Reimagining High School Summer Reading
What to do about summer reading? We know it’s important, but we also know it’s fraught with complications and that students often spend less time doing it than teachers do planning it. In fact, every spring, members of our high school’s English department sit together for countless hours ruminating about which books to assign for the summer and about the most effective ways to encourage our students to read them. Our traditional approach has been to assign one book at each grade level, but in recent years, we have tried school-wide big reads, with every student in our high school reading the same book and teachers designing activities and assignments around that book. Some years, we have tried to mitigate issues of book access by giving away summer reading books, or making them easily accessible at the local library. In addition, we’ve done everything we can think of to get our students to read: we have promised/threatened assessments in the first week of school; encouraged reader response journals; had poster contests; one-pager assignments; essays; and movie screenings. We’ve tried classic and contemporary titles. We’ve invited parents and community members to read along. And, every single spring, we have worked tirelessly—scouring reading lists and previewing new books—to find that one novel that is so spectacular and so riveting, that our students literally won’t be able to put it down.
But still, and despite our best efforts to put great books into the hands of our students and to set real expectations that they will read them, many of our students just don’t read in the summer.
And the problem with this is a very real and very troubling paradox. Research among students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds suggests that the students who are most likely to suffer from the decline in reading/writing skills that experts term the “summer slide” are the very kids who would benefit most from an engaging summer reading program. In fact, summer reading setback can account for approximately 80% of the reading achievement gap between economically advantaged and disadvantaged students (Allington & McGill-Franzen). Conversely, research shows that students from middle class or economically privileged backgrounds tend to live in homes with more access to books and to summer learning activities, so that even if there is no formal summer reading assignment, these students are more likely to engage in literacy activities that help them to maintain their academic/intellectual growth (Alexander, Entwistle & Olsen, 2007.)
And, furthermore, when we double down on summer reading by assigning graded projects/essays/assessments in the fall, with our good intentions of holding the bar high for all of our students, we are really just amplifying and maintaining those inequities.
So, the question becomes, how do we create a summer reading program that works? A summer reading program that engages all students, and doesn’t harm the students it means to help the most?
This year my school decided to change things up. Instead of doing our traditional summer reading assignment, we created an intensive 4-week reading/writing workshop that every student in our high school will participate in in the fall. For the summer, we followed the research, which basically confirms what we already suspected: students are more likely to have positive summer reading experiences when they choose which books they read and when they read them (Scholastic 2019.)
So, instead of assigning a specific book over the summer, we asked our students to join our summer reading Google Classroom, in which we provided a list of books for students to choose from; we also gave them the option of choosing a book that is not on the list. The Google Classroom also provided a preview of our fall workshop, which is centered around the topic of diverse voices. In this Google Classroom, students will find short stories, articles, poems, videos and works of art—all chosen for their rich and diverse perspectives. Students were urged—but not required to—peruse the material, so that they would be familiar with them prior to beginning our workshop in September.
The workshop itself will be centered on improving literacy skills, by having students read, write and discuss diverse works across genres. Many of the activities will be what we call “low-stakes assignments” so that students feel free—and comfortable—to confidently explore this new information and to exercise their reading and writing skills, which might not have been fully engaged over the summer. The last week of the seminar will be focused on helping students to produce a fully polished piece of writing, in this case an argumentative essay. Across all grade levels, English teachers will emphasize the creation and use of effective thesis statements and the mining of pertinent information from our non-fiction articles to use as evidence in their writing. Seminar-style discussions, peer editing activities, meaningful revisions, as well as student-teacher writing conferences will ensure that all of our students begin the year with their literacy muscles fully engaged and an understanding of what good writing looks like.
Although we’re not sure yet how this new program will impact our students in the long run, we are hoping that it helps our school to address the problem of “summer slide” while at the same time, jump starting all of our students’ literacy skills with intensive—and intentional—direct instruction in both reading and writing, skills that are critically important across content areas. We are also hoping that giving students the freedom to read what they want, when they want works to promote a positive experience with summer reading for a big swath of students in our school. Finally, and maybe most importantly, we hope for our increasingly diverse student body to see themselves in the wide array of culturally diverse works we have chosen and to cultivate a school-wide conversation about culture and diversity.
Works Cited
Alexander, K., Entwistle D. & Olsen, L. 2007. "Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap." American Sociological Review, vol. 72, no. 2, pp. 167-180.
Allington, R. L. & McGill-Franzen, A. 2013. Summer Reading: Closing the Rich/Poor Reading Achievement Gap. Teachers College Press, New York.
https://www.scholastic.com/readingreport/summer.html
