Popcorn Reading

Psst. I have a confession to make. There was a time when I felt that an occasional “popcorn” around to different readers in the room would do no harm. However, through the years, my thinking has evolved because the evidence against it is beyond persuasive. Research on round robin reading tells us:

• It slows down reading rates.
• It lowers the quantity of reading students do. (Research estimates that students actually read between two to six minutes in a typical round robin reading session. Any way you slice it, it’s not much.)
• It is ineffectual at improving reading comprehension. When reading aloud, pronunciation is emphasized over meaning. In turn, text is often read slowly and disfluently which interferes with meaning making.
• It is detrimental to fluency because children are often asked to read texts that are too difficult which leads to choppy models of what reading sounds like.
• It highlights the displeasures of reading leaving children feeling disinclined to pick up books and read on their own.

When asked, teachers cite a number of reasons why they believe in and practice round robin reading but the bottom line seems to be this: Most feel it is their best and only option for coming together around a shared text which means that if we are going to change this practice, we need to provide teachers with better alternatives.

But what would those be?

One option teachers have is to read the text aloud. The benefits of reading aloud to children are well documented. Unlike round robin reading which has many strikes against it, reading aloud has many benefits, including: 

• It models what expert reading sounds like.
• It helps kids know and love many different authors.
• It exposes children to many genres.
• It actively engages children in thinking and meaning making while enjoying the piece being shared.
• It conditions the brain to associate reading with pleasure.
• It creates background knowledge.
• It builds vocabulary.

If the issue remains that we want our students to do the reading, then why not have them read it silently? Teachers often worry that student won’t actually read or might not understand what they read. If that’s the case, we’ve got to consider the underlying issues. Are they not reading because they don’t have the stamina they need to get through the text? Are they not reading because the text is too hard? It is only through honest reflection that we are able to answer these questions and in answering them, we inevitably find our way to better alternatives to round robin reading.

When your students need to come together around a shared text, how do you make sure they all get what they need? What alternatives do you propose?

Back in 1992, all movie theaters cooked their popcorn in coconut oil. As movie goers, we devoured it by the bag—buckets even—unaware that as we ate, we ingested 37 grams of saturated fat.

Did you catch that? I said thirty-seven grams of fat.

If you ate eggs and bacon for breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and topped it off with a steak with a side of baked potato with butter and sour cream, you’d ingest slightly less than 37 grams of fat. So, you see, thirty-seven grams of fat is bad. Really bad. And when people began realizing HOW bad bad was, there was public outrage. Movie theaters had no choice. They had to abandon the coconut oil and switch to something better.

You might be wondering why I am telling you this story and the reason is simple. Literacy has a “popcorn” problem: You might recognize it from your own education…or possibly, even from your own teaching. It looks a lot like this:

“Boys and girls, today we are going to read from our Social Studies textbook about World War II. Please open your book to page 56. Who would like to begin reading aloud? …Great job, Billy. Thomas, were you paying attention? I want you to continue reading. Kathy get ready, you’re next.”

Sound familiar? This practice has many variations but the bottom line is this: whether you popcorn around the room or pick sticks out of a jar, it’s all round robin reading. And like popcorn cooked in coconut oil, there are alarming problems inherent in this practice. It puts children on the spot, asks them to perform without practicing, it can be demeaning and demoralizing, but most of all, it severely limits the amount of practice kids get ACTUALLY reading. Oral reading rates are by nature slower than silent reading rates which means that when a text is read aloud, you are not going to read as much in the same amount of time as you would if you read it silently in your head. During round robin reading, the average turn lasts about one minute and between the time a child reads aloud and attentively reads along with the other children as they take their turns, they read for about six minutes. Six measly minutes.

So, like popcorn cooked in coconut oil, round robin reading is bad. Really bad. We need to feel the same public outrage and demand something better.

The question this leaves us with is this: When we want our students to come together around a text, what are our options? What other choices do teachers have besides taking turns listening to children read sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph?