Free Choice Read
- Jun 20
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 23
A not-perfect but fairly easy-to-implement system for regular reading.
We really want my students to be reading, and ideally reading non-narrative non-fiction that builds up their contextual knowledge. So, what I was after was a system that gets students reading the right sort of stuff, at a level that's accessible to them, in a way that doesn't eat up a bunch of teacher time. I just posted about Class Read and I still love that system, but there are a few barriers to setting that up. As a result, I thought I'd write up the thing I did before that, which is much simpler to set up and asks a lot less of you. I called it Free Choice Read, which is a total misnomer but entirely deliberate.
We all know that trick to use with toddlers where, instead of telling them to get their shoes on, you give them what feels like a choice: pink shoes or blue shoes. It turns out that this absolutely works on 17-year-olds: free Choice Read isn't actually free choice at all. I'm telling them they have to read something from the Economics Observatory website, and the only real choice is which article, but weirdly they didn't ever seem to challenge me on it?!
Because I've picked the site, I know that whatever they land on is going to be worth their time.
I'm a bit of an evangelist for Economics Observatory, so bear with me, because the reason it works so well for this is that everything on there does a job for me:
Everything is relevant and worthwhile, so I haven't had to vet each article. The whole site is decent quality.
It shows the breadth of economics. There's plenty on sport, development, policy and geography, so students can find their niche whatever they're into.
The articles are all formatted in a similar way, which means you can give specific guidance and it'll apply across the board.
It assumes no prior knowledge, so it's usable right from the start of the course.
It's a great example of non-narrative non-fiction, which they don't get nearly enough of.
It's research-based, and each article tells you who the experts in that field are, which is a lovely sneaky way for students to find out about current economists.
Lots of articles link to extra reading (we can dream that they'll follow those up...).
There are very few super short articles, so its difficult to game the system
Loads of them are evergreen-ish, so