Motivating students to turn the page on reading

I have an embarrassing confession: I’m a middle school English teacher, but when I was in middle school, I didn’t read a single assigned book. Not one.

I read only a few of the assigned books in high school, and in college, I actually majored in English without doing much of the reading. I still got high grades because I took careful notes in class and wrote papers that artfully parroted back what the teacher had said.

As a teacher, I like to think that I can sniff out a kid who hasn’t done the assigned reading (takes one to know one), but it isn’t always easy to do, so I’ve tried various systems, to hold students “accountable.” For instance, I’ve given participation points, figuring that only kids who read would be able to contribute to discussions (though I certainly contributed to discussions of books I hadn’t read). I’ve used quizzes to identify students who did the reading and given low grades to those who didn’t (though doing well on quizzes may have more to do with students’ memory for details than whether they did the reading). I’ve tried spot-checking for annotations, on the theory that you can only underline and make notes about important passages if you actually read the book (as if kids aren’t savvy enough to underline a few passages just before class).