I don’t know about everyone else but we have a pervasive problem with students refusing to read on their own time. This causes a problem once they come back to class because they can’t participate and you can see how that spirals into some very unsuccessful lessons and makes it very difficult to do group work, a main theme in the Common Core State Standards. It seems that teenagers have other things on their mind when they leave our classroom? We have tried several strategies to combat this problem that have worked.

Start Reading Together. One strategy we have implemented is reading aloud in class at the very beginning of a novel or difficult text.  This has given reluctant readers an opportunity to engage in the text prior to reading it on their own.  We use this as an opportunity to discuss the initial setting and characters so students leave our room with a picture in their minds about the text.  Once they are engaged, they are more likely to pick up the book on their own.  While this hasn’t been full proof, it has helped.

Teach Students to Visualize.  We combined this strategy with a focus on visualizing in those very early stages of reading.  explicitly teaching students how to make pictures in their heads.  In order to teach this, I read a couple of sentences of text and then asked for a detail that wasn’t included in the description.  For example, what color is the man’s hair? What kind of shoes is he wearing?  Anything that they would have to fill in for themselves because the author didn’t provided it would work.  Although this is a basic reading strategy, many students (especially struggling readers) aren’t doing it independently.

Watch As You Go.  The third strategy that has worked is to watch the film version of the text in chunks.  So for example, students read a chapter for homework and annotate.  Then we watch just that part of the film version in class the next day.  This is followed by small group discussion or another task related to the reading.  We also come back as a whole group to share out. This has had several effects.  First of all, those students who are reading get credit for completing annotations and sometimes doing well on a reading quiz.  Those students who haven’t read are still able to participate in small and large group discussions.  In addition, they are not getting further and further behind, so if at some point they do become engaged, they can join in and start reading without being too far behind.

Some might argue that these strategies are not leading to the rigor expected by the Common Core State Standards.  I would argue that these might be steps in getting struggling or generally low achieving students to a point where they can independently meet the expected standards.  While they may not be grappling with complex texts, they are participating in small group book discussions, practicing and being assessed on the speaking and listening standards which is more than they would be doing if they didn’t have access to the text in some way.  Are there some small steps you could take to get reluctant readers involved in class?