Teacher Selected and Student Selected Literary Choices

I thought about using the title "Teacher Selected vs. Student Selected Literary Choice," but I realized that they don't stand in opposition to one another, they must work together to form the literary experience for any student in any classroom. That being said, let's get into today's topic.

Teacher selected literature, sometimes referred to as read aloud, shared reading, or teacher led reading (although even in those alternate definitions, there are different approaches to the method), serves purposes that self selected, self read books cannot. First of all, the shared reading experience is in large part about the teacher modeling good reading, something I've talked about time and again in this blog. Here are some ideas/focuses of what teacher selected reading should be about:

• The book you choose should ideally be above the reading level of the majority of your class, but not to an extreme point above their level. There should be opportunities for new vocabulary, more in depth story telling, and you should have opportunities for many questions, predictions, etc.


• Know your class, don't just choose a book because you like it. I cannot stress this enough, if your students find the book boring and/or tedious, they're going to tune it out. Your selection should have many points for class discussion, journal work, and other extensions.


• The book should be something that you are familiar with. Too many times in my short career I have seen teachers pick a book because they've "heard it's good," or "my kid read it," or something else along those lines. I've also heard too many teachers say that they don't have time to read the books beforehand. Well, that's nothing short of laziness and a cop out. How are you going to lead discussions and ask probing questions if you're experiencing it for the first time as well? It's important, imperative, to know your content.


• Vary how the book is read. This depends upon whether or not the students hold a copy and are reading along, or if you have the only copy. It's ok to have the only copy, I do this often, and my students enjoy those books equally. But sometimes it is important that they read along and get chances to read together. This can be done through round robin, popcorn (where they read and choose someone else based upon pre-set rules, boy chooses a girl, etc.), partner reading, small group, and anything else that I failed to list here.

Now that I've discussed a little bit about teacher selected reading, let's discuss student selection. Self selection is something that I am a very big fan of, and believe is a cornerstone of a well run reading class. Self selection takes time and effort on the part of the teacher, and requires a few things. Here are a few of those requirements:

• An understanding of the reading level of the student and the ability to find them appropriate books. If you teach 6th grade, you might have a student who reads on a kindergarten level and wants to read Harry Potter. There's a difference between letting them "give it a shot," and knowing that there is 0% chance of them succeeding with a given book. Set parameters, or if you're lucky enough to have a school program like Accelerated Reader or something, teach students to look at book levels. If you don't have that option, you can see my post on How to Determine the Reading Level of a Book at a Glance for some clues on how to do this on the run.


• Have clear expectations. Are you going to have students do a reading log, book reports, or some other kind of progress monitoring? How are you going to know that they're reading and comprehending their book? These are important questions that you must have the answers to.


• Have your students read at home. Have them read at home for 30 minutes each night. I send home a calendar, and the students must put how many minutes they read that night, and have a parent sign off for that night. Remember, the only way to become a better reader is to read, it can't be done through worksheets, snazzy presentations, or tests, it's all about practice, the more the better. If you find students balking at this idea, help them find books that interest them, work relentlessly to get that perfect book in their hands.

So, there's some ideas that should get you started. I tried to stay pretty well on the surface with this whole discussion, it can get deep into theoretical models and approaches to methodology, but I wanted this to be a resource. Let me know if there's anything else you need help with or have any other questions (or want to add to this in any way). We (teachers) learn from each other, and take ideas from each other, that's the only way to improve ourselves.

How To Determine the Reading Level of A Book At A Glance

I've done some posts in the past about determining the reading level of children/adolescent/young adult books, but they usually involve referring to some type of chart, or searching around on Amazon.com or another book site to find the reading level according to a formula.

This post is about how to quickly determine if the book is appropriate for a student (or your own child, whatever the case may be for you) just by using information you gathered from the book itself. Many children's books very obviously list this information right on the front cover. DK Readers for example have the level as a number, as well as who it is appropriate for. Scholastic books sometimes have the appropriate reader level listed near the bar code, many of the short leveled reader books that are used in elementary classrooms list the level, along with the skills that the book works on, right on the front or back cover.

