Re-Thinking S.U.R.E

[2,354 words]

The popularity of sustained silent reading programs began in the 1980’s and so there is a long period in which to analyze their effectiveness. I vividly recall the days prior to such programs where student reading occurred outside of class, if at all, and teacher reading consisted mostly of grading papers and staying one day ahead of students in preparing classroom material for student study. There may have been more than a few language arts teachers, myself included, whose recreational reading occurred only in the summer, or not at all.

I recall the drive toward incorporating an SSR program to roughly coincide with a state mandate to lengthen our classes from 50 to 55 minutes. There was a staff debate about instituting a special S.U.R.E. period, as many middle schools have done, but the staff voted to simply extend all periods by 5 minutes instead. Any increased reading would have to be left to English teachers. The English department did enthusiastically embrace a 10 minute SSR program with the extra five minutes as a start. One of the great benefits of the program for me was the time devoted to my own recreational reading. I now had 40-50 minutes a day to model such reading and found myself reading at least a book a month. This was a win/win situation for English teachers. This part of the work day was pure pleasure for me.

I became such a devotee of SSR that I began in 1990 to collect recommendations from my A.P. classes for a student-generated recreational reading list. Students were to recommend either the best book they had ever read or one that was a page-turner. They were not allowed to recommend books in the English curriculum. I began to type up these recommendations and the list eventually grew over a period of 10 years to be some 80 pages in length. There were in excess of 300 works by some 200 authors. The most recommended book on the list was Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton, with over 30 student recommendations. I often told my colleagues that I refrained from choosing a book from this list to teach because I did not want to ruin the experience for students. I often said this with a laugh, but it is truer that I would like it to be.

The following are some of the assumptions that underlie sustained silent reading programs.

1. Students are not reading enough on their own. If they could choose their own books in a recreational setting and be given time on a daily basis to read in them, they have the potential to develop into life-long readers.
2. Reading should be fun. Academic reading is rarely fun and only a select few students can even tolerate it. Non-fiction is dry unless it tells stories the way fiction does.
3. Students respond to powerful models. Nothing is more powerful than everyone on campus, from the custodian to the principal, pausing daily for 10-20 minutes of independent reading. The adult who models reading in the room is essential to the success of the program.
4. Increased accountability, as in book reports, quizzes, tests, reading logs, etc. tend to decrease the efficacy of such programs and remove some of the natural joy there is in reading.

The California Language Arts Framework and Content Standards have set impressive goals for the state’s children, the reading annually of 1 million words of linear text by 8^th grade, and twice that by 12^th grade. In a well-managed SURE program, this goal can very nearly be met. I define SURE programs as special set-aside periods during the school day, often after lunch, where students and staff meet in rooms to read self-chosen books. There is usually minimal accountability in these programs. The typical SSR program is folded into a language arts class, is usually shorter in duration, and often involves accountability, as in reading logs, book report, tests or quizzes.

Any worthwhile program runs the risk of incurring unintended consequences. It is the unintended consequences of SURE programs that have caused me to re-think their efficacy. Below is a list of unintended consequences I have observed:

1. The most problematic consequence is the widespread assumption that such programs can do the heavy lifting in terms of meeting year-long reading goals and preparation for the post-secondary world. What I have observed, in both the literature and the classroom, is that quite often this is the only reading students are expected to do. Most other classroom reading is done orally.
2. Content area teachers do not see that learning is necessarily text-based. Reading happens in SURE or in English classes. Teachers are excellent at lecture, question and answer, drawing inferences, making analogies, and in countless ways connecting abstract learning to the world students live in. However, this is done either orally, by worksheet, or some combination.
3. Other than SSR, language arts teachers limit the reading students do to what can be meticulously analyzed. This leads to a year long curriculum devoted to a handful of short stories and poems, explicated in impressive detail, a play or two, and perhaps 2-3 core novels. Secondary teachers will routinely spend a month or more on a single novel.

When I returned to teaching English after a three year term as a full-time released consultant teacher, I discarded my SSR program. I had spent part of my three year hiatus working on secondary reading and re-thinking pedagogical practices. I returned to the classroom dedicated even more fervently to reading, but skeptical of the SSR programs as they are currently implemented. I have discovered something more powerful and of greater student efficacy.

When I returned to the classroom I adopted a different set of assumptions about both reading and writing.

1. If students are only reading what a teacher/class can explicate in detail, they are not reading enough.
2. If students are only writing what a teacher can read and assess with corrections and marginal comments, they are not writing enough.
3. It is not necessary to teach every book passage by passage. [Interestingly, as a consultant teacher, I sat in on a class the other day which was studying a novel I know well and have taught on numerous occasions, although not recently. The teacher gave a quiz with very specific questions about chapter details. I could not answer a single question. Neither will her students a month from now. Does that kind of quiz serve any other purpose than to expose who has not read the chapter?]
4. Most of the works studied in schools are arbitrary choices from a broad canon. The only real reason for reading a book is to become a better reader of the next book. Reading is a skill largely acquired by doing. When you are analyzing and talking about a book you are simultaneously not reading it or any other book. Every time we engage in such discussions we are really forfeiting time students could devote to the practice of reading.

