The Robb Review Podcast

The Robb Review Podcast is a conversation between Evan Robb and Laura Robb about how reading is taught and how a whole school can be organized around it. Evan usually sets up the topic and steers with questions. Laura, who calls reading her favorite topic more than once, answers with specific practices she wants teachers to adopt. The tone is conversational, closer to two people comparing notes in a home office than to a lecture, and a home office is where they say they usually record. Independent reading is the idea they return to most. Laura wants it at the start of the period, with students reading books they picked themselves, because time saved for the end of class tends to disappear. She moved it there years ago after teachers told her they never got to it. She argues that opening class with reading shows how much the class values it. School-wide approaches come up too, including the point that a goal of 40 minutes of reading every night, however well meant, does not usually work. Instructional reading gets equally firm treatment. The pair reject the assumption that every student in a class can read the same book. They describe genre units stocked like small libraries, such as a biography library or a realistic fiction library, that cover the range of reading levels in the room. That reading happens at school, where the teacher can support students and watch how they work, not as homework. Guided practice, as Laura describes it, means short, focused lessons with short texts in which the students do the work. She ties it to fifth and sixth graders who arrive several years below grade level, and she credits another book with bringing her back to the approach. Several episodes grew out of the pandemic, and some were recorded over Zoom audio from separate houses during social distancing. Their remote-learning tips stick to the show's core beliefs: give students choice, find free e-books online, post five or six poems instead of one, and never assign a single book to a whole class. Another conversation is about rebuilding independent reading as schools move back toward normal routines, and scheduling comes out of it as the key. Personal asides keep the show from sounding like a methods course. Evan counts Ian Fleming among the reasons he became a reader, and he uses rewatching old James Bond films to argue that books also reward a second read. Their book, Schools Full of Readers, from Benchmark Publishing, provides the framework for a discussion of reading culture. In another episode Laura says she hopes teachers and school leaders will share their own reading with students, so reading becomes more than something done for school. The common thread is simple: more students reading more books they chose themselves.