In this episode, we explore the pitfalls of reading incentives and how they can undermine intrinsic motivation and create a culture of winners and losers. Instead, discover how to build a supportive and equitable reading community that truly values the joy of reading. Tune in for this thought-provoking audiobook sample from The Joy of Reading by Donalyn Miller and Terry Lesesne.
Below is a full transcript
In some schools reading competitions and contests offer the only community-wide attempts to celebrate reading for young readers. Students must reach a certain reading goal such as reading so many books, pages, or hours, and document proof or pass an assessment. And when they do, they receive better grades or earn prizes and awards. Children who do not meet such goals receive lower grades, punishment, or the public humiliation of failing to earn a desired reward. Such competitions send powerful messages to both the young readers who win and those who don't. First, that reading is not worth doing unless you can win a prize doing it.
Second, if you can't read well enough to win a prize or if you lack access to resources that would help, you are a failure. Instead of fostering an inclusive reading community, incentives and contests for reading create a culture of reading winners and losers. Research on the negative effects of external rewards on reading motivation shows that manipulating learners through extrinsic rewards and punishments, including the withholding of rewards, impedes real learning and seems most damaging to long-term motivation when the task being rewarded is already intrinsically motivating, like reading, as noted in Kohn's Punished by Rewards.
Unfortunately, these misguided contests and competitions continue, often disguised as summer reading programs and battle of the book contests that control children's reading choices and misrepresent why reading matters. Simply put, rewarding reading indicates only that you do not believe reading is innately rewarding or you do not trust kids with their own reading lives or both. Why any school would to set its students onto such a path of reading shame and failure is hard to understand. One particular example of the damaging effects of incentives and competitions that is close to my heart is the 40 Book Challenge.
I described this student focused reading challenge in my first book, The Book Whisperer. I explained that at the beginning of the school year. I voiced an expectation to my students that they would read 40 books from a variety of genres and in a variety of formats. My classroom centered independent reading, used research-based practices for engaging children with reading and supported students in forming a vibrant reading community. The result was that students were excited to read as many books as they could.
In the decades since the book's publication, however, I've seen the 40 Book Challenge corrupted into a competition and incentive program in classrooms that don't center independent reading or support reading communities. The effect has been what you might expect, a joyless rush through as many books as possible with students competing against each other rather than forming a supportive community. Something that was originally used successfully to expand students' reading lives and build community had been turned into something that limited students' reading lives and damaged community.
All because it had been infused with competition. I am unlikely to express how harmful this is to readers better than I did in a 2014 blog post. Writing The 40 book challenge isn't an assignment you can simply add to outdated ineffective teaching practices. The book challenge rests on the foundation of a classroom reading community built on research-based practices for engaging children with reading. Assigning a 40 Book Challenge as a way to generate grades or push children into reading in order to compete with their classmates corrupts everything I have written and said about reading.
The 40 Book Challenge is meant to expand students' reading lives, not limit or define it. The 40 Book Challenge is a personal challenge for each student, not a contest or competition between students or classes. In every competition or contest, there are winners and losers. Why would we communicate to our students that they are reading losers? For some students, reading 40 books is an impossible leap from where they start as readers and for others, it's not a challenge at all. If Alex read two books in fourth grade and reads 22 in fifth grade, I am celebrating with him. What an accomplishment. Look how much Alex grew.
He didn't grow because he read more books. He grew because he had 22 successful reading experiences. Conversely, when Haley read 55 books in fourth grade, reading 40 books in fifth grade isn't challenging her. Encouraging Haley to read biographies and historical fiction, which she claims to detest, does more to stretch her than simply reading more books. Honestly, I don't care if all of my students read 40 books or not. What matters is that students grow and evolve as readers and increase their competence, confidence, and reading motivation through their daily participation in our reading community.
