Topic: Rewarding Reading

The best way to "build" reading muscles is to encourage students to read whatever interests them whether it is Dr. Suess or Tolstoy. Do not attach value to whatever it is they are reading, avoid your own biases. No pressure, no summer assignments.

When we attach rewards to reading, we have to be careful about what we are conveying. Are we saying that this task is so awful or unpleasant that we have to reward you for completing this task? We know that is not our intention but it is important to understand what message we are sending.

We use Scholastic Reading Counts in our district. Kids read books, from Dr. Seuss through the Odyssey, and then they take a quiz on the computers to see how well they understood the book. The questions are low level thinking/recall questions, but are pretty tricky. They earn points that can be tracked by the teacher or librarian. This chapter reinforced for me how important it is not to overemphasize the extrinsic rewards that some teachers and librarians have attached to this program. What I see in students is a sense of pride that they read the book and understood it well enough to pass the test. We have a super ethnically and socioeconomically diverse district, so for many kids they just get a kick out of having one more reason to use the computers.

Students like my kid had a requirement to earn a set number of points in the school year (9th grader) this forced him to knuckle down and get some "free" reading done, but what I saw was that because he started the habit, he grew to like it much more. So for him, he discovered the intrinsic rewards because of the extrinsic. The program could backfire for a student who already loves to read.

One cool idea for this kind of program is for a teacher to set a class goal to read a million words. The program will keep track of this and so everyone in the class can feel like they are contributing, whether they read 10 books or 2, chapter books or picture books.