What is a Culture of Reading?

Why do most schools fail to build a culture of reading?

Reader Zone is based near Boise, Idaho. There's an elementary school here that has a world-class jump rope team--yes, that's a thing

They go to competitions all over the U.S. and some of their former students went pretty far on the tv show America's Got Talent.

It began with one person at the school who was passionate about jump roping. She got the kids jumping and now, when you enter the school, you know right away that they're all about jump roping. It is a durable culture.

Any culture is made with two ingredients: A practice and information. You know you have a culture when everyone in the school community.

expects something. They're proud of it. They talk about it.

So let's frame this up for reading:

How much reading did your school or class as a whole complete last year?

Do you know? Do your students know? How about your parents?

If the answer is no, you haven't built a culture of reading. Here's why.

You probably hand out paper reading logs and implore students and families to log their reading numbers. That's the part that takes the most work and you're already doing it.

Here's where most schools fail:
All that reading data doesn't get aggregated or reported. It stays on the paper reading logs. The information is never shared.

Picture this: your new kindergarten students and their parents walk into school this fall and see a big banner that says:

"Last year our students read 2 million minutes and 50,000 books."

Now you've done something powerful. You've reported evidence that validates a claim that you are readers.

You've created an expectation. You measured it. You reported it. You talk about it.

"Students at Johnson Elementary are readers--here's the proof." That's culture. specifically a culture of reading.

For the last six years, we've helped hundreds of public libraries do exactly that with Reader Zone.

Now we've built a Classroom Edition of Reader Zone specifically for teachers.

Because when reading totals are reported and made visible, culture is created.

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