Amanda Fortenberry - Miller Ch. 2: Why Not? What Works? Why Independent Reading Matters and the Best Practices to Support It

In Chapter 2 of Miller's "No More Independent Reading Without Support," Barbara Moss details the importance of independent reading, the research behind it, and how to make it work for all students.  She notes regardless of the names over the years that 'independent reading' has been identified as (DEAR, SSR, USSR) and now IR, just making it work and using it correctly and effectively is key to creating effective, strategic practices and successful students.  It was a little hard to read as the chapter was jam packed with study after study and filled with data and a plethora of information to reach ALL students...the HOW and the WHY of it all.  Just like the how and why questions in the classroom are hard for our students to answer because they are complex.  That type of work (and read) and its complexity of making it all work is consuming!  However, I feel like we are off to a great start at RES and have supportive measures to make sure we are effective; but we HAVE to keep reading about being effective and being supportive because that's what we are teaching our readers to do.  Moss makes that evident in chapter 2 when she adds, "Good readers read.  Poor readers don't read."  The phrase "practice makes perfect" we know all too well.  This chapter parallels the importance of reading as adult readers and teachers of readers; that we need to practice reading everyday...for ourselves and others; hence the name 'supportive independent reading.'  I gathered from reading the effectiveness of modeling different strategies everyday with different genres, text varieties (newspaper, email, chapter books, etc) as well as with the things we like to read is important for us to grow in everyday life and should be equally important for our students.  She pushes and validates the importance of complex reads to help us grow and I feel that chapter 2 was a little complex, but I'm growing in that fact that when we are stretched to think outside the box, then we expand our knowledge and our need for growing.  Does that stretch make life difficult sometimes? Yes!  The process grows us and we should use the parallel of that stretch to grow our readers.  We need to grow ourselves and our students in everything we read.  Moss connects hair (yes our hair) and it's need to be volumizing instead of flat, boring, etc...to the need for volume in books with our students as she states, "By increasing reading volume, students can improve reading achievement."  BAM!  Ok.  Perfect sense and she explains how to make it happen in chapter 2.  The chapter is filled with a plethora of information to reach all readers: ESOL, the struggling reader, the one who is having trouble with comprehension, or fluency, vocabulary, engagement, etc.  I liked reading this chapter though and really studying the framework of HOW to make it work for ALL students.  All of the studies she gave just validates the importance and that IR really works.  Moss makes perfect sense of saying "Children need the chance to practice reading everyday, not just when their work is finished."  I agree with allowing student choice with an "access to a wide range of materials on a variety of topics and interests."  Another interesting read in this chapter is that "common core" is the new reason to effective practice and the teaching of reading to grow independent readers because "the [common core] standards argue that current practices have not done enough to foster independent reading of complex text; especially informational texts."  I'm looking forward to using the studies in this chapter and the information to 'inform' the readers in my class.  So yay!  Looks like I'll be reading over common core standards again along with this book because that's what good readers do...they read and reread, but I'll also pick my other books to keep up my enthusiasm for reading and to decompress during the complex readings.  Happy Reading!