So, beyond books that list the level somewhere, which is a trend we're seeing more recently, how can you find the level of a book that doesn't have this information anywhere on it? The skill of finding the level of a book on your own takes some practice, but once you have rated enough books on your own, the better you get (that's right, it's the ol' "practice makes perfect" thing).

There are many methods that teachers have been using in their own classroom to determine if a book is an appropriate book for that certain child. Leveling a book on the spot is usually done to see if it fits a certain child.

The "five finger rule" is a mainstay that you'll hear about anywhere you go. Basically, open the book up to a random page, and have the student read that page. Every time they miscue (pass a word or miss it), hold up a finger. If they miss five on that page, it's not a good book for them. This method has served many teachers well for a very long time.

The reason the methods like the "5 finger rule" have been around and continue to be used is because they apply book leveling to the individual child, which only makes sense. All the book levels in the world won't do you any good if that child can't pick up the book and read it.

Variations of the five finger rule include:

• Vocabulary picking: Go through one chapter of the book (roughly 5 pages) and see if you can find more than 20 words that could be given for vocabulary. That is, 20 words that the student won't know. If you can do it, this isn't a good book for that child to read.
• Check back: Go ahead and give the child this book. After two chapters (depending on the length), check their understanding of the book. This should be fairly obvious, but will only work if you have an understanding of the book.

There's millions of different ways to check, at a glance, if a child should read a certain book. The examples I have given so far mainly gravitate around fluency. But comprehension should not be ignored, because, ultimately, it is what matters most.

Now, the school district I work for has always been interested in fluency. How fast can a child read versus how many mistakes they make over time, that's the basic formula for fluency. So, just because a child can read 160 words per minute (which is excellent for any child under the age of 14), does that make them a good reader? Of course not. With the focus on fluency, many students have learned to become what we call "word callers." They know the words and can read them quickly. The main problem, however, is a disconnect between fluency and comprehension. I've also had students who read 65 words per minute (considered slow or deficient in intermediate grades), but comprehends on an advanced level. So speed isn't the best way to go.

When I sit down to determine if a child should be reading a certain book, I want to know if they can handle the structure and words of the story, but I also want to know if they understand the content. Take me for example. I'm working on a doctorate, so in theory, I am one of the highest educated people on the planet. This means that I should be able to pick up any book written in my language and read it for comprehension. Yes, I could pick up any book and read it, but understand it? That's a different story. If I read a book on bio-chemistry, I'd probably actually comprehend less than half, and this is a cultural/situational comprehension issue with reading.

Students who don't know a thing about the Holocaust are going to struggle reading about it, because the background knowledge isn't there. Take this into account as well. Comprehension checks done on the fly only work if you, the instructor, have a rudimentary understanding of the book you're trying to scrutinize. If it's a classroom read aloud, you can lay some background for the students, but if it's an individual reader, you probably don't have the time to do this, so make sure it's appropriate in terms of fluency, comprehension, content, and will hold the interest of the child.

Wow, that's a lot to take in. But this is what good literacy instruction involves, good, appropriate, individualized literacy instruction. Many issues must be taken into account when determining the level of a book for a child. Is the child fluent without comprehension, or vice versa? Is there an English Language Learner (ELL) issue in play that must be addressed? Is there a lack of background knowledge on the topic? These are just a few questions you need to ask yourself.

Now this is all well and good, but what if you came here searching for how to level books because you want to level an entire library for later use? This isn't hard, because you obviously have the internet (or you wouldn't be reading this). Scholastic has a Teacher Book Wizard that lists levels of many books out there. I did a post back in April titled How They Determine the Reading Level of A Book, and it offers some resources, including some comparison charts to interpret book levels done through different leveling systems and/or formulas.

Finally, if you are on your own, you can involve a little intuitive guesswork. I've done this before. If you can't find any information about the book online through some Google detective work, then read a few pages of the book, compare it to other books of similar levels, and guess at it.

