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Middle school is beautiful-and sometimes a bit messy. Young adolescents are in the throes of discovering themselves and how they relate to the world. They are in the midst of deep analytical thinking, busy analyzing friends' actions, making meaning of their families, synthesizing their place within their peer groups. In any given moment, they're interpreting texts from friends, song lyrics from favorite artists, passing looks from other students. Our middle level students are doing the beautifully messy work of understanding themselves, creating ideas about how the world works, and figuring out how to fit into it all.
It's surprising, then, that when we ask them to do similar thinking as readers of texts, it falls flat or doesn't translate. The same thinking skills vibrant in their social-emotional lives can, at times, lay dormant when asked to analyze, interpret, or synthesize ideas from a text. When this happens, responses to reading feel phoned in, thrown together, or not given much care. They feel more like responses to assignments and less like personal discoveries.
We began craving a way to help our students' reading lives mirror more closely their layered social lives and deep discovery of themselves. We knew, chances were good that this recalibration of their reading lives wasn't going to happen in one assignment or one unit. We found ourselves seeking "a long game," a way students could discover themselves as readers and thinkers of texts that stretched across the year. Growth and discovery takes time. We knew we couldn't rush the process. We also knew this long game had to stem from the students-the books they were reading, the ways their minds worked, their own pacing. Agency, independence, and choice are crucial for any personal discovery, and they would be for this kind of reading discovery too.
So we began a year of teaching with an inquiry, "How can we help our students discover and celebrate how their minds work to think deeply about a text?" Our answer became the Independent Reading Journey.
What Are Independent Reading Journeys?
An independent reading journey is a month-long process during which each student selects a book of her choice to read, analyze, and critique. Students begin their journeys by capturing their initial thoughts and musings while they...