my classroom. Over the years, I have collected data in a variety of ways. For the sake of simplicity, I will talk about this data
chronologically.
Within the first two months of the 2013-2014 school year, I took a purposeful sampling (six students in each class, or about
twenty percent of the class) of students in each of my 11th grade classes and tested their reading levels using the San Diego
Quick Assessment. I aimed to test two students who performed well in my class and appeared to read with ease, two students
who struggled in my class and had an aversion to reading, and two students in between. The population I sampled ranged in
independent reading level from fourth grade to eleventh grade, with an average reading level of seventh grade for my non-
honors class and ninth grade for my honors class. I used this information to help find suitable books for my classroom library.
Students read independently during Reading Zone, a time at the start of class dedicated to independent choice reading. They
can choose books from my class library or bring a novel from home. For the 2013-2014 school year, my students had ten
minutes of Reading Zone every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I read with them. I told them about my books. Reading Zone
was a sacred time—not time for the bathroom or for doing last night’s homework—and though we read silently for a sustained
period of time, it helped to manipulate the wording I used when talking about reading with the students.
As they read, they tracked their progress (date, minutes read, and number of pages read) with reading trackers. For each book
that they finished, students were given the opportunity to write an extra credit paper about something they learned from their
book; this was not mandatory, however, and though I gathered some data in this manner, many students chose not to do this,
and so that data is limited.
During the current 2014-15 school year, I teach fifty-eight students, two classes of honors English. Despite being placed in an
honors class, not all of the students read on grade level or have good grades, but some of them do. A little more than a third of
them considered themselves to be “regular readers,” and only three said they read every day. For this group of students, I
increased Reading Zone time to between ten and twelve minutes a day. I also put into effect five rules (which I will expound
upon later): a book is a book; I read, too; we talk about our books; we write about our books; we are free to ditch our books.
These five rules gave students more choice and autonomy while also presenting reading as a community activity.
In addition, I changed the way I collect data with this group of students: it is mainly through the implementation of readers’
notebooks. These notebooks serve a variety of integral functions in my classroom. On the inner cover is a reading tracker where
students list the titles of books they’ve completed, the date completed, the genre, and a rating between one and five stars. The
notebooks also contain a list of thinking stems (i.e., sentence starters) organized by level of difficulty in a chart similar to Bloom’s
Taxonomy. The students can choose to use these thinking stems to start their journal entries, of which I require three a week.
These entries should be about the book a student is currently reading. I encourage students to choose more challenging thinking
stems to produce deeper, more complex ideas in order to grow both as readers and as people, and they often do.
In addition to our readers’ notebooks, we track the genre of the books we read on large, colorful trackers in the back of the room.
When a student finishes a book, he or she can add a sticker to the tracker. Above the trackers is a running list of all the books
my students have read, which includes the names of the books and of the students who read them. This allows students to go to
one another for book recommendations.
Other than these systems, there are other, smaller ways that I am gathering data in the 2014-2015 school year. I give a reading
survey at the end of each quarter that is very similar to the survey I administered at the end of last school year: It asks students’
opinions, number and kinds of books they have read, and so on. I also gather a good deal of my data anecdotally from
conversations I have with students about the books we are reading. Each kind of data—quantitative and qualitative—informs me
about different aspects of independent choice reading in my classroom.
Results
Increased Reading Levels
At the end of the 2013-2014 school year, I retested the reading levels of students in the sample group with the exception of two,
one of whom transferred and another who dropped out. Students showed varying levels of improvement, an increase of
between one and three grades levels. However, this cannot be linked directly to independent reading in Reading Zone since the
students read a variety of other texts both in my class and in other classes. I also administered an anonymous Reading Zone
Survey at the end of the school year. This survey (See Appendix A) had both factual questions (regarding the quantity and
quality of books read) and opinion questions (focused on their feelings and attitudes toward reading, Reading Zone, and
themselves as readers).