A fantastic conversation is happening right now at Dan Brown's blog, "Get in the Fracas," about reading for pleasure as key factor in student success, especially on standardized tests.  He draws on research by Veda Jairrels about how voluntary reading is the crucial piece that is missing for many African-American students and accounts for the "achievement gap" between black and white students.  I highly recommend reading the post and comments. 

I just posted this response:

Reading for pleasure is such a key factor AND indicator of learning and intellectual growth because when a child reads voluntarily he or she is focused on the reading experience and not the grade, desired test score, or approval of the teacher. Our schools and school system are built around the idea that kids will respond to extrinsic motivators to learn. Research shows that extrinsic motivators (incentives, grades, etc.) work when the task is very simple, not requiring critical thinking. But when the task is more complex and requires critical thinking, the extrinsic motivator has a negative effect on the learning. That is because it moves the child's focus to the grade or desired outcome, instead of the content and experience itself. (See Daniel Pink's new book, Drive, for this research. Also this Ted Talks video.)

Back to reading for pleasure: the Readers (as Brown describes--those who read for pleasure but often do not complete class assignments) are building genuine intellectual experience in their reading, whereas the Worker Bees (those who complete all assignments but understand very little) are just trying to earn the grade and/or please the teacher and other people in their lives.  They are far removed from the real process of learning. 

I believe that intrinsic motivation to learn is the crucial factor in academic success. Reading for pleasure is not the only way kids can develop and work off of intrinsic motivation, but it is a really important and rewarding place to start. I agree with Jairrels that including the parents in the process is extremely valuable. [I want to say it is essential, but some students really do not have family situations that allow this, though they can definitely still become readers.  Parent involvement also becomes more complicated when parents do not speak English or are not literate themselves-nonetheless, I have not found this to be a barrier to students developing a love of reading.] Some of my most rewarding experiences as a teacher have been when I've connected with parents around my reading curriculum, so that parents understand their child's reading interests and actually get involved in their reading lives directly, by reading together, or through conversation about the reading. 

Last year I had a student I'll call Jamar.  Jamar was a sweet, very sociable kid, who always expressed a desire to do well in school, but who, in reality, was pretty disengaged with his school work.  He had a lot of trouble focusing and following through on assignments.  His grades in most classes including mine regularly hovered between a D+ and an F.  His skills more or less matched those grades.  My homework all year long is reading.  We alternate between students choosing their own books and me assigning whole class novels.  Every night, students are to read at least 10 pages and write 3 post-it notes inside the book with their responses.  (I also allot class time for this.)  I make lots of phone calls home to let parents know what students are reading and especially to alert them when their child is not doing it.  

Jamar was reading very little, especially at home. I had made a few phone calls to his mother about it. As it turned out, she was out of work on disability and so she had plenty of time to spend with Jamar in the evenings.  This time I was calling about a novel the whole class was reading, The Dream Bearer by Walter Dean Myers.  It was due in two days and Jamar needed to complete it in order to participate in seminar-style discussions.  His mother said, "That's it. He's gonna read this book."  The next day, Jamar skipped into school early.  "Ms. Sacks, you're not going to believe it. I am SO tired. I was up til 2am reading that book with my mother!  But you know what?  The book is really GOOD! And you're gonna love reading my post-it notes!"  

The following day the book was due, and Jamar came in boasting to everyone that he'd finished.  His participation in discussions that week was exemplary.  His insights into the book were deep and well-evidenced.  A new voice--both knowledgeable and inquisitive--emerged from him that day.  I called his mother to tell her how wonderfully he'd done with it and thanked her for her help. She said, "You know, I'm home with him every day. I always ask him what homework he has and he says he already did it.  This is the first time I got to really work with him on anything."  She also told me how much she'd enjoyed reading the book with him and asked me what other books I had that might be similar that she could read with him. 

The amazing thing was that Jamar was not the same student after that moment.  Something had clicked. He became much more engaged with his work, not just the reading, and not just in English class.  He had benefitted from the real intellectual experience of reading and was able to speak from that experience in an academic context.  The power of that work and the deepening of his relationship with his mother was great enough to turn him on to learning.  

[image credit: homelink.cps-k12.org]

At the school where I taught for my first three years, I had two classes: one class of seventh graders and one of eighth graders. My seventh graders would move on to become my eighth graders the next year, so I taught them for a wonderful two years in a row.  (This was only true for English classes for some reason.)  
By the time my students reached eighth grade, we already knew each other well.  We did not have to spend a few months testing each other and building trust.  By eighth grade, my students also had formed a strong group dynamic and knew how to work together.  I remember one September a new student came to my class as an eighth grader and groaned when she saw one of the school's most troublesome students, Maurice, in line for the class.  Her friend said to her in Spanish, "Don't worry, he doesn't act out in English class." I attribute this to the fact that we had already developed a positive group dynamic in the class; Maurice felt comfortable in the environment we had worked for a whole year to create. 
My second-year students were also accustomed to the type of assignments I designed. They knew I would ask them to reflect on their experiences, and they knew what that meant. They were also accustomed to drawing their own conclusions from their experiences, and listening to the ideas of their classmates, rather than constantly deferring to me for the "correct" response.  This gave them great confidence in their work.

