Student Accountability During Independent Reading

I run a reader's workshop in my classroom, and at the midpoint in the school year, my students are reading independently for about 40 minutes a day.  Because I am conducting small groups and individual conferences, I don't have the time to be constantly monitoring whether or not my students are actually reading. And you know we always have a few that appear to be reading but really aren't.... How can I get ALL of my students to take their independent reading time seriously?
Are you having trouble keeping your students focused during independent reading time? An independent reading reflection activity is the perfect solution to helping your students take ownership and responsibility over their own work!
Enter the Independent Reading Report. It's a quick checklist that my students use to self evaluate their work during independent reading time. Every Friday, my students complete this half-sheet to reflect on their reading work for the week.
Students score themselves on three areas: Reading the Whole Time, Writing 2-3 Sticky Notes per Day, and Completing their Reading Logs (don't get me started on my opinion of reading logs... but I'm required to use them, so it is what it is...). They rate themselves on a three-point scale. One week I tried to use a 4-point scale, but how can you Exceed Expectations for completing your reading log?

Then, I take about 10 minutes on Friday to go through all my students' reports and I score them as well. Sometimes I'll check in with a few to look at their sticky notes and reading logs again, just to be sure.
You should see my kids run to their mailboxes at the end of the day to see how I scored them and see if our scores matched. I've even had a student approach me, show me her sticky notes for the week, and make me change my score :) And for those kiddos who maybe earned a 1 or a 2 for a certain area, they are motivated to work harder next week to get to the 3. Do I have students who overrate themselves? Yes, a few. But for the most part, they are very in tune with their efforts for the week.

My district's copy center can copy these on two-ply carbon paper, so I send the top copy home and keep the second copy. Then at report card time or for parent teacher conferences, I have lots of data that supports each student's classroom performance.
Want to use this in your classroom? Click HERE to grab this for free!

What else do you do to support your independent readers?


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Are you having trouble keeping your students focused during independent reading time? An independent reading reflection activity is the perfect solution to helping your students take ownership and responsibility over their own work!

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