Is the choice between two extremes? On the one hand, students read most of the time and write some of the time. No discussion. That would really not be as bad as it sounds compared to what happens in practice. Students are encouraged to free read during SURE or SSR periods, but most other reading in a language arts class is seriously limited by the need to master every passage of every piece. I would posit that the most effective strategy lies somewhere in the middle.

Here is what that might look like:

1. Read lots of short stories, let’s say 20-30 and analyze and discuss in detail only a portion of them, perhaps five. These five should be rigorously studied in an academic sense. The test however, should not be a multiple choice test over these five stories, which amounts to simple recall of what was discussed by the teacher in class. The test should be on a story the students have never read before. This would show growth in skills and would be a true measure of content standard mastery.
2. Poetry is an acquired taste for most of us. I would argue that the taste is more easily acquired through its sound than its sense. Therefore, I would recommend having students read poetry daily, but analyze only the occasional poem. How about reading as many as 50 poems, but analyzing only 10. The ratio of reading to analysis is starting to look like 5-1.
3. Read several plays, discussing in only the broadest terms, but analyze selected scenes or passages in only a few.
4. Read many novels, again discussing in the broadest sense, analyzing selected passages in only a few.
5. A little analysis goes a long way. Restrain the urge to analyze everything students read. For one thing, it limits the total reading students will do. For another, it will turn a portion of your students against the study of literature.

From a teacher who collected 300 recommendations about recreational reading from students and put them on a website, I turned into a teacher who completely abandoned an SSR program in my classes the past two years. I am not recommending that anyone follow me and I may re-institute SSR when I next return to the classroom. However, what I did instead worked extremely well.

Newbury Park High School is set up on semester blocks, where one semester of study represents a year’s worth of curriculum. The blocks are 95 minutes in length. I decided to have my students read as much high-end literature as I could get away with. We moved at a rapid pace. There were occasional discussions of selected passages and there were a couple of works that had papers attached to them. But there were no study guide questions, no group work, no art work. Just a lot of reading of highly academic text.

I chunked out one novel for fluency practice and students read 700-1000 word passages daily. It took nearly the semester to complete a single novel this way. We occasionally examined the style of selected passages, but, otherwise, there was little to no accountability beyond students keeping a log of their reading rates.

When the semester ended, I had my two 9^th grade classes, a total of 38 students, fill out a form anonymously, indicating how much of each text they had read. I tallied these forms and was surprised to see a very high level of student investment in this academic reading. The table below consists of the books the students read in order, as well as the average percentage of completion for the class. The last column is how many of the 38 students read the book in its entirety.

Title	Total Pages	Total Words	Percentage	Read Entire Book
The Chosen	271	108,400	75.6	14
To Kill a Mockingbird	281	112,400	82.4	15
Of Mice and Men	107	31,779	76.7	18
Animal Farm	140	36,960	78.3	14
Fahrenheit 451	179	62,650	76.5	13
The Odyssey	365	148,900	78.9	16
White Fang	271	98,373	84.7	21
Total	1,614	599,462	79.0	15.8

Although this was an entire year’s worth of curriculum collapsed into one semester of 95 minute blocks, the reading load was demanding and the expectations were correspondingly high. Two of these books, Of Mice and Men and Animal Farm, were each read within a week. White Fang had a high degree of completion because it was read entirely in class as a fluency exercise. But The Odyssey is a significantly complex and challenging work. I would like to attribute the high degree of completion to the growth in skill and over-all competency of the students over time. In addition to these longer works, students also read a number of short stories, selected poetry, three shorter plays, as well as Romeo and Juliet. None of the reading was textbook-based. The students read the works in monograph form and the short stories, poems and one-act plays on hand-outs. The chapters of White Fang were downloaded by each student from the class web-site, printed at home and brought to school for the daily fluency check.

Was this program superior to an SSR program geared toward self-chosen works? I think it was. Students read at least as much and had far more exposure to complex language, thought and vocabulary. Even with this commitment to quality literature and a fast pace, note that the reading total is only one-half the reading goal for 9^th graders, of 1.2 million words. How do teachers meet the framework’s goal while studying only a few works so slowly and in such significant detail?

The English/Language Arts Framework categorizes books three ways: core, extended and recreational. My experience in the language arts classroom is that the bulk of the reading goal is achieved through the recreational reading program and the remainder of class is spent on close-reading and analysis, passage by passage, of just a few core works. What is missing is the valuable practice intended to be achieved through the extended reading program, absent from most classrooms.

Where does this leave us with SSR or S.U.R.E. programs? Here are a few guidelines I would like to recommend:

1. By all means, use SSR programs in your language arts classes and support S.U.R.E. campus-wide programs. They have tremendous value in supporting the essential curriculum.
2. Do not rely on such programs to meet yearly reading goals. These programs are recreational and supplemental in design. They cannot do the heavy lifting necessary for reading success in an academic environment.
3. Find a balance between close reading of just a few works and wide reading with no academic focus. Require/encourage much more reading than you can discuss, analyze and assess. Infer the ice-berg from its visible tip.
4. Reading across the curriculum is a wonderful goal, but it can only be achieved if all, or nearly all, learning begins in text.
5. Assess for independence and offer scaffolds to only those who need them. Continue to test for independence by removing scaffolds periodically.
6. To assess content standard mastery, assess students using new material.