Section 2 Why Not? What Works? By Debbie Miller-Blog 4 Kathey Tate

Independent Reading is an essential practice as one that develops background knowledge, improves fluency and comprehension, heightens motivation, increases reading achievement, and helps students broaden their vocabulary. Practices that are critical for effective independent reading are classroom time to read, to choose what they read, explicit instruction about what, why, and how readers read, to read a lot: a large number of books and variety of texts, access to text, teacher monitoring, assessment, and support during independent reading, and to talk about what they read. The teacher must be an active participant. The teacher cannot sit on the sidelines and just watch what is going on, sit reading, or grading papers. The teacher must structure, guide, teach, interact with, monitor and hold students accountable for time spent reading independently and silently. I really like the way it is explained in this section. This will help all teachers understand the purpose of independent reading and the correct way to implement it in the classroom.