Reading Motivation

Well, choice, empowerment, respect for kids, meeting them where they are as readers. We have to understand that learners in general, no matter their abilities often seek the same things. We want autonomy. We want empowerment. Brian Cambourne, researcher in Australia who spent his career looking at engagement theory says that learners who lose choices become disempowered.

And we need choices that are meaningful choices that are relevant to the children. So, a student who is a developing reader may be reading several years below grade level, but that doesn’t mean that their access to text, their access to conversations should be limited to low-level guided readers and talking with the teacher at the small group table. They need meaningful reasons to become literate and have those opportunities to connect with other readers in the classroom to have rich, meaningful, authentic texts to read.

Our students who are also avid readers, underground readers who may feel a disconnect between school and their real reading lives need to – we need to value that and recognize that these are students who already have many of the literacy skills we are trying to instill in all of our students and that they need an opportunity to see how far they can go to be enriched, to be stretched, and to not be held back because they’re defined in a box of what the school requirements might look like for reading.

Well, we need to make sure that we are offering students options in what they read, interest surveys where we’re trying to connect them with books that match their personal interest. When we’re working with students on either end of the grade level spectrum, we need to make sure we have a diversity of text to offer them. Often when I go into classrooms and look at classroom libraries, I’ll see a lot of text for that grade level reader because those are the expectations for the classroom.

And there are token few texts for students who are reading below grade level or who may be acquiring English and a token few texts for students who are reading above grade level. With students who are advanced readers, precocious readers, we have to be mindful too that often where their true reading level is may not match their emotional age, and we have to look at content then to make sure the content is appropriate, you know.

Experts in gifted education recommend that students who are advanced readers read fiction at their emotional age and non-fiction at their true reading level. We have to do a better job of offering text that our students both can read and that they’re both interested in reading. And it’s the same at home with parents to make sure that while we may have aspirations that our child is reading at grade level, buying books and putting them in the home that are at those grade level text only cause struggle if the child can’t actually read them, and they won’t improve as readers.

And parents are, of course, the first line when working with students who are gifted and guiding them towards choices that are appropriate for their age but also help them follow a passion or an interest.

Well, when I tell people that I’ve gotten rid of reading logs in my classroom, they’re often horrified because they think I got rid of something that worked. We all know students who can log pages and minutes forever and never actually finish a book. The first fall I taught, I assigned reading logs because everyone in my department did. And my colleagues really convinced me that if I didn’t tie some sort of grade to every piece of reading that the children were asked to do, they wouldn’t do it, and I believed them.

And it was wrong. That first fall as I’m sitting there at my desk every Friday looking through the reading logs that I received and marking off the reading logs I did not receive, I could see clearly that there were some students that I never got a reading log from. And they were often my students who struggled the most with reading or also lacked home support. So, what was I really assessing there?

Even the students who did turn in their reading logs, I would get them filled out Monday through Friday in the same color ink, in the same parent handwriting, in the same slant. So, what was I really assessing there? Parents’ ability to find a pen in the car on Friday mornings. Those logs were no evidence that any reading really took place. The only thing a reading log is evidence of is the parent and child’s ability to fill out the reading log.

And so we don’t really have control over how much students are reading at home. All we can have is influence there. So, where is our effort best spent; chasing kids down the hallway for the reading log again or making sure that they’re engaged with the reading choices that we offer them at school because we know from several studies that students who are more engaged with reading at school are more likely to read at home.

If you’re reading The Hunger Games and you’re in the woods with Katniss and Rue, you’re not waiting until second period English class tomorrow to find out what happens. That’s something where we have some influence. That reading log is not.

So I think that a lot of kids have been somehow left behind for a lot of years of their life. Either they weren’t a good reader, or they weren’t up to the level of their classmates, and you know. That means they didn’t get to experience the joy of like, sitting down with a good book. But graphic novels so often fill in those gaps, and then those kids become voracious readers, and they’re able to talk about the stories with their classmates and their friends. And so, you know, I was a kid who loved to read comics, and I only had access to comic strips, and a few really underground small published graphic novels that were floating around out there.

The manga boom hadn’t happened yet. The indie comics boom hadn’t really happened yet, so I didn’t know where I was going with it, I just knew I loved it. I wish that I could be a kid today, because they have access to so much good stuff.   

I think for some readers, some kids really do have trouble. When they see all that text, their mind just closes. And I was kind of one of those kids. I mean I like to read, but I never loved to read. And I think I saw all that text. The closer together it was, the smaller it was, the less likely I wanted to read it. I love getting those large‑print books from the library that were for the older folks, you know. I love this, and I’m turning the page so quickly.

