Developing a Culture of Readers

District Strategic Goal #1:
Continuously Improve Student Growth and Achievement

Dunlap Grade School teachers have been participating in weekly breakfast meetings to develop professionally in the area of reading. This voluntary time commitment is focused on developing strong readers in every classroom. Our conversations have focused on developing independent readers, modeling our lives as readers, and sharing with students the power of understanding what we read. We have used the research and philosophy of renowned researcher, Regie Routman (http://regieroutman.org/) to drive our conversations and professional development in this 14 week long professional development residency.

Part of developing strong readers is encouraging them to choose a “Just Right” book. Students are encouraged to develop a list of strategies for choosing an appropriate book. The example below demonstrates how first graders at DGS determined how to choose a “Just Right” book.

One of the staff favorite ways to encourage reading, is to share their reading lives with the students. All teachers are maintaining their own professional and personal reading logs to reflect on their reading. Teachers share with students their purpose for reading, why they read, and strategies for choosing a book.

Students in first grade experienced developing a system for organizing their classroom library. This activity generated powerful conversations amongst some of our youngest students as they collaborated to develop genre lists or debated why certain books belonged in a particular genre. The conversations focused on features of the text and negotiated understandings of those features.

Regie Routman writes, “When students help create the library, they use it more. Too often, we teachers do all the

work. Not only does that take lots of teacher time that could be better spent elsewhere, but

also students are less likely to find material they like, which, in turn, affects how much they

read. I have watched some teachers work hard to create lovely looking libraries. But they

organize these spaces for themselves, and the books are often not easily accessible to

students—in terms of the types of reading materials that have been chosen and the way

they are displayed and located. However, once teachers give up some control and let their

students help make the decisions, pleasant surprises await. With demonstrations and guid-

ance, even first graders can take full responsibility for categorizing, sorting, and organizing

books and returning them to agreed-on places—and they love doing so. (Note a third-

grade class’s worksheet below for determining what categories and authors to include in

their class library.) Not only that, students begin to take pride in “their” library.”