I teach a skills-based English class for 16-year-olds who are struggling with writing and reading and I had become sick and tired of the same problem occurring every single year: the books list I had to teach, while educationally valuable, was making my students hate reading.

Of course, many a teacher will have struggled to entice their class of teens to engage with a text, but I had tried every trick I could think of to make these books relevant and appealing and they were simply having no effect. In fact, they were turning my students off reading full stop.

So I decided to form a new list, a list with which I knew my students would engage. It was a massive challenge. I needed teachable, modern books that connected to our school’s curriculum but that were also exciting to read and relevant to my students’ lives.

What we ended up with was a comprehensive list of high-quality young adult literature. In the 27 May issue of TES, there is a free poster listing these books.  

A new approach

This year, I began to teach the new canon we had created.

I began with Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a truly wonderful young adult novel about a teenager coming of age.

To follow this, I wanted to give students the power to choose their own stories, so we conducted a “pass around” - students passed all the books on my list around the room, spending a few minutes with each text, to find one that was a good fit for them.

Once they decided on their book, we made reading schedules. Students filled out their calendars, deciding when and how much to read each night depending on their schedules and the book’s length, so that we would all finish our books by the same date.

Big impact

Our lessons each day in the classroom were varied, keeping students energised and engaged. Some days we talked about similar themes presented in many of the books, such as bullying, racism, the justice system or drug abuse. Together, we would read an article about the topic and the students would connect it to their books in our class discussions. The students reading books about the topic at hand became “experts”, explaining how their book portrayed the issue through fiction.

Other days, I prepared mini-lessons on a particular reading or writing strategy.

Very quickly, it became apparent that this unit was having an effect on the students. After the first week, two of my most resistant readers told me they had already finished their books. I had to hold back my surprise when they asked if they could borrow a second book.

They were reading not by force but because they genuinely wanted to and they really enjoyed doing so.

Rebecca McGrath is a high school teacher in New Jersey, US

This is an article from the 27 May edition of TES. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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