They also had been through my "Whole Novels" program for an entire year.  Without going into great detail here, this method has students reading a number of whole class novels almost entirely on their own, and then coming together to discuss them in student-centered seminars.  Each novel builds on the previous one in complexity, but similar themes run through them all.  By 8th grade, my students know how this process works and how rewarding it is.  They trust my choice of novels, because they recognize that nothing in my curriculum is random and everything is connected and carefully planned with them in mind.  They take pride in formulating their own opinions and interpretations of the book, and look forward to expressing them in discussions.  
Recently, I've been wondering why my 8th grade students at my new school, whom I meet for the first time in September, seem to have less confidence in their own reading and their own thinking than my old 8th graders did.  Although my new students actually have higher literacy skills than my previous ones, they struggle more to trust their own thinking, to relate positively to one another, and to take on challenges.  There are many possible reasons for this, but I'm certain that part of it is because they have not--as my old students did--spent seventh grade building a foundation as a group, with me as their leader, for our work this year.  Much of the work I used to do with my seventh graders now has to be done in the first half of the school year with my current eighth graders.  It's still rewarding and I see a lot of progress, but the net effect seems to be less than when I looped.  
Enter the NY State ELA Test.  It is given every year in January, after just 4 months of eighth grade.  I have always resisted "teaching to the test," preferring to think that good teaching is good teaching, and if my students are learning, they will perform well on the test.  Well, many do, but there has been a lot of variation over the years.  In four years of testing every January (I haven't gotten the results for this year yet), there were two classes that made huge, startling gains.  By now you can probably guess which classes those were--the two 8th grade classes I had taught the year before as seventh graders.  
I remember puzzling over why my seventh graders never improved as much and as reliably as my eighth graders did, even though I believed they were learning a lot, and they seemed to feel that way too.  I had concluded that it was developmental; that seventh graders just didn't do as well as eighth graders.  But looking at my 8th graders' scores from last year, the level of improvement is very similar to that of my previous seventh graders: not bad, but not striking, with some serious question marks about a number of students.  
My conclusion at the moment is that the deep learning I design my teaching around takes time to achieve. Four months is not enough to see the long term benefits of the work, at least on the standardized test. It requires a substantial amount of work on the social-emotional level [that includes their understanding of what learning is and how they do it], both for students individually and for the group as a whole before the class really begins to take off.  
So what I believe is good teaching is not good teaching as far as the test is concerned, if I only have 4 months to prepare.  The good news, it would seem, is that with one year plus four months, good teaching begins to pay off quite a lot on the state test.  
After seeing last year's scores, I'll admit, this year I spent a good month and a half before the test preparing my students--hard core--for the type of formulaic responses and tricks they'd need to do to excel on the test. I felt good about it at the time.  But now, I'm watching them struggling to dig in to a challenging novel, and I'm thinking again.  We broke up the flow of the year for that test. More significantly, I broke the commitment I had to helping them as critical thinkers, readers, and writers, in favor of standardization of thinking. Sure, it was only a month and a half, but as my father once said, "Whatever doesn't help hurts."  I see now, we are paying for this decision.
Maybe looping is the way to go.  I'd imagine most teachers and students would benefit from this, especially in the middle school years, because you don't have to spend the first few moths of the year getting to know one another, building trust, and assessing academic needs.  You can say hello, and take off full speed.
[image found at www.coaster-net.com]

You know that class.  Every teacher who teaches multiple classes in a day--especially in middle school--knows that class. You've planned an excellent lesson; maybe you've used it successfully for years. It goes over swimmingly with 810 and 812--these students exclaim how they love your class. Then comes 813. You brace yourself as they enter the classroom, because you never know what to expect with them. For whatever reasons, students in that class respond differently. Some days they are great, but on others, they don't settle down and it's a struggle just to begin class--they seem content to socialize while you wait or dole out detentions. Sometimes they start out cooperative and engaged, and then devolve into petty quarrels with each other. They often fall behind the other classes, or the classroom environment is so full of distractions that students have trouble being productive. The usual strategies seem to work one day and not the next. You find yourself shortening lessons to make up for lost time. Students often ask you to teach even though kids are having side conversations, but you know this is a trap and refuse.

