devices by silencing them and placing them out of sight, and
choosing print over connected materials may improve our
success. When we adults nourish our reading lives, we give
children the opportunity to identify with us as mentors and
witness reading’s quiet gifts. For boys, it may be especially
helpful to see men reading, directly confronting the gender
gap that has existed until now. When logistics make reading
in front of our children difficult, we can talk to our children
about what we have read, ask them about their reading, take
them on outings to libraries and bookstores, and show them
that we respect the time it takes to peruse a complicated
piece of writing. At home and at school, we find the age-old
admonition to read to our children is still very much in effect;
this includes preverbal infants and otherwise independent
older children.
At school, we find ourselves called to patiently respect
the many years it takes each brain to learn to read well.
We recognize different learning profiles and seek to tailor
reading instruction to students’ needs as early as possible,
to maintain positive momentum. By necessity, this
involves building in time for guided academic reading and
independent reading. Of new import, we gain inspiration
from Mar yanne Wolf in building a digital literacy
curriculum to develop a “biliterate” brain. Wolf proposes
that training the brain to critically evaluate the short bursts
of information encountered online strengthens the circuits
necessary to sustain deep reading in books. Her model
supports our practice of introducing critical reading skills
in print first, and then gradually transferring those skills to
a mixture of digital and print materials in the upper grades.
As we do this, we introduce new concepts for students to
apply to the digital milieu: questions of authorship, purpose,
and veracity. In essence, we strive to protect the quality of
students’ reading by cultivating new literacy skills alongside
those that fit traditional media. M
Gwen Kaplan is Upper School Librarian at
Saint David’s School.
Christopher Bergland, "Reading Fiction Improves Brain Connectivity and Function," Psychology Today, January 4, 2014, accessed November 1, 2019, https://www.
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psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201401/reading-fiction-improves-brain-connectivity-and-function.
Bergland, "Reading Fiction.”
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Goldman, Corrie. "This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen, and Researchers Are Taking Notes." Stanford News. Last modified September 7, 2012. Accessed November 14,
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2019. https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/austen-reading-fmri-090712.html.
Andrew Perrin, Book Reading 2016 (Pew Research Center, 2016), accessed November 1, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/01/book-reading-2016/.
4
Victoria Rideout and Michael B. Robb, The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2019 (San Francisco, CA: Common Sense Media, 2019), 9.
5
Rideout and Robb, The Common, 60.
6
Jean M. Twenge, Gabrielle N. Martin, and Brian H. Spitzberg, "Trends in U.S. Adolescents' Media Use, 1976-2016: The Rise of Digital Media, the Decline of TV, and the
(Near) Demise of Print," Psychology of Popular Media Culture 8, no. 4 (2019).
7
Michael Sullivan, Connecting Boys with Books 2: Closing the Reading Gap (Chicago: American Library Association, 2009), 14-23.
8
Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (New York, NY: Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2018), 184.
9
Wolf, Reader, Come, 151.
10
For a summary of scientific studies, and interpretation of what this means for thinking processes, see: Maryanne Wolf, "Skim Reading Is the New Normal. The Effect
on Society is Profound.," The Guardian, August 25, 2018, accessed November 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-
normal-maryanne-wolf.
11