Some basic formulas (along with their link to Wikipedia) that are used to determine the reading level of a book include:

• Fry Readability Formula
• Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
• Dale-Chall Readability Index (pdf document)
• SMOG Readability Formula also The SMOG Interactive Calculator

I hope that this information can be of service to you. Please let me know if it was, or if there are things you're trying to find out or understand that I didn't touch on here.

How They Determine the Reading Level of A Book

The readability of a certain text has always been one of the first things that teachers and decision makers look at when choosing books to either fit their curriculum or add to their classroom library. Readability, often referred to as 'grade level,' can be given in a variety of ways. The most popular of these include:

• Fountas & Pinnell (Guided Reading): Books are leveled from A-Z, with A being kindergarten up to, well, you get the idea.
• Basal: Simply expressed as 'Grade 1,' 'Grade 2,' etc.
• Lexile: The standard score used in the DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment). It's expressed from 100's up into the 1000's, and isn't the easiest to understand without a conversion chart.

I could go on here, because there's many more, but you can go to the Reading-Grade Level Comparison Chart .pdf document to see it all laid out for you. The readability of a text is determined by a lot of things in a lot of ways. Either a survey can be conducted, with normed tests, or a formula can be applied (the most common of these is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Formula).

I came across a very interesting tool to check the readability of blogs, just in case you are utilizing them in the classroom. I am definitely all for the use of varying texts beyond books and *gulp* basals, and *double gulp* textbooks.

So check it out, it's the Blog Readability Test. Here's how this blog did:

The Attack of Summer Vacation

Summer vacation has been an American tradition for over 100 years now. Students look forward to it, and to an even greater extent, teachers look forward to it. I'm only talking to those of you who are teachers right now, because what I'm going to say is often criticized by those outside the field.

Teaching is a very difficult job, and a very intense one. After going from August to May (or September to June, depending on where you live), that 10-13 week break is well deserved and well taken. Yes, other people don't think it's fair that we get this vacation, but we don't listen to those people, because they just don't understand.

Then the questions start coming. Isn't it true that students don't retain a lot of what they learned the prior year during the summer? Isn't it true that students come back to school and actually have lost reading skill since the end of the prior school year? And isn't it true that parents often complain that they have trouble keeping their kids active with productive things to do during the summer, and that the rates of kids getting in trouble rise?

The answer is yes, to all, but let's analyze:

Student learning retention rates: This one seems pretty obvious. If you're not using it, you're losing it. Many students aren't actively learning during the summer vacation, and they will forget quite a bit of what they were taught. But some of this is the teachers fault. If we're teaching them through traditional methods, lecture and textbook, studies have shown that students can and will forget anywhere between 60-80% of what they were taught. As their learning becomes more engaged, they retain more. In fact, if it's things they learned out of an authentic literary experience (a book, you know, novel or chapter book) that they were actively engaged in, the retention rates can be much higher. I've seen this personally, and studies have shown a variance from anywhere between 70-95% of the material being retained, and not lost as the previous numbers showed.

Reading skill being lost: I've said it to my students a million times, the only way to become a better reader is to read. It's the old 'practice makes perfect' thing, and it's very true, especially as it comes to reading skill. If a student goes the entire summer without reading a book, of course they're going to lose some skill, both fluency and comprehension. If you're in a position like I am where you know your students for next year before the end of the previous year, you can have a summer reading club to keep them going. If you don't know who your students will be, you have to count on parents to keep them reading, and we all know that this isn't going to happen in large numbers. I survey my students at the beginning of the school year, and over the last three years have found that out of 62 students, 11 responded by saying that they read consistently over the summer vacation, that's 18%. This one is obvious to me.

Parents have trouble with their kids over summer: This one isn't really something we should worry about. You mean parents actually will have to spend time with their kids? GASP! This actually becomes more of a problem as it relates to students that have apathetic or uninvolved parents, which, sadly, is too many of them. There are things you can do as a teacher, including giving your parents lists of summer camps and activities, both free and pay, that students can participate in over summer. Also, I tell students and parents that I do have a large library of books that I relocate from my classroom to my home over summer, and they're welcome to drop by and choose some. Teachers can do our part to help, but the real fact is, most of us have our own families to worry about during the summer. This one is really up to the individual parent, if they're going to let their kids run wild or give them some guidelines to follow.

