Setting Students Up for Success During Independent Work Time

As educators, many of us have struggled to keep a classroom of learners engaged in meaningful independent work while we work with a small group. As a result, we may spend time creating (or buying) activities that occupy students to keep them quiet but don’t advance their learning. Instead, we can give our students strategies to remain positive, set goals, make choices, and stay focused during authentic reading and writing, allowing us to work with small groups while also supporting the entire class in meaningful learning.

And it isn’t just about keeping students on task—supporting students with active self-regulation, executive function, and strategies in reading and in writing has been shown to improve their outcomes.

Below are some of my favorite strategies to help students in grades 3–8 become active, self-motivated, engaged learners as they read and write independently.

Strategies for Positive Self-Talk

One of the most important strategies we can teach students for independent reading or writing time is how to stay motivated while reading a complex text or writing—and rewriting—as assigned. Students need to know what to do when they hear that “It’s too hard” or “It’s not good” inner voice.

While reading, students may notice they are distracted. I teach my students how to take control of their wandering mind. I think aloud for my students, modeling that getting distracted happens to everyone, and then teach them how to positively self-talk using phrases like “I know what to do. I need to back up, reread, and get back into my book. This happens to everyone at times. Let me refocus.”

Often while writing, students worry that they don’t have anything interesting to say, which holds them back from putting words on the page. Similar to how I introduce positive self-talk for distractions, I also will model how to self-talk when writing: “I can do this. Just get a first draft down,” “Let me think about what I’d see in this scene, and write it. Let me think about what I’d hear, and write it. Let me think about what the character feels, and write it.”

Strategies for Setting and Tracking Goals

Having a purpose and a plan during reading and writing helps students stay motivated and engaged. Engaging students in regular self-reflection to set their goals, and teaching strategies aligned with their self-selected goals, keep independent reading and writing focused and meaningful.

I introduce self-reflection tools like these What Can I Work on as a Reader? and What Can I Work on as a Writer? checklists to help students identify their strengths and next steps. Their responses then serve as a springboard for goal-setting conversations. I meet with each student to set their goals, and by the end of goal-setting conversations, they may have decided on a reading goal such as comprehending character or improving fluency, or a writing goal such as structuring their writing or adding detail.

In that same meeting, I give each student a goal-focused bookmark with their name and goal at the top. Throughout the year, students learn strategies aligned to their goals and add those strategies to their bookmark.

For example, let’s imagine a student named Sara: After self-reflection, Sara and her teacher decided she’d focus on comprehending characters in her books. During a series of lessons over time, she learned strategies—listed on her bookmark created by the teacher—to help her comprehend, such as noticing what characters are doing and saying and thinking about their motivations to infer their feelings; listing character traits and noticing those that are helpful and those that create obstacles in order to see complexity or different sides of the characters; and considering conflict in characters’ thoughts, feelings, actions, and words to infer about character traits.

When reading fiction texts, the physical bookmark helps her keep her goal in mind, and the strategies help her remember how she can meet it.

Strategies for Selecting Topics

Research shows that when students have a choice in what they read or write about, they are more engaged, but too much open-ended choice decreases engagement. When applied to independent reading, this means it is important for students to have books they want to read, but it isn’t necessarily helpful to just tell students to find whatever they want.

Instead, I ask students to reflect on their identity as a person and then connect that to their identity as a reader: What do they enjoy most? What groups are they a part of? What places matter to them? Based on these answers, they can look for books with inherent connections to their own lives, or purposely decide to look for something that is totally different if they enjoy new experiences.

For example, a Dominican-American female eighth grader who grew up in the Bronx in New York might decide to have a reading experience where they connect closely to the main character and setting and choose a book like Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, or could decide they want a reading experience that will take them to a new place and time or learn about people very different from them, and choose Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, with two male protagonists, set in 1990s Texas.

When it comes to independent writing, I similarly like to start by asking students to think about themselves as inspiration for writing: Ask kids to think about a life event that has happened repeatedly. Then tell them to focus on one occasion that stands out, replay it in their mind, and think about what ideas they could infer about themselves based on the significance of that one time that stands apart from the other similar events. They can then write the story of that specific time, bit by bit.

By equipping students with strategies to make the most of their independent work time, we can set students up for a lifetime of independent literacy success.