The Lab administration should modify curriculum to encourage independent reading
Midway Staff
A semiweekly advisory period should be implemented into the curriculum for students to read independently during the school day, writes features editor Caroline Hohner.
January 21, 2022
Textbook passages, articles from science journals, poetry for English class. With so much assigned reading throughout high school, students now read a lot every week — except books they pick up for pleasure.
The Lab administration should incorporate a semiweekly advisory period into the curriculum for students to read independently during the school day.
Independent reading time will allow students to take both a break from work and a social break to reset during the school day.
Given the opportunity to discover new books to read independently, students who had given up the habit of reading outside of schoolwork could pick it up again.
Mandatory independent reading could help rebuild reading habits in students. A 2012 report by the UK Department of Education found “a positive relationship between reading frequency, reading enjoyment and attainment.”
Time spent reading for pleasure wouldn’t have to disrupt students’ time to complete homework during school hours.
For all the high schoolers who had to put down their personal books in high school, independent reading should be incorporated into the Lab curriculum as a mandatory event.
Mark Krewatch • Jan 22, 2022 at 11:14 am
I don’t in any way speak for my department, but personally I’d like to say that I love the idea of an independent reading program across disciplines, even at the the sacrifice of a particular independent reading assignment within one of my own courses. We need to encourage students to read and explore thoughtfully, creatively, and freely, and it opens up great opportunities for interdisciplinary thinking and promoting diverse topics, voices and genres.
That said, there is one more element that might be less popular: accountability. If teachers are going to have to drop independent reading projects for a particular classes — projects that they can guide and assess as a very real and productive part of their curriculum — in favor of reading students do for a more general independent program, that is a cost. To balance it, we need to trust that that other reading is really happening, and maybe even be able to plan ways we might put it to use in individual course curriculum.
The track record for students (and, for that matter, teachers!) actually doing the reading for something like a summer “community” text, is not great. So we’d have to do better — but I think we can. I’d love to work with our librarians , with teachers in other departments (and of course my own), and with students on a program.