Save the Popcorn for the Theater

Equity is a sneaky thing. It's completely possible for teachers to believe they're promoting it in their classrooms yet miss important opportunities with truly providing it.

Reading is a perfect example.

Imagine you're a student sitting in a room with thirty other students. Before you is a bowl of M&M's. You're not allowed to take a single M&M until you've had your chance to read orally from the text during a popcorn reading session.

You scan the text. Twelve paragraphs. Twelve readers at most, unless your teacher decides to read a few of the passages herself, or unless your teacher calls on multiple readers for each paragraph. You've got maybe a thirty-three percent chance of getting a single M&M before you head to your next class.

Popcorn Reading, a strategy long used by teachers, is probably one of the least effective practices for
promoting reading comprehension in the classroom. What popcorn reading promotes instead are performance skills, like being on stage and reciting lines from a script. The students who do get to read and take from the bowl today are thinking about one thing--how to say the words correctly in front of their peers. There's definitely value in that. We want students to be able to speak in front of others. I'm just saying this isn't the best strategy for getting students to think deeply about the texts they read.

Meanwhile, those students who sit passively, clearly the majority, remember some of the content from the text, but because they're simply following along, they're operating at lower cognitive and engagement levels. A few of these students, usually the introverts, are actually reading ahead and targeting unfamiliar words in advance.

But what if a teacher using this popcorn strategy ensures that each student has a chance to read? That promotes true equity, right? In this case, students would read approximately three to five sentences each, resulting in at least one M&M.

Students need more than just one M&M.  They need to read often. They need to read deeply.  We need to develop classroom practices that provide students with more opportunities for active engagement.  How much better would it be for students to read the paragraphs themselves, or to read the paragraphs in partners or groups of four! They're reaching into the bowl much more often like this, and they're able to read at their own pace. If the teacher provides some text dependent questions at a rigorous DOK level, then students are engaged in meaningful reading comprehension strategies.

A friend and colleague of mine shares this phrase with everyone on her educational travels: "If a question is worth asking, it's worth everyone answering the question." I'll add a similar statement and say that if a text is worth reading, it's worth everyone doing the reading.  Popcorn reading creates order and promotes compliance among students. It's just too easy to think that compliant students are fully engaged and thinking deeply.