Class Library to Build Richer Reading Lives

School libraries are built for experienced readers. Finding books that hold your interest, engage your mind, and build vocabulary and skills at a sustainable pace is a complex process that avid readers learn over time.

When I taught 7th and 8th grade, I built a class library to support independent reading in my classroom. I found that students who didn't read outside of class needed persistent coaching and guidance in how to find high interest, appropriately leveled books to read. They also needed regular dedicated class time to read them.

Avid readers used independent reading time to stretch themselves with greater challenges or by expanding their scope. My job was to conference, coach, and help all of them connect the elements in their books to our curricular class texts, using dialogue and the writing process.

Transitioning to high school, I found this avid reader group shrinks significantly. Students who'd either fallen off or never engaged in a reading life outside of school continued to need instruction and scheduling help in searching, choosing and completing books on this parallel track; one that allows for connections, conversations, and journaling alongside the more complex curriculum track.

The purpose of this proposal is to build a class library that supports independent reading thru engagement, responsibility, and a flexibility driven by student’s curiosity and personal development.

Choice Drives Engagement

Having an active, choice-driven reading life, where students set reading goals, monitor and reflect on growth, and create personal challenges, allows students to feel an agency and ownership that is strained or often missing in the formal curriculum.

Students with a dynamic reading diet have more curiosity to write. They ask more authentic questions and produce more genuine responses. Equally as important, they have more stamina to tackle the challenging texts that make up the core of the year.

Funding from this proposal would stock our classroom library with a broad range of high quality contemporary and classic fiction / non-fiction, arranged in shallow bins by genre, stacked covers forward, which promotes active browsing. My current classroom library is primarily my personal paperback collection, which has some good stuff for sophomores and seniors, but many that are dense, eclectic, or obscure for most tastes, while other titles are just tired and need replacing.

I teach 3 sophomore and 2 senior sections at an independent school (Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, Maine) with a total of around 80 students. So $2,500 at $12-$20 per title, will yield a few hundred books, which would be a great start.

If you DO choose to donate, and have titles to recommend, PLEASE write them in the Words of Support column, which should activate after you donate. (include author's name)

I am hoping to get this funded by August, 27, 2024.

A big inspiration for launching campaign was hearing author/educator Penny Kittle speak about her work with adolescent readers, and watching this video she made, which was a slap in the face, a kick in the pants, and a cry of hope:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something–a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things–which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

– Alan Bennett, The History Boys

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