One of the trickiest issues for English teachers, at least for English teachers who want to foster a love of reading in their students, is how to asses it. Many teachers advocate the no assessment approach, choosing instead to conference frequently with students. I would love to someday be that kind of teacher, but alas, at this point in my career, I need a system that works.
At my previous school, our independent reading program for sophomores was based on number of pages read per week. (College prep students were required to read 50pp./week, and honors students, 100pp./week. That was a challenge, to put it mildly, for many of our students.) This had its plusses and minuses. Students could choose a mammoth book like Game of Thrones or It and plug away at it all semester (or longer, if need be) rather then feeling the pressure to either finish it in one grading period or switch to a book they could finish in one grading period. But assessment was a challenge. A few of my colleagues used a combination of one-on-one book talks with students and page logs. When I realized that the teacher who made the most effective use of book talks also had three volunteers helping her out during the week, I realized that I needed to take a different approach.
I had to come up with incentives for each element of the reading program:
- Pages read
- Whether the student actually read those pages
- What the student got out of the reading
So, after looking at a few different teachers’ approaches, I borrowed heavily from Dinah Lee, and created a three-tiered approach:
- digital book logs to track pages read and titles of books
- reading notebooks (inspired by those described in 180 Days) to track comprehension (here’s my intro presentation)
- a final creative project, turned in once each grading period, to show what the student took away from the reading
Each assignment was worth 20 points, so if a student fell somewhat behind in pages read, but really understood and loved their books, the overall independent reading grade wouldn’t take too much of a hit. We’d use occasional class time and our A+ Academic Intervention period to read our independent reading books and add to our reading notebooks so that everyone would have SOMETHING in there. Further, the final creative projects were designed so that there were options if you didn’t finish the book yet.
Overall, the system was a bit complex, but worked fairly well for readers and aspiring readers. I was continually impressed by the work my students submitted in their reading notebooks, and over the course of the year, I saw them grow as thoughtful readers.
(As a side note, maybe someday I’ll write a post about my super awesome/borderline insane book log system that used Doctopus, Google Sheets, and many, many advanced formulas to pull student data into a master spreadsheet. This made grading a breeze and prevented me from ever having to look at the individual book logs.)