Micheala Jeter's September Blog Post #2: Miller Ch.2 Why Not? What Works?

In this section of the book, Miller talks about Why Independent Reading Matters and the Best Practices to Support It. Independent reading does matter. Independent reading can be simply defined as the time students spend reading self-selected texts. A major part of that definition is that the text is "self-selected", meaning that the student made a choice of what they wanted to read. In the chapter, Miller talks about the idea that teachers know that independent reading is a critical factor in students' reading success, yet they still don't incorporate it in their classrooms. Teachers stated that some of the reasons why they don't do IR are because of "scarce instructional time" or the "difficulty of managing IR with a wide range of levels in the classroom" (Miller 13). Those these are challenges that do arise in the classroom, there still needs to be time for IR. According to the" Revised Publishers Criteria for the Common Core State Standards, students should have 'daily opportunities' to read texts of their choice on their own during and outside of the school day" (Miller, 13).

Miller goes on to list some of the practices that are critical for effective independent reading. Those practices include "classroom time to read, having the choice of what they read, explicit instruction about what, why and how readers read, reading a large number of books and variety of texts, easy access to texts, teacher monitoring, assessment and support during IR, and being able to talk about what they read" (Miller, 16). Although I agree with all of these practices, the ones that stand out to me the most are that students have the choice of what they read and being able to read a lot. If students choose what they read, it means that it is something that they enjoy. Students don't always like reading those required texts from school. If this is the only thing that they read, and they don't enjoy it, it makes reading that much more daunting. Having the choice to read, and to read lots of what they like, makes for easy reading. When students read texts that they like, they are comfortable. Once here, they can begin to push themselves to read things that are a little harder. As long as they have the correct support from their teachers and that IR in school, reading should become something that they can both learn from and enjoy as well.