You ask yourself, why is this happening?  There are some students with challenging behavior in this class, but there are challenging students in all of your classes.  This class doesn't even have any students with diagnosed special learning or emotional needs.  What's more, you spoken with students individually and met with their parents, but the progress is almost always temporary. Is it you? But your lessons and teaching style seem to work in the other classes. And other teachers report similar experiences with the same class. Is something just off with 813?
Last week I made some progress in my thinking about my 813 (a pseudonym). It started when I was absent for a day to score NY State ELA tests.  I left a movie for the students to watch. The film, "Smoke Signals," is actually an important piece of my curriculum, and I told the substitute that I needed the students to really watch the movie. If students were talking, I said, he should pause it and ask them not to talk during the movie, and continue when they are quiet. I also left a worksheet for students to make observations as they watched, and which explained that we would be discussing the movie when I got back, so they should pay close attention. As you might imagine, 810 and 812 watched the movie with no problems. But 813 talked so much, the substitute eventually turned it off altogether.  
When I got back, the students of 813 were upset. "But we weren't even being bad! I mean for 813, we weren't bad. No one was disrespectful. We were just talking," they said. I took a good 15 minutes to hear multiple renditions of the story and discuss the situation with them. I explained that I had instructed the sub to pause the movie if they were talking. I also asked them if they would be able to understand the movie if they were also talking to one another about other things... After a little while, they seemed to understand.  
We put the movie on. They started talking a little bit, then a little more. I paused the movie. They protested! We discussed the reasons behind my expectation that they watch silently again. They got quiet. I put the movie on again. They started to get into it! Someone made a comment in response to the movie. This provoked a string of comments that got loud. They were missing important dialogue. I paused it again. They got annoyed. Then they got quiet. I turned the movie on...and so forth.
The other classes finished the film in 2 class periods--one with the substitute and one with me--and loved it. We had brilliant student-centered discussions the following day, which were so interesting that the students asked for another day to continue (and we did).  
Meanwhile, after 2 days of the film, 813 was only halfway through it. I had a dilemma. Should I give the class extra periods on the movie? How much time? What about the discussions? A colleague recommended not finishing the movie, canceling discussions, and giving them a test on the entire film. Alternatively, I thought of allowing them to finish the movie, but forgoing the discussions. Or, I could allow them to discuss the half of the movie they had seen. But all of these options would defeat the purpose of having them watch the film in the first place: to get experience analyzing an entire work of "literature," its conflicts and the resolutions of those conflicts, its themes, and the craft decisions made by the screenwriter and director to achieve the effects the movie has on the viewer. This would build story understanding and discussion skills that we would put to further use in discussions of an entire novel.   
I spent a while thinking about who was responsible for the fact that 813 hadn't seen the whole film--me or them. I didn't want to enable irresponsible behavior by giving them unlimited time on anything. But the discussion experience had been so rich for the other classes and so well-timed in the curriculum, I hated for this class to miss the opportunity.  
Then I thought, does it even matter who's at fault? Here we are, either way. Maybe this class is just slower than the others. Not slow intellectually--in fact they are some of the most insightful students in the grade when they apply themselves. They are behind in terms of their group process. I teach a CTT class and give that class extra academic supports when they need them. Maybe 813 needs some extra social-emotional supports that the other classes, for whatever reasons, don't require. Though somewhat counterintuitive, maybe spending time learning how to watch a movie carefully together might be the most productive thing for this group. 
I remembered my mentor at Bank Street College, Madeleine Ray, telling a story about a class she taught years ago in Harlem. As the story went, she always kept bread and butter in the room for the students. When, on occasion, they broke out the bread, one boy in the class always tried to eat more than his share. When the students reported it to Mrs. Ray, she said, "It's okay. Let him eat. We can always get more." Contrary to everyone's expectations, every time they ate bread, she let him eat until he was full.
Then one day, just as she predicted, the student stopped eating extra bread. His need had been filled and, more importantly, he made the decision on his own to limit himself. Sometimes we make the mistake of trying to control everything, and ration everything when it comes to our students, even when it's not working. Afraid to take risks, we ignore the real problem and continue to do what's already not working. Often, we deny our students the opportunity to make important decisions for themselves.      
There was no real reason for me to limit 813's time, when they clearly needed it to reach the learning objective I had for them. Like Madeleine had done with the bread, I let my class take as much time as they needed to finish the movie. I explained to them that they were two days behind the other classes, and that I had debated over how to handle it. When I told them that it was necessary to finish the movie before having the discussions, and the discussions were necessary for their education, they seemed to feel some urgency. 
By the forth day, they were watching silently. They finished with fifteen minutes left in the period and elected--without my input--to begin discussions right away. They listened to one another and even stayed voluntarily for part of lunch to continue the discussion.  
Mind you, day two of discussion we were back to starting and stopping, starting and stopping. But I'm coming to see this as the practice they need. My patience and persistence are more valuable to them than my instinct to control them or cover up their weaknesses. For now, I'm content to slow dance.   [image credit: http://carcino.gen.nz/images/index.php/5922d576/6faaad84]