From an equity and inclusion standpoint, school contests also erode communities in school by ignoring the economic disparities and differences in access to resources between our students. Students with piles of books at home, library cards and caregivers who can attend school literacy events during the day or read the likely English-only contest materials always have the advantage. Driving a wedge between groups of students, contests uphold the power and status of a few predominantly white and affluent families, teachers or administrators, and do little to improve the overall literacy outcomes or reading culture of the school.
A school community that reads and joyfully models reading, encourages even the most fragile reader to connect with books relevant to their interests and experiences, and receive the necessary academic and social support to strengthen their reading motivation and ability. Investing effort toward fostering readily relationships between students means dedicating regular opportunities for students to preview, share, and talk about books with each other. Developing independent reading rituals and routines provide students with a scaffold for launching reading-focused conversations with each other and practice in a community of other readers.
Dr. Ernest Morrell has described rituals through temporal, spatial and status lenses. What do we make time for? What do we make space for? What do we give status to? My spouse, Don, and I are business partners as well as life partners. We cook dinner together almost every night. This transition from our work lives to our personal lives has created a wonderful space for sharing our interest in cooking, dancing to our favorite music and enjoying each other's company. Our cooking knowledge and skills have grown considerably since this ritual began. We have dedicated time and space for this ritual and made it a priority.
In language arts classrooms what temporal, spatial and status needs might we consider as we develop our rituals and routines? Time. How do students spend their time in language arts class? What is the balance between teacher-directed instruction and student-directed inquiry and practice? Do children spend self-directed time every day reading, writing, and talking about topics of their own choice? Is there regular time for reading aloud? Is there regular time for visiting the library? Is there regular time for family literacy education and community building events, especially outside of the school day?
Space. How do we construct our physical and intellectual spaces? How does our school create emotionally and intellectually safe spaces for students to share and discuss with each other what they read and write? Does reading play a prominent visual role across our school? What does our school, district or state prioritize in the curriculum? How are social justice, social and emotional learning and information literacy woven through every course? How does our school create welcoming spaces for all families? Status. How do we decide what to emphasize or elevate?
Does our school, district or state budget for sufficient resources, including books in libraries and classrooms? How might our school's institutional and instructional structures perpetuate stereotypes and social or cultural inequities or seek to dismantle them? How do our school and teachers bestow privileges on certain students while withholding this status from others? Does our school celebrate and incorporate diversity throughout the school year or emphasize that only during holidays and designated months? How does our school value students reading lives and identities more than their test scores?
How does our school show appreciation of home literacy as much as school literacy? Reflecting on our understanding of best practices, funding and policies in our district or school, and our relationships with students and their families, what do we seem unable to prioritize in spite of our beliefs? What is the gap between knowing and doing? No matter our professed pedagogy, our consistent actions and behaviors reveal what we value in our school community.
Edie :
To hear more from the Joy of Reading, you can stream or download the audiobook wherever you get your audiobooks. Thanks for listening, and let us know what you'd like to hear about in our time together. To learn more and read a full transcript, visit blog.heinemann.com.
About the Author
Donalyn Miller’s work champions self-selected independent reading, providing guidance and resources that foster children’s love of reading and the development of positive reading identities. A national and international consultant and bestselling author, Donalyn’s published works include The Book Whisperer (Jossey-Bass, 2009), Reading in the Wild (Jossey-Bass, 2013), and Game Changer: Book Access for All Kids (co-written with Colby Sharp, Scholastic, 2018) as well as articles in Gifted Child International, Education Week Teacher, The Reading Teacher, Voices From the Middle, Educational Leadership, Horn Book, School Library Journal, and The Washington Post. Recipient of TCTELA’s Elementary Language Arts Teacher of the Year (2011) and TCTELA’s Edmund J. Farrell Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award (2018) (for her contributions to the language arts teaching profession).
Donalyn is also a co-founder of The Nerdy Book Club, an online community which provides inspiration, book recommendations, resources, and advice about raising and teaching young readers. Donalyn and her husband, Don, live in Texas atop a dragon’s hoard of books. You can connect with her on her website BookWhisperer.com, or on Twitter at @DonalynBooks.
