I Needed More Read-Alouds The Past Year-and-a-Half has Taught Me a Number of Things: Part 1

The world we have lived in for the past fifteen months or so has taught children some things. Some found that this world of distance learning allowed them to be somewhat anonymous. If they chose not to turn on their video, and if they remained on mute, they were like ghosts in the classroom. Nobody knew they were there. Nobody knew what they were doing. So, nobody knew if they were doing what they should be doing. This was a sad by-product of distance learning.

This invisibility caused some of my best practices in an ELA/English classroom to be put on hold, especially one. For many years, I have used the first seven to ten minutes of each class period for silent independent reading. My students were asked to always have an independent reading book with them. As class began, and I was busy taking attendance and letting in the stragglers, I would play soft instrumental music and set a timer for the number of minutes desired. My students would settle in to read about ten pages of their books. I would join them once my administrative tasks were complete. I would actually sit in a vacant student chair, amongst the other readers. We would all, typically, be surprised when the timer beeped. This practice works really well in a live classroom. It causes reading to become a daily habit.

I saw the positive results of this habit when I introduced Friday Book Talks, a volunteer activity where five students have one minute each to tell us a bit about a book we should read. I modeled Book Talks on the day I introduced the idea. By about the third week of Book Talks, there was no need for me to talk. All five spaces were taken, and some students needed to be placed on a waiting list for the following Friday. Success!

In the Zoom classroom, I found that I would set the timer, play the music, and hope that my students were reading something for seven to ten minutes. I had no idea if they were. Then, I introduced part two of this process, Book Talks on Fridays. A few of my students were reading. Those four or five—out of my entire day—did offer to give book talks. But there were entire classes of seventh graders who had no one to give Book Talks. So, I did. Then, after a few weeks of doing solo Book Talks, I asked why no one had a good book to recommend. This is when some very honest students explained to me that “no one was reading, Mrs. Tisch.” One boy told me that he was playing with his Legos during reading time. Many others told me that they used the time to get to the next level on whatever game they were playing. Still others used the time to look at TikTok, check Instagram, or make a sandwich. Sigh.

Needless to say, I stopped pretending. Even though I know some of my students were actually reading, this daily routine was originally put into place to capture the attention of my non-readers or reluctant readers. Now, it was not doing what it was intended to do. I abandoned my seven-to-ten-minute independent reading at the start of class. Then, I checked into the whole-class reading I asked my students to do, and found a similar problem. "No one was reading, Mrs. Tisch." So, I beefed up another good habit I had developed in my classroom, the read-aloud.

I have always read aloud to my students. I read aloud for many reasons, not the least of which is to teach them how to truly hear language and slow down enough to notice nuanced details in writing. This past year, because of the above realization, I read-aloud just about everything that I assigned to my seventh-grade students—novels, poems, short stories, articles. Most of the time, I read these things in their entirety. Sometimes, I read up to a specific point near the end, asking my students to predict and submit what they thought would happen next. Then, I would give them the ending to read on their own and see if their prediction was correct. I realized that my reluctant readers did not even do this. It was apparent in the follow up, comparing their prediction to the truth. These students were then invited to an invitation-only read-aloud of the ending with me. I sent the invitation to their parents as well. Who wouldn’t love to attend yet another Zoom with Mrs. Tisch and the other non-readers? As it turned out, the invitation list for these private events became smaller and smaller.

So, by the end of the year, I had read aloud to my students these books: The Outsiders, A Christmas Carol, and The Cay. I had also read aloud to my students more than 25 other pieces of literature and every one of the writing assignments that I wrote with them. Can I prove that each of these read-alouds was listened to by every single student? No. I cannot. But I do believe that more students did “read” these stories with me than before, when I asked them to read to themselves, independently.

Now that we plan to head back to all in-person classes next school year, will I go back to my old habits? Probably. I will absolutely return to the seven-to-ten-minutes of independent reading time at the beginning of each class. Daily reading is simply a good habit to form. I will most certainly read aloud to my students as often as I can. I will read entire books, poems, articles, short stories, and my own writing. I will do a little of both.