Dont Do Books, Miss Motivating Reluctant Readers

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Dont Do Books, MissMotivating Reluctant Readers

• Stephen Rickard
• Creative Director, Ransom Publishing

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• This is a highly condensed summary of a longer
  argument
• Ill put a fuller argument on Ransoms blog
• www.ransompublishing.blogspot.com

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The argument in a nutshell

• Kids today live in a very particular kind of
  ecosystem

• It is media-led, very fast, sophisticated,
  pluralistic and gratifying

• TV, computer games and movies lead the charge

• Books trail behind. Especially educational books.
  They dont reward

• So books are something you have to do, not
  something you want to do

• Worse, the way we manage the interface between
  children and books teaches them this

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• Lets try to unpack some of this ...
• First, lets focus on the ecosystem that kids are
  living in these days ...

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The ecosystem
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Children are ...

• Visually very literate
• (More so than you!)

• Accustomed to complex narratives (Drake and Josh,
  Spongebob)

• Able to process the world through stories
  (Spongebob)

• Punching well above their age! (Hannah Montana)

• This is post-modernism as a starting point!

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Fast Media

• Not plot plus subplot but 5 or 6 simultaneous
  plots - very fast, very parallel

• Full of cultural references and sideswipes
  (verbal, visual, musical)

• Plenty of depth (compare the current Doctor Who
  with the 1960s - 1980s versions). David Tennant
  is cool, but lonely too, and shows it even tho
  you can see hes trying to hide it (as a 6 year
  old told me)

• But also no depth at all (if its turned up to 10
  all the time then everything is shallow)

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Want more evidence?

• Lord of the Rings (the movie trilogy)

• Toy Story - the kids get the jokes for parents
  (that ones for you)

• Masterchef (not watching cooking but watching
  people under pressure failing to cope)

• Whose Line Is It Anyway? (x pretending to be y
  pretending to be z)

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I think we are failing our kids

• We are failing them in two ways.
• One is a challenge to us.
• The second is a problem of our own making.

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Failure 1Educational books are boring
educational books

• Poverty of language

• Dated, limited, simplistic illustrations

• One-dimensional stories, linear, slow

• Often patronising

• Awful story topics/plots

• Utterly struggling to offer rich experiences

• This is primarily a failure of content

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Failure 2 We are teaching our kids that books
are boring

• To do with the way that reading/literacy is
  taught in schools

• Part of lessons

• Ergo reading is what you do at school

• 20 mins to read part of a book and next time you
  get a different one

• WIFM?

• Or one-on-one with struggling readers
  confrontational (whos the expert, whos
  useless?)

• This is primarily a failure of process

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Books are boring

• Conclusion
• Reading is a chore
• Something you do at school - because you have to
• Choosing a book is finding the best of the worst
• No wonder we have so many reluctant readers

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Irrespective of reading ability ...

• We are not offering good enough books
• (i.e. books that can compete with The Simpsons in
  the kids ecosystem)

• We are training our kids to accept that reading
  books is a chore
• by virtue of the way we teach reading

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So what do we do about it?
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Three things

• Decide what we want our kids to become
• Improve the content
• Improve the process

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1 Decide what we want our kids to become

• Do we want kids who are literate, who are
  fulfilled and who are successful (but just dont
  do books)?
• Do we want our kids to appreciate literature and
  what it is (even though it might not be for
  them)?
• Do we want kids who enjoy and delight in the
  pleasures of reading (a book at bedtime for the
  rest of your life ...)?
• Do we want kids who devour and relish Shakespeare
  and Chaucer, including all the tiny nuances?

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2 Improve the content

• Better books that can compete more effectively in
  the kids ecosystems
• For high-low readers, this is the challenge that
  Ransom sets itself
• In many ways this is more an issue for publishers
  than for anybody else

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3 Improve the process

• For all the money spent by governments on various
  literacy intiatives, I see a focus on process as
  being both
• cheaper and
• potentially more effective

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Process a relevant digression

• Force field analysis - a change management tool

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A relevant digression

• Force field analysis - a change management tool
• Stuff is where it is because the forces driving
  change the forces resisting change
• If you want to change stuff - overcoming the
  forces resisting change is usually more effective
  than increasing the driving forces.

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becomes
Driving change
Resisting change
Driving change
Resisting change
and change happens ...
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Same with kids ...
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What we have found 1

• Motivation is 80 of the problem solved
• If kids want to read it, they will try very hard
  to do so
• This means it must behave like all the other
  media they consume and must be consumed in the
  same way as other media ...
• wicked, cool, fast
• visually very sophisticated
• not patronising
• rewarding!

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What we have found 2

• Give the kids ownership of the need
• Dont confront them with the need to learn to
  read
• Let them confront you with the need to read this
  book
• Strategies to achieve this
• leave the books lying around
• let them come to you demanding help
• appeal to their visual literacy to achieve this

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What we have found 2

• Focus on slotting reading into their ecosystem,
  not them into yours
• Reading clubs (e.g. a secret society for
  struggling readers)
• Reading outside the classroom
• Bringing in stuff to read comics, football
  programmes, etc.

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What we have found 2

• Our Goal! football books
• wicked, cool, etc.
• put the kids in control I know about this. Let
  me tell you, miss!
• Reading in a non-confrontational manner as one
  teacher put it

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• Of course the books have to be good enough to
  start with
• Getting them educationally good enough isnt hard
• Getting them visually good enough is very hard
• Synthetic Phonics on its own will not get kids
  reading (but thats probably another conversation)

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Im sorry for over-generalising but time is short

• What we have learned at Ransom
• Our experiences as a publisher of high interest
  age/low reading age books for struggling readers
  ...
• ... seem to apply to reluctant readers generally,
  whatever their reading ability.

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Thank you.

• Stephen Rickard
• www.twitter.com/kidnap
• www.ransompublishing.blogspot.com
• steve_at_ransom.co.uk

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