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Have you ever felt the thrill of reading aloud a story you love? Those texts where you cannot wait to share with your students and have them notice all the details and word choices that made you fall in love with the story as a teacher (and a reader yourself).
And your love for that read-aloud becomes contagious. Before you know it, your favorite books are your students’ favorite books.
I’ll never forget walking to the bus stop in 3rd grade, so excited because I knew my teacher was going to read aloud from Matilda every day before lunch. I never once stopped and thought I could read it myself, because it HAD to be my teacher.
Now, have you ever felt the absolute tedium and (dare I say sometimes soul-sucking) feeling of having to read aloud a text that is difficult, complex, or maybe not your favorite? Matilda has kids sitting on the edge of their seats to see if Bruce will finish that cake, while that text on creating green cities from your basal has your kids falling asleep.
We will always have texts that we love to read, and there will also always be some that aren’t our favorite. But that doesn’t mean we just barrel through those complex texts and wake up any sleepers at the end. It also doesn’t mean those complex texts don’t have value-we just have to think about ways we can engage our students with those texts in meaningful ways. Reading engagement is a critical component for our students-it’s hard to move the academic needle forward if the students aren’t even engaged during the text.
So today, I want to share with you a variety of ways you can read texts with your students to increase reading engagement. The way a text is read is just ONE way you can keep students engaged, but there’s enough different opportunities that it’s well worth its own blog post.
I haven’t met anyone who says they still use round robin reading, but I still see a lot of round robin reading happening. If you have kids take turns reading out loud, you are using round robin reading. Even if it isn’t called that. Even if it seems like the kids are enjoying it. Oral turn-taking while reading a text is considered round-robin reading.
And we do not want our children to round-robin read. Why?
Think back on your own childhood. Were you ever expected to read aloud to the class? How did it make you feel? There are countless adults who still remember having to “wait their turn” to read to the class in elementary school. This is a practice that is so embarrassing for some children, they remember it decades later.
Reading came easily for me. When I was in 4th grade, my teacher would only call on students who weren’t paying attention. I would pretend to not pay attention so I could get the chance to read out loud to the class. Despite it’s simplicity and its prevalence in classrooms still, round robin reading doesn’t benefit struggling or typically-developing readers.
Furthermore, think about how much text each child is actually reading. If after each sentence the reading “pops” to the next person, that is a single sentence per child. Reading a single sentence in a day will not give children the amount of practice they need to become proficient readers. And we all know that everyone isn’t following along with the rest of the class.
If you still use round robin reading, I get it. It’s a way to ensure all children are at least reading something. But there are different ways that have less of an emotional impact on our children, and those are the ones we should put our attention towards. Let’s turn our attention to those different ways of reading.
Textbook manuals often ask teachers to read texts aloud to students. Reading aloud while children “listen in” is not a bad idea, because children can understand more difficult texts that are read-aloud to them than they can read independently. Children’s listening comprehension is much higher than their reading comprehension. The difficultly comes in the fact that if you just read a text out loud to students, you have an entire group of children who are not actively doing anything except listening. In these next sections, I’m going to detail different ways you can maintain reading engagement as you read texts to your students. These options have a variety of scaffolding, so choose the one that you think your children need most. Each one is a different opportunity to increase reading engagement in your classroom.
While the teacher is doing a lot of the reading, the children are also expected to participate at different points with these kinds of readings. Asking children to interact with the text is an automatic reading engagement booster.
Echo reading is the highest level of support, aside from the teachers just reading and asking children to listen. With an echo read, the teacher will read a sentence, then ask the students to repeat the sentence. While reading, the teacher should point to each word and ask the students to follow along with their finger. Then, students should use their finger to point as they repeat each word in the sentence.
This is the highest level of support because the teacher is doing the heavy work of decoding first. When we ask students to point to each word as they read, it allows the teacher to see the students matching the words with the text.
I do not echo read an entire long passage. I will echo read decodables or perhaps a paragraph, but nothing much longer than that. And I only ask students to repeat one sentence at a time. Reading engagement is not really possible with echo reading for lengthy amounts of time, and this is a very high level of scaffolding: be mindful about how much text you are asking your children to echo read.
Choral reading occurs when the teacher and the students read at the same time. This still offers a heavy amount of support, because the teacher will be guiding the pace. Most of the time, the teacher is a second ahead of the students, allowing them additional support as the teacher leads.
When I am introducing a decodable, I will often echo read for the first read, and then we choral read the second time. Once again, I am not choral reading entire lengthy passages. Instead, choral reading a page or a paragraph is appropriate.
Choral reading is helpful because it allows all children to engage with the text in a non-threatening manner. I would use choral reading with particularly meaningful, important, or complex sentences within the text.
Cloze reading requires a little more preparation and isn’t feasible for all texts because the teacher must alter the copies the students see. With cloze reading, the teacher intentionally removes a word from sentences within the text. You can do this throughout the passage at different intervals.
When reading, the teacher then asks students what word could go into the blanks. Then, the students write the appropriate word in that blank (this is a place where spelling matters for me. I make sure everyone spells it correctly, fixing when necessary). I love this method because it asks students to actively think about the text. When the teacher is mindful about which words to remove from the passage, it provides an opportunity for children to write down key vocabulary terms. And we all know that writing helps things get sticky in our brains. So writing, vocabulary, sentence level comprehension, and reading engagement? Sign me up!
The difficulty in this method lies in that you cannot always alter a text like this, especially if you are using a basal. Although this is not the “true” way to do Cloze Reading, there’s a way we can still utilize this method. Instead of removing a word, simply ask students to read the word. So, you would read the majority of the text aloud, but then ask students to read the “missing” word. Children would be unable to write the word, but you can still ask them to read (and maybe highlight) the critical word. This is actually a word-level version of Cloze Drop reading.