Pleasure Reading and My Boring Research

I'm doing some classroom based research for a graduate course right now, actually I'm putting the finishing touches on the study, but the point of it is to try to better understand how No Child Left Behind and the political pressures have affected the pleasure of reading for students and how they perceive themselves as successful learners.

It's been real interesting, and oddly enough, I'm not totally surprised by the findings. I'm looking at things from a few different angles, including socio-economic status and how it unfolds regarding literary success, and how reading level influences the enjoyment one gets from reading.

Of course, there's millions of teachers out there who know the answer to those questions, but I am tying them further in to No Child Left Behind. One of the more telling articles I came across was actually in The Washington Post and is nearly three years old. That article is titled Odds Stacked Against Pleasure Reading and in it, high school students talk about how much they enjoy reading and how much they hate 'reading class' at school. It's so true, and it's something I think about everyday.

Why Is Oral Reading Important?

This is actually more of a rhetorical question than anything else. Growing up, I never really minded oral reading, because I was always a strong reader, but I never preferred it either. I'm not talking about teacher read aloud, I'm talking about oral reading from a student perspective.

The reason a lot of students read orally is so the teacher can hear how well they are reading. Unfortunately, there is often a disconnect between oral reading skill and silent reading skill. I know this because it happens with me. Yes, I can read well orally, but I can read extremely quickly silently, and feel like I retain more.

For a lot of students, once that metacognitive awareness is in place (which for some starts to happen around the age of 11 or 12), maybe oral reading won't be as important as far as it relates to trying to assess student reading.

I'm not an expert by any means on this, I'm just throwing it out there. If you read this and have anything you want to add to the discussion, please, comment.

The Pluses of Homogeneous Grouping

Homogeneous (pronounced either ha-mah-ga-nus or homo-genius, depending on who you are) grouping involves putting students of a similar skill level together, either in a group setting within a class, or in a class setting. Some teachers, a lot of times those who are self-contained (don't send their students out for any subjects), are faced with the choice of whether or not to ability group their students. If you work in a larger school, with many classrooms per grade level, you may have been faced with the possibility of grouping students for a subject by level and sending them, by those levels, to a certain classroom (this is also sometimes referred to as departmentalizing).

Homogeneous grouping can cause some issues, especially if you somehow become the teacher who is asked to take the 'low' group every time, but there are pluses. If you have a large class like me, and you are self-contained, like me, then you have to either teach whole group, small group, or a combination of both.

Since this blog is focused mainly around literacy, let's look at it from there. I've posted previously on how I run my reading class, and some suggestions on how to set up a reading class (that post was titled Reading Instruction: The Basics), but basically, I do some whole group stuff with the class, read aloud and the discussion that usually follows, as well as the activities that go with that book. I do that with all students, regardless of level, this could either be referred to as whole group or even heterogeneous grouping, although a more appropriate definition of heterogeneous grouping would involve their application in smaller groups. Then, they split off into their ability, or homogeneous, groups, and have work to do there.

The most obvious advantage of similarly skilled students working together is that you can focus them on texts that are appropriate for their ability. Why put the student reading on a 10th grade level in small group with the student reading on a 2nd grade level? Well, there are pluses for doing that, including having good modeling and a reciprocal relationship in the group, but there is also pluses of keeping them apart in small group.

A lot of it comes down to book choice. I would want to challenge my advanced student, and not frustrate my struggling student, so homogeneous grouping would be appropriate to steer clear of this conflict.

This blog is still rather new at this point, but I do have some long-term goals, especially as I gain readers, which has been happening very slowly so far, as I'm still getting embedded into Google and teacher blog sites, and things like that. However, I will be posting more on this topic, as well as its counterpart, both pros and cons. But for now, this is a good starting point.