Sustained silent reading (SSR)

Arsenal Technical High School

Herb Budden, ITW Director, IPS Retired Teacher, and IPS TLC

Two areas of concern:Why do SSR?Key Factors for Success

Would a good coach say:

As we prepare for the big game

Friday night, I won’t be conducting any practices at school.

Instead, I want you to go home

and practice on your own for a number of hours to improve your skills. Good luck, and I’ll see you at the game.

Virtually all worthwhile endeavors

require supervised practice. SSR is a

way to practice

reading comprehension.

CONSIDER:

The average amount of time spent reading for

all grades is

7.1 minutes per day

in public schools around the nation.

The peak reading years

are the fourth and fifth grades. By the time students reach high school, they are spending

about as much time on self-selected reading as

kindergartners.

Students in the top 5 percent of national

reading scores read

144 times more than students in the

bottom 5 percent

Students in the highest-performing states in

the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading

study engaged in 59 percent more

reading than those states in the bottom quartile

Paul, Terrance. 1996. Patterns of Reading Practice. Institute for

Academic Excellence.

TIME SPENT READING CORRELATES WITH

HIGHER TEST SCORES

IN ALL SUBJECTS.

PERCENTILE RANK

MINUTES OF TEXT READING PER DAY

EST. # OF WORDS READ PER YEAR

98 90.7 4,733,000

90 40.4 2,357,000

70 21.7 1,168,000

50 12.9 601,000

20 3.1 134,000

10 1.6 51,000

Anderson, Richard et al, 1988. “Growth in Reading and How Children Spend Their Time Outside of School.” Reading Research Quarterly 23: 285

Local Research Proves SSR Raises ISTEP Scores:

Leslie Preddy, Perry Twp. Schools, Indianapolis

ATHS is ahead of the curve in establishing and maintaining a powerful SSR program among urban high

schools in the city, state and nation!

It needs YOUR further commitment!

TECH’S SSR Program:Teacher Comments

One year ago, as the planning phase for our SSR program was winding down and we faced the implementation

phase, I was skeptical. Today, I can report …it has been better received than I expected

In fact, there has been a need on several occasions and in several classes to

remind students that SSR time had expired for the day and it was time to put away their books.

As for myself, I have read more books (12) for pleasure in this school year than I have read in my previous 56 years on the planet. I do not know whether the school I will be assigned to next year will have SSR; I certainly hope it does.

I love the way SSR leads so logically right into a climate of learning, even in my area which is usually noisy! It is a calm and understated way of preparing the mind for learning. I do not want to go back to teaching without it!!!

I experienced an incident in my class this year that demonstrated to me the value of SSR and how seriously the students regard it. I was

talking to a student from my at-risk group of non readers …This was a student who is not in my SSR group. He noticed the Stephen King book Dream Catchers. He asked to borrow it to read but I explained that it was for my SSR group and added that it was a hard back book and was very expensive.

The next day he brought me a $10 bill and begged me to hold his money while he took the book to read. He said that if he lost it or damaged it that I could keep his $10. .. I let him keep his money and sign out the book based on his promises. In about 2 weeks, the book was returned in good shape.

A Tech Student Writes:January 23, 2008

Few books have the ability to capture my attention for longer than a few minutes. I am by no means an avid reader. I find it excruciatingly difficult to pick up a book and begin to read. With so many different forms of entertainment available, reading a book seems like a chore. But there was one book that was able to keep me glued to its pages from beginning to end.

…The school had …a reading program named SSR that forced us to read in the mornings. I browsed through the classroom’s library of books and found a book with a nice cover. The book was Ender’s Game, a science fiction novel about a young boy that is raised and trained for the sole purpose of defeating an attacking alien race…

At first I thought the plot was dumb, but as

the story progressed I found myself getting lost in the fictional world. I would read that book for hours at a time whenever I found myself with nothing to do.

 To this day I have yet to have such an

enjoyable experience while reading a book. I have only finished reading a handful of books because it is hard for a book to capture my attention from the first page to the last…it was a book that I deeply enjoyed and a story that I wish never ended.

FACTORS FOR

SUCCESS

FACTOR ONE: Students need access to High-

Interest reading materials.

***More books=more reading=better

reading

FACTOR TWO: Students must have a

structured time and place to read

Your SSR program does this

FACTOR THREE: Teachers must model the value

of reading. Adults who don’t read for pleasure themselves during

SSR send a powerful message: time set aside for

reading isn’t important.

We often have to model positive behavior ten, twenty, or thirty times before we see it take hold in adolescents. But if they see us model a bad behavior ONCE, they learn it immediately. Think of this at the beginning of each SSR.

FACTOR FOUR: No grading, yes, but accountability

matters.

SSR time should be inviolate and the room absolutely conducive to reading silently.

FACTOR FIVE: Faculty commitment to show

students what’s in it for them. It’s our

responsibility to “SELL” SSR (extrinsic value) in order for them to “BE SOLD”

(intrinsic value) on it!

Experience + research shows that carrying out

these factors consistently

will result in higher

student achievement.