But there was like this sense of satisfaction for readers who maybe have a little bit of difficulty reading. Here are these pictures that help propel me through. It doesn’t take very long to get through a page. Suddenly you read a 220-page book, and you’ve never read a 220-page book in your life. It’s like this gateway to reading maybe things that are more difficult down the road, but I don’t think that that’s all they should be known as.

They are art on their own just like a prose book is art on its own. It is perfect for what it is, but it does help. it has this extra power of being super helpful for helping a lot of people read with more confidence I think.

I’ve actually talked to a lot of people who study dyslexia, and they say, “Sure, the pictures help, because, you know, the context, you can look at the picture, and look at the words. But, also, just the fact that they’re in a spherical bubble, in little bite sizes, and I write in all caps.” So they look at these little bubbles that are in all caps and it makes the dyslexia just a little easier, I can read that little bubble. It’s nice and uniform in size, and I can read it.

And then they’re looking at the stuff, and they’re starting to feel smart because they’re like, look at this, I’m reading this, I now know the causes of World War I, and the major players, and the big battles that happened. And as they’re going along, they’re feeling better and better about the learning experience, which hopefully propels them into other graphic novels. Propels them into other history, nonfiction, I really hope, I think a really good book is always a springboard into other books. And I really hope that they when they read the Hazardous Tales books and my other comics that it makes them want to go back to the shelf and find some more stuff, and find other, other takes on it, and other things.

Parents and teachers often express concern about students reading graphic novels and picture books at upper grades. What we have to remember is that picture books and graphic novels are formats of storytelling. They are not a designation for an age of reader. Picture books are often very complex and very sophisticated and often beyond the comprehension ability of a first-grader or a second-grader without some support.

And they can often be a great way to build background knowledge, to teach a lesson in language arts class, a great way to share a story with parents at home. And when we’re looking at graphic novels, the research shows that graphic novels can actually be a gate for many kids into more rigorous reading.

Graphic novels present a reading challenge for them because they’re not used to incorporating the illustrations into the text as they read as they get older. And so it can actually prove to be a way to push them as a reader to try a type of reading that is ubiquitous, popular, and yet they lack confidence in being able to read. Picture books and graphic novels are great ways to introduce kids to wonderful authors, storytelling, illustrators, and they certainly have relevance in upper grade classrooms and in homes with older children.

Well, the original genesis for the 40-book challenge, which I talk about in The Book Whisperer, was that I wanted my students to really have a high bar for their reading. That number didn’t come up randomly. It really came from what was my total influence on the reading lives of my students. Forty weeks. Thirty-six weeks of school and four weeks of school vacation.

It’s about a book a week. Now, that’s a high bar, but if I set a lower bar, if I expected my students to only read 10 books in a school year, they might read a lot less than 10 and they might not start until April. So, 40 books meant let’s get started, let’s get going. We have a high bar. It does cause a little bit of anxiety in children and their parents at the beginning of the year, but once we get into the groove of it, parents and children are really surprised about how much reading they can accomplish.

It’s also not a contest or a competition. The students are not competing for each other. There are no award ceremonies at the end of the year, no celebrations, no pizza parties over who met the 40‑book challenge. The students who – and no punitive grading. So, students who read 19 books in a year can be just as successful in language arts class as the students who read 66. The main goal of that challenge is to expose students to a wide range of literature, encourage them to try a little bit of everything so they can become strong, capable readers of just about any text.

But I also want my students to try a little bit of everything in the hopes that they find the one thing, the one thing that really resonates with them as a reader that they might not have found on their own without that challenge to dip their toes in and try something new like poetry or science fiction or non‑fiction texts.

I have seen over the years since The Book Whisperer has come out a lot of corruptions of that idea in a way that I think is actually more harmful for children than it is helpful or supportive. Things like incentivizing the 40-book challenge, creating a competition, or creating a situation where students who might read less than 40 books receive lower grades in language arts class than children who might read more.

And that really does not value those true tenets that I originally intended and created in the challenge in the first place. It has to be about meeting children where they are, about really seeing them as readers, and moving them along a path towards lifelong reading that values their experiences, their choices, and their unique needs. It’s not about putting a number onto something and using that as a marker of reading accomplishment or ability.

I think one of the reasons why graphic novels are so popular at least for me is because they’re a great way to take in a story. With my dyslexia, the type of dyslexia that I have, it’s very difficult for me sometimes to handle a large block of text and especially if you have page after page of large blocks of text, it can be overwhelming sometimes.

But with graphic novels they take those large blocks of text and they break them up into little panels that are very easy to digest. And when they include illustrations with the text, the illustrations tell part of the story and they give contextual clues to the meanings of the words. So not only is it a great way to read a story, but it’s also a great way to tell a story.

When I go and talk to mixed groups like that of parents and kids together, one of the things I always try to talk to parents about is reading with their kids. We think of reading with your children of reading with the toddler with the toddler on your lap.

My idea of children is that when you have a child, you have this life-long reading group that’s built into your family. You have a way to share the books that are important to you. Once that your child starts to read, a lot of parents continue to read what they’re going to read and then their kid is reading on their own.

I think that’s an opportunity that is often missed that to read the same books and to discover some of the wonderful literature that’s being written right now in America. Some examples for older teens right now, The Hunger Games. I lent it to my 24-year-old daughter and she was up until 6:00 in the morning. You know, a book that kept me up.

Saying to someone, here’s a book that’s interesting to you. My son is in community college and just finished reading Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian — a wonderful book.

I read voraciously, but I often find that some of the most interesting works being done are for young people and that people are missing out if they just assume those books are for young people. That’s something that I think is very important for us as parents.

To me, the single most important element in Raising Bookworms, in raising a bookworm or several bookworms is keeping the joy alive in reading. This is the whole focus of the book. It’s the whole premise of the book. If we ask ourselves only one question as parents in relationship to this idea, I think it should be am I serving the joy with this activity or am I serving something else? Am I killing the joy?

It’s an interesting dilemma because children when they’re babies and they’re toddlers, we tend to read to them much more, I hope. The ideal situation when we’re babies and toddlers, we are read to, we are snuggling and cuddling and being loved with our family members.

Maybe we have a snack or we’re nursing or we have a bottle, and reading is equated with all things wonderful and warm and fuzzy. Reading equals love. Then we go to school and we begin to learn to read for ourselves and sometimes it’s a struggle. Often it’s a hard thing to do to learn how to read.

There’s a certain amount of pressure and expectation from teachers and perhaps from parents as well. Maybe the material isn’t as scintillating as the favorite story at home that’s being read to us by our beloved family members. Little by little, we begin to associate reading with pressure and with responsibility and with chore and with duty and with frustration or with boredom.

Around that same time that this is happening, what we tend to do as parents is back off of reading to our kids so much, thinking I need to promote independent reading skills, and I need to let the child go and do their own reading rather than reading to them.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This is the time when we need to read more to keep the joy alive because if we back off of reading and all they’re doing is experiencing the frustrations of learning to read and the pressures of learning to read, then reading is no longer associated with joy; it’s now associated with struggle and chore.

The book’s premise is let’s bring back the joy. Let’s look for ways — and I call them stealth mode activities because I think kids have a wonderful way of knowing when we have an ulterior motive and just because they think it’s an ulterior motive, pushing back against it.

I think one of the challenges for us as parents is to be a little bit subtle about our approach and crafty and find stealth mode techniques to keep the joy alive. For example, with the youngest readers, it’s as simple as making sure that the reading environment is inviting, making sure that the lighting is good to read by, making sure that it’s cozy, that there aren’t too many distractions of sound or visual distractions.

Having the TV on in the other room can be very distracting to a child who is reading or being read to. The basic environmental support, creating a reading nook, a place to go and read together and establishing reading rituals and those kinds of things for younger children are very important. Reading everywhere and anywhere, whenever possible. I’m a great believer in reading at the dinner table, reading in the bath, reading in the car, reading when you’re waiting in line.

Children are innately gifted play actors, storytellers, dramatic performers. Most children, we can all remember being kids ourselves and losing ourselves in the world of pretend and imagining that we were a vet or a cowboy or an astronaut or whatever it may be.

There’s a natural instinct and a gift in children to be open to that kind of creative play and creative stimulation. Unfortunately, all too soon for many kids, that sort of gets squeezed out and in favor of more serious pursuits and learning and assessment and responsibilities and pressure and so forth and homework and all of those things.

I think that if we’ve done our job well as parents and as caregivers and as educators and as writers that we’ve got to continue to keep that sense of imagination and playfulness alive. The ways that we can do that are so simple. I mean, it’s as simple as reading aloud with our children as often as possible for as long as possible.

Taking that opportunity to demonstrate not only storytelling, but dramatic play. There’s nothing more wonderful than a great read aloud that comes to life because the characters have voices that are specific to themselves. I’m not saying that we have to all be hams or be actors when we’re reading aloud to kids, but to the extent that we can enliven the read aloud experience for them a little bit with that kind of creativity I think really makes a huge difference.

Then looking for ways to support the literary experiences that they are having with other creative opportunities and experiences. For example, if a child is reading or enjoying a particular book, is there a related play or art exhibit or piece of music or a recipe that you can explore together as an extension of that experience to just broaden it that little bit further and enrich it that little bit more.

I think that something sometimes we don’t think about enough. We think that it begins and ends with the reading experience. But if we are really thinking creatively, we can enrich the reading experience so much by bringing that kind of playfulness and inquisitiveness to it through drama, through art, through music through other ways to support the reading experience.