Focus on Policy - Policies Can Follow Practices

Roser discusses how both teachers and librarians, whom she calls the preservers of children’s reading, should cling tightly to three essential practices to ensure that our children read more, read better, and read more widely. She argues we should: a) keep the classroom library viable; b) preserve, protect, and defend time for self-selected reading; and c) make certain there are shared texts to talk over or to do something about. Regardless of instructional climate, level of student, number of benchmark assessments, surety of supervisors, quoted and misquoted reports, and curricula that leans toward “one size fits all,” Roser argues that teachers help to ensure that kids read both in school and beyond when they help make for access, choice, time, and talk in the classroom.