Teaching Students to Reset Their Brains for Independent Reading

When my home state of Michigan recently joined nearly 40 other states in implementing a school cellphone ban, my colleagues and I were cautiously optimistic. Like educators across the country, we were doing our best to support sustained reading in our classrooms against a backdrop of constant distraction. Removing phones, we thought, would restore our students’ focus.

The outcome surprised us, though. Phone policies vary by district, and many that ban devices during instructional time still allow them during passing time, lunch, and the last few minutes of class. Five or six minutes is enough for a student to get deep into a scroll, and recent studies describe what that does to the brain: It becomes primed for rapid reward and quick switching, not the sustained attention required to read a novel. Phone or no phone, some of my students were sitting down to read already in that state.

During our first attempt at phone-free independent reading, I immediately noticed a heightened restlessness. Students fidgeted, asked for the pass, stared out the window, or stared at their book without turning a page. I ended up managing a variety of distraction symptoms before many students even got started. Because the benefits of independent reading are too great to leave to chance, I needed a way to support students so they could begin quickly and experience success every time.

Breaking Down the Task

Soon after, I asked students directly: What is independent reading like for you, and what keeps you from staying engaged? Their answers were what I expected: thinking about lunch plans and what was happening after school. One student drifted from a character’s name to a close friend with the same one. On the surface, these habits might seem benign, but research links mind wandering to weaker comprehension.

My prompt to take out a book and read, I later realized, was actually a request to do four tasks at once. First, students needed to consider what their text required from the reader to make sense. They needed to begin reading from a place of calm. They needed tools to monitor their own connection to the text and self-correct if their mind wandered. And they needed to know if they were successful when the reading was done.

Without naming these tasks or giving students tools to self-regulate, I wasn’t setting them up for success.& So I developed a routine to speak to all four—one simple enough that students could use it on their own, in other classes, or at home.

The Reading-Readiness Routine

Preparing to read, I remind students, is itself a skill. And like any skill, it takes practice before it becomes automatic.

The routine begins with looking at the text in front of us and asking what procedure we will follow to engage it. I’m adapting the de Bono Group’s Blue Hat frame as a way to activate what students already know about approaching a text. Because we’re reading novels, we talk about genre conventions—what a novel typically asks of a reader, how it’s organized, what to expect when a new character shows up or a chapter begins in the middle of the action. This gives students a procedural map before they open the book.

Then I share a self-check tool that students use during the reading time. Borrowing from Kylene Beers’s “Say Something” exercise, I project some prompts on the board: visualize, summarize, ask a question, make a prediction. Every two pages, I tell them to pause and look up at the board. “If you can’t do two of these items,” I say, “you need to go back and reread.” There’s nothing to write or turn in. The purpose is to encourage an internal dialogue, a way for students to monitor their own thinking and redirect as needed. As I circulate and read alongside them, I sometimes notice students turning back a few pages. In those moments, I give a silent thumbs-up.

Finally, we complete a settling practice. I adapted a script from common MBSR practices, trimming it to run two to three minutes when read slowly. Rather than scanning the body, which can feel awkward with a full class, mine keeps students’ attention on their breath and on the present moment, not on outside issues or future events. They close their eyes or lower their gaze while I read. And when I finish, they pick up their books, and we begin. Afterward, they answer a few reflective prompts, like “How easy was it to picture, hear, or follow what you were reading?” and “Roughly how many minutes did it take before you were settled into the reading?”

Our first time through, students answered the reflective prompts in a survey, and we went over the results together the next day. I used that discussion to hear their feedback and to explain why I built the routine. The first non–young adult book I read cover to cover, Ray Manzarek’s Light My Fire, took me almost six months. I was 15, with no way to keep my mind on the page or remember what I’d read. “How many of you have had a similar experience?” I asked, and hands went up around the room. The routine, I told them, is a kind of training, a way to treat attention as part of what it means to be a reader.

After that, the routine became more streamlined. The reflective prompts moved to paper, where students completed them individually, and eventually students reflected silently to themselves.

Promising Outcomes

After the routine was implemented, my students reported fewer lapses in their attention, less mental wandering, and less rereading from lost focus. Over three-quarters said their focus drifted less than during independent reading without the routine, and no one preferred going back to the old way. Over half said they would use the settling practice elsewhere too, and one student shared, “I still drifted, but I was able to come back and still comprehend what I was reading.”

Granted, this wasn’t a controlled study. But I noticed something telling when I started offering students the choice to skip the routine entirely and read on their own: A few boys flashed an exaggerated “om” hand sign across the room, playing it for laughs, but not one of them opted out.

Implementing this routine taught me as much as it taught my students. Banning phones is an important first step toward supporting sustained focus, but removing distraction doesn’t teach a skill. Alongside minimizing distraction, teachers can support their students’ attention by making implicit reading practices explicit and incorporating them into routine.