawyer, a scientist, or an engineer is to be prepared for texts not necessarily designed to engage the reader or yield their meaning easily. If students cannot sit down and successfully make thorough sense of such texts on their own, their horizons will be constrained.

Maryanne Wolf points out in Reader Come Home that independent reading is also critical to building the capacity to sustain attention and concentration.13 Learning to read deeply and well “rewires the brain,” she says, creating “sophisticated neural circuits” capable of reflection, concentration, and empathy. A fractured half-attentive society shouting at one another, in other words, is one outcome of a culture that does not read much.

And young people increasingly do not read. A 2020 study by the Literacy Trust in England found the lowest rates of student independent reading so far recorded.14 When students do read, they typically read in states of distraction: on the couch with a smart phone buzzing away on their stomach, say.15 To read and half-attend or vaguely understand is an increasingly normal cognitive state. Being distracted trips no internal alarms.

Providing periods of sustained, focused independent reading, especially with challenging texts, is among the most valuable things teachers can do in school, in every subject, and at every grade level. For many students, school is increasingly the only place this activity is likely to happen—there are few other places safe from the reach of technological distraction.16

However, many teachers don't ask students to read in class because students don't do it productively or they—or their administrators—don't think of it as a form of teaching.

Accountable Independent Reading (AIR) is a set of tools to ensure that independent reading during class is successful and productive. It has three tenets. First, assign reading in smaller durations at first in order to make adaptive decisions based on how well students read an initial sample (or samples). Second, assess intentionally, ideally through observable tasks, to make decisions about how effectively or how much of a given text students can read on their own. Third, embed the reading within the arc of the instruction so it is not a separate activity but rather one where ideas apply and connect to the rest of the lesson.

Much of the rationale for this approach comes from the recognition that students' ability to read independently is not static—it depends on the text they are reading and varies given their own background knowledge and experience with different forms of syntax.17

Further, the goal is for students to read attentively and with understanding when they read as much as it is to increase the amount of their reading. The habit we want to build is of focused attentive reading.

You can see an example of this in the video Nicholas Hermann: Forces. Nick has added an article to his lesson plan for his fifth-grade Science students to read. Great idea. Scientific texts read differently from other writing. It's great practice for students to read within the discipline. The article describes the forces that affect the flight of a baseball. Nicholas is very clear that they're going to start with just four paragraphs. He wants to make sure they can spot the two forces (gravity and air resistance) acting on the ball. He's prepped the text in advance, so the segment is easy for students to see “You're going to stop right next to that number three.” His annotation task—put a box around the two forces acting on the baseball—allows him to clearly see if students are able to comprehend this kind of scientific writing.

Why that can be difficult is deftly revealed by the second round of AIR he assigns: read the next section and place a star next to the line that explains how a scientific law is different from a government law. “Law” is an apparently simple word that means something different in a scientific context, just the kind of barrier to understanding that the “curse of knowledge” might cause a teacher to overlook. But with two careful tests like this Nicholas will know: Can I give my students longer reading assignments? Can they learn reliably from this kind of reading? If they can, he can pause during a typical lesson and, rather than saying, “Let me explain to you how electricity works,” he can say, “Let me give you a short article that will explain how electricity works,” and let reading passages be one of his core teaching tools. If not, they will need more practice.

You can see a slightly more complex example in the video Kirby Jarrell: A Doubtful Freedom. Students in her seventh-grade class are reading The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. It's a challenging text, to say the least—published in 1845, Douglass's syntax is challenging to modern ears. His writing is rich in complex imagery and often employs a formal rhetorical style rarely seen today. But it is also a critical text for students to read. There is no other way to understand the book save to hear Douglass's voice directly. The text is both complex and necessary.

As the clip opens, Kirby's class has just read aloud. “It was so obvious from the way you read that aloud that you really understood it,” she says. This small moment shows us that Kirby is already using students' fluency and expression in oral reading as data to inform choices about how ready students are to read this passage independently.18

Kirby asks students to read on their own to the end of the section for about two minutes and to make notes about the “lists” Douglass makes—these are critical to understanding the passage. In assigning a visible annotation task, Kirby sets out to assess students’ status as independent readers—not just generally, but of this portion of this book. Because she's given them a specific annotation task, Kirby is able to use Active Observation (technique 9) to note trends in comprehension, and as the timer winds down she is optimistic, “Awesome job. You don't need a partner,” she says, deciding to skip a planned Turn and Talk (technique 43). Instead she launches into a whole-group discussion. “What is he listing, and why?” she asks.

The subsequent discussion is meant to stamp the understanding students should have gleaned independently from the text, but the text is tricky, and it quickly emerges that not everyone understood as fully as Kirby thought. One student explains that Douglass is listing the challenges he faced while escaping, and Kirby calls on another student to clarify that the lists are hypothetical—none of the challenges listed had actually happened yet. This passage, critically, involves Douglass imagining the risks of escape.

But Kirby is alert to the indications of struggle and asks students to jot a note at the bottom of the page capturing the idea that Douglass is imagining in this section. They're doing well in the face of real challenge, but she'll have to be careful about how much she gives them to read on their own. Being able to fly solo with such a challenging book is still a work in progress.

As the clip closes, she says, “I just want to emphasize, it's been [only a few] weeks [since they started the novel] and just think about how well you're understanding this book … what was that like for you? … I think a lot of us are really able to figure out Douglass's tough language.” This might seem like a contradictory thing to say after students have struggled with a key point, but both things are true.

They have made incredible progress. They are often able to read successfully from an immensely challenging text. But tricky passages will emerge. A book's “level of difficulty” is an average. Within it there are sections students can breeze through and sections of special difficulty. To say that students can read a book independently is always a generalization. There are several elements Kirby uses to ensure this segment of independent reading is productive.

First there is the gradual release in the length of the independent reading: starting small and increasing the amount of text as your confidence in students' comprehension grows. If Kirby's students had read the bulk of a chapter instead of starting as they did with just a paragraph or two, it would have been much harder for Kirby to lock in on their understanding of this passage and to use it as a test of their readiness to read similar passages solo. In the long run we want to build students' stamina for independent reading tasks, but it may take time before we know that students are up to the task of reading extended passages with accuracy.

Kirby's clear and specific annotation task—“What is he listing, and why?”—is key. Giving students a focal point allows you to monitor comprehension while they work. For younger students, this might sound like what you hear Dan Cosgrove say in the video Dan Cosgrove: Earthworm: “Meet me at the top of page 56 and jot one word to show how the earthworm is feeling.” In a history class, you might prompt, “Underline at least two details about the conditions faced by Revolutionary War soldiers.” Having a clear task also benefits students, guiding them to concentrate on the most important parts of the text by giving them something concrete to pay attention to while reading.

One important caveat on annotation tasks: It’s easy to make the annotation task too complex or too vague. What we want is a task that clearly reveals whether students understood, not just the gist, but the specific language of the passage. The task should therefore be specific to understanding a particular section of text rather than the application of a universal skill. “In this paragraph, underline the three ways memory can be manipulated or changed” is better than “In this paragraph underline three examples of figurative language.” A student can complete the second task and not understand what they've read. The goal in designing annotation tasks is to give yourself data on whether students understood with precision what the author is trying to say so you know how much they can read on their own.

One benefit of short and medium doses of AIR is that they allow you to integrate reading into the arc of your lesson and send the message that independent reading is one of the ways we engage content together during class and not just something we do after class and on our own. To have everyone read a passage independently and then discuss it or write about it makes reading a part of the learning process. As Nicholas Hermann's video shows, this is especially valuable outside of reading classes. Learning to read the discourse of the sciences independently and seeing reading as intrinsic to the process of learning about science is a necessity for any STEM career, for example.

A last thought on AIR. Does it always look like this? Must you always methodically assess students' readiness and release them only to what you know they can do successfully? No. The accountability is something you often use to understand and support your students' ability to read complex texts. There are times when independent reading can take other forms—students should choose and read books on their own, of course; sometimes they should struggle with a challenging text and reflect on what they initially missed or didn't fully comprehend. But AIR reminds us of how important it is to constantly assess students as independent readers so we understand the experience they are having when they read.

And AIR can help students understand the reading process better too. Like Kirby, you may opt to be transparent about your decision-making process (for example, “My sense is that we're still figuring Steinbeck out. We're going to keep reading independently in small chunks until we're a bit more familiar with his style and voice,” or “This description of photosynthesis includes a lot of technical vocabulary, so you're just going to read the first two paragraphs on your own.”) It also allows for celebration of success, as we can see in Kirby's clip: “That was a challenge, and you did it.” This language of celebration is a way to embrace challenge and show that success brings additional autonomy: “We're really starting to get Steinbeck. I'm going to challenge you to do more on your own,” or “You did a great job summarizing the section on photosynthesis—let's see how you do in this next chapter, which goes a little deeper.”