Cloze Drop reading is when the teacher starts reading, but then drops off and asks the students to finish. I first heard of this when I went to Pam Kastner’s session at The Reading League Conference. There are no hard rules with this-you start reading, and at some point you ask the students to take over. It may be just for a sentence, or perhaps the rest of a paragraph.
I was substituting in a fifth grade classroom, and we had to read the story of the week from the basal. Even without knowing the topic or text super well, I was able to use Cloze Drop. I read the text once before reading it with students. When I was reading aloud, I found key parts of the text where I expected children to read. The best part? Children don’t know when I’m going to drop off, so they all have to follow along in the text.
A few weeks later, I was subbing at the school again. The teacher came up to me and told me that the kids told her they wanted to read the text the way I had read it to them, and they got her to use the Cloze Drop method. Talk about a win, right? You know reading engagement is high with a strategy if the class ASKS to use it!
Sometimes when we are teaching, we don’t ask students to read the text at all. It is okay to have teacher texts that are completely read by the teacher. But, how can we keep reading engagement up during a time when they are not required to actively read?
My solution is to bring out the highlighters. When I read a text to students, I provide a copy for each of them. While I’m reading, I give them questions to think about. When they hear me read the answer, they highlight directly on the passage.
For example, if I’m reading a passage about George Washington, I might ask them to highlight his achievements as I read. I mostly give them a question for each paragraph, but will sometimes ask them to highlight across paragraphs for a single question. You may ask students to highlight key details, specific facts, or statements that help them draw inferences. There are so many opportunities, and kids love using a highlighter.
An additional benefit to this kind of activity is that it can help children quickly locate information. After reading the text about George Washington, if i wanted them to write about his achievements, they already have the pertinent information highlighted.
Up until now, we’ve discussed different strategies for when the teacher is reading aloud a text to students. Before wrapping this up, let’s talk about two different reading engagement strategies for students to use when they are reading the texts themselves.
Partner reading can work a few ways. The easiest is when Partner A reads a single page or paragraph, then Partner B reads the next page or paragraph. You can also have Partner A read a single page or paragraph while Partner B notes errors. After reading, Partner B helps with error correction. Then Partner B reads the SAME page or paragraph, while partner A notes errors.
Partner reading has the opportunity to be a great asset for reading engagement, or a complete nightmare. If we just send students off to partner read, there’s so many things that can go wrong. Children who are at wildly different reading abilities should not be partnered together. Children who will play around instead of working should not be placed together. If we want to allow students to partner read, we need to explicitly teach the process to our students and be mindful about the pairs.
When partner reading, it is best if students are not allow to choose their own partners. I’m a big fan of kids choosing partners, but when it comes to reading, I’m not leaving things to chance.
The best way to organize students for reading partners is to rank your students (privately, of course). In a class of 20, your strongest reader would be #1, while your most struggling reader would be #20. Don’t get stuck in the details: if you aren’t sure if Tammi or Kyle should be #12, just choose one and move on! This isn’t an exact science, but a simple way to make partnerships more equitable. We do not want to partner #1 up with #20. That pairing is unfair to both students because they are so far beyond what the other partner is doing.
Instead, split your list in half. Then, #1 would partner with #11, #2 would partner with #12, #3 with #13, and so on. This way the pairs are not completely equal with their reading abilities, but are not so far from one another as to cause issues.
One of the arguments I hear for keeping round robin reading is this: “How will we know if they are actually reading the text if we can’t hear them reading it?” My answer is always to ask your students to whisper read.
Whisper reading allows you to get a feel of what students are doing and the amount of reading engagement you have in your room, even if you cannot hear every word you are saying. When there’s the gentle hum of students whispering, you can pick up when Tammy has suddenly stopped. You’ll know that there’s no way Erick was able to finish the passage in such a short amount of time.
While students are whisper reading, I listen in on students one at a time. When its time for them to read to me, I ask them to read it at a normal volume so that I can hear. While they are reading to me, I’ll offer feedback as needed.
Sometimes you’ll have kids who are resistant to whisper reading. I tell them to subvocalize, which is where I can see their lips moving as they read, but they don’t have to have a full-blown whisper. In general, however, since all kids are expected to whisper, I don’t have many students who are resistant. Whisper reading is a way to get a pulse on what students are doing, without using round-robin reading or allowing students to read in their heads.
Please note: I do not use this for independent reading. This is for texts that are utilized in whole or small group. If children are reading a book for pleasure, I do not expect them to whisper read.
When you have a text you love, it’s easy to keep reading engagement up. But, reading complex texts can present problems. Instead of just barreling through and hoping our students hold on to what we say, there are many opportunities to alter the way we read with students. From choral reading to Cloze Drop reading, try choosing one of these methods of reading with your students the next time you have a new text!
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Savannah Campbell is a K-5 reading specialist. She has taught her entire 12-year teaching career at the school she went to as a child. She holds two master’s degrees in education from the College of William and Mary. Savannah is both Orton-Gillingham and LETRS trained. Her greatest hope in life is to allow all children to live the life they want by helping them to become literate individuals.
Savannah Campbell is a K-5 reading specialist. She has taught her entire 12-year teaching career at the school she went to as a child. She holds two master’s degrees in education from the College of William and Mary. Savannah is both Orton-Gillingham and LETRS trained. Her greatest hope in life is to allow all children to live the life they want by helping them to become literate individuals.
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