SSR on the Hot Seat

As a participant-observer in public school classrooms and in teacher-preparation programs for thirty-five years, I became a habitual autoethnographer, searching for clarity about my role in local school cultures so that I felt competent to discuss front-burner questions of pedagogy with teachers and administrators.

I worked as a teacher and in teacher professional development at dozens of different sites over a ten year period and then as a professor in teacher preparation for seventeen years. As David Pearson (1989) wrote in his cautionary defense of Whole Language, teachers are dyed-in-the-wool eclectics who don’t adopt anything without adapting it to their professional practice. SoR advocates caught on quickly to this eclecticism. As SoR emerged we witnessed the birth of Fidelity.

Sustained Silent Reading as a pedagogy took me by surprise when I made the leap of faith from teaching English at the community college level to teaching in a self-contained fourth grade. The term itself seemed compromised, awkward, strained, and I wondered what exactly it denoted beyond the obvious. As I spotted variants of SSR (DEAR time, USSR, Free Reading, to name a few), my confusion grew. In my experience, people tinker with different terms to refer to what they believe to be the same thing when they are really talking about different things. All of the variants included student choice of reading material, but some teachers were hands-off, some hands-on, and some not buying it at all.

I had read research presented in my reading specialist program providing evidence that a wide variety of reading experiences during the elementary and middle school years is essential to the development of effective, efficient readers—automaticity, vocabulary, conceptual development and more depend on it. Over the years, specific criteria were proposed. Some have argued that a million words per year is the right number. Others have argued that twenty-five books per year does the job. Wide reading means quite a lot of reading—a large investment of a child’s time no matter the unit of measurement. Moreover, to yield dividends, the investment of time must be made regularly and voluntarily, self-motivated, self-interested, self-aware.

In the minds of some teachers, SSR was an “eat your vegetables” problem. In homes where fresh vegetables are plentiful, parents resort to bribes to cajole or even threats to coerce the desired behavior. Teachers make use of rewards and punishments as well, and education is still working to free itself from the residue of wholesale behaviorism. Threatening an individual if they don’t do a thing voluntarily makes sense if the goal is just to get the thing done. Bribes work the same way. But vegetables and books are alike only metaphorically. We “eat” books, and books “eat” us (we get “absorbed in them” or “devour” them or “consume” them). We eat and absorb broccoli, not books.

Theorists of human motivation prefer the word “incentive” over “bribe,” but the mechanism is the same. Edward Deci taught us half a century ago of the lunacy in giving external rewards to stimulate behavior which we want to become intrinsically motivated. The act of incentivizing a behavior sends the message that such an act is inherently unpleasant or difficult—eating cabbage or broccoli. What we learn from incentives is not to do the behavior unless there is an incentive.

Yet even in 2023 the intentional use of bribes to encourage reading goes on. Google it and you’ll find information like the following:

In the 1990s Martin Covington pointed to the paradox that incentives today become disincentives when they are removed tomorrow to explain how the star spangled drive to make the honor roll in school turns the internal reward of learning into the external rewards of work. In the process, thinking and learning are owned by the school, not the student. Grades as academic capital become more and more salient as school years pass. In first grade children hardly know a smiley face from a + or a -. But soon they understand, and they either care and invest effort accordingly or give up and grow helpless or actively resist and get pushed out. In the age of Common Core, the entire public school system said the quiet part out loud: School isn’t where you go to learn; we go to school to become college or career ready. We read because we want to work in an office or a on a campus or in a corporation.

As far as I know, experts who have studied the question of SSR have no empirically derived recommendation on what children should read—other than “variety.” In my experience, teachers struggle with this question. On one hand, they believe that kids should volunteer to read increasingly more challenging books; on the other, they know that reading to build automaticity and fluency should be easy and fun. A volunteer tutor for an adult literacy project once asked me for advice in her tutoring of a middle-aged man who was functionally illiterate.

He had discovered pornography.

At one school, the administration required that everyone literally drop everything and read for fifteen minutes every day—everyone, no exceptions for adults working outside the classrooms, who were seen as models for the children. I talked to a custodian who was feeling some angst. She felt responsible and was proud that she was being acknowledged as important to the kids’ learning. But she also had real world work to do. The SSR time ended up being her morning break.

In this era of Core outcome-driven laissez faire pedagogy knitted to outcome-driven formative and summative assessments, it takes courage to share control of the curriculum with students. Getting children ready for college or career is serious business. Time must not be wasted on frivolous or exploratory learning. Providing a well-stocked classroom library today in Florida and Texas takes even more courage. In this era of book banning, teachers run the risk of lawsuits if they sanction student self-selection of suspect books.

How do we turn this ship around?