Executive function skills and the motivation to read

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Some of the comments that are coming back from the Year 7 cohort about reading is that the 'Drop Everything and Read' wider reading campaign is giving them permission to read.

To me that sounds funny; why would you need permission to read? Why can't you just enjoy the process?

Intrinsic motivation is an interesting concept. For many of us, getting up in the morning isn't driven by the intrinsic motivation to start the day at a decent time. It is driven by the fact that we have work to go to, or kids to get up or animals to feed. The routine of our life is the motivating factor. For many of us, when those factors are removed, the morning routine falls apart. As adults we have developed those executive function skills to get up and get the jobs done that need to be done.

But for teenagers, many are still developing their executive function skills that drive them to set independent goals, meet self-set deadlines and also keep themselves organised.

For many years I have noticed a decline in the development of executive function skills amongst students. The school diary was often the mechanism to teach them these skills. Assignment dates would be set, tasks would be broken apart, times would be set to study for tests. Once upon a time we would help students create homework timetables and meet with them weekly to talk about their homework habits. Yes it was hard work by the pastoral teachers and parents, but you are not born with organisational skills; systems have to be developed that work for you. Part of this process was also learning to talk to teachers about completing tasks on time, such as 'role playing' how to ask for an extension on a piece of work.

With the large scale integration of Learning Management Systems into our schools, this skill is being super-seeded by looking at an electronic calendar that your teacher has populated for you with due dates. There is no processing or negotiation involved, the dates are just there ...

Online tasks are automatically given due dates and often the system doesn't allow for students to break down these tasks over a series of dates to suit their learning needs. Most electronic calendars do not allow for notes or reflections to be inserted. Perhaps the simple physical act of recording homework offline in a handwritten diary might have more benefits than meets the eye.

So is there a correlation between executive function skill and the motivation to read?

We have been recording our Drop everything and read data for 7 weeks now. We can see that the kids who under-achieve in many subjects are not good at reading regularly and those that are good at reading regularly achieve higher marks in their classroom tasks. Perhaps we didn't need 7 weeks of data to tell us this ...

But what about their executive function skills? Is there a link?

Does the simple act of learning how to plan, increase the likelihood of finding time to read recreationally?

Perhaps this is the next research project for me!

Encouraging a regular reading habit

The data from our reading observations has shown that there is a large chunk of our Year 7 students that are not reading regularly.

Reflecting on the Wider Reading data, we can see that there is a group of girls who are just not reading outside the wider reading sessions every fortnight. Their reading is disjointed and often they pick up a different book each week. The only book that they have finished all semester is their class set text. We know that reading competency, vocabulary range and imagination will develop if students read novels regularly.

They have sports practice, they have homework, they have production rehearsals. The excuses are endless and sometimes quite creative. Students don't understand the benefits of reading regularly and they are not willing to make the changes or sacrifices to steal 10 minutes here or 10 minutes there for their reading.

So what are we doing about it?

We have put together a 'Drop everything and read' campaign. I purposefully called it a campaign because it has a start and an end date. We are doing this in Term 3 because we now know a fair bit about our Year 7 readers, we have 6 months of reading observations about them. Now it is time to change some habits.

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So we have started off with bookmarks to launch the campaign and classroom posters encouraging them to find the 10 minutes a day to read. To steal it from the time before dinner or when waiting for a bus.

Students will use the bookmarks (hopefully) to record how many minutes they read per week and enter the data online so that we can tally up which class has read the most. Yes there is competition between the English classes, however, we are not targeting individual students even though we will have that data so that we can verify and encourage their efforts when we talk to them during the wider reading sessions in the Learning Commons.

The plan is to see how they go and encourage them along with some lolly packs and perhaps button badges if I have the time to make some.

After I presented to two of the classes this afternoon, there was a buzz and lots of questions:

1. Do I have to read?
2. Will there be chocolate?
3. What if I forget to read?
4. Can we each get chocolate?
5. Can I listen to an audio book?
6. Is there chocolate?

When exiting the classroom after presenting the ideas, a student who is a big fan of Tui Sutherland leant into me and said "I am going to knock it out of the park".

I am going to try and blog as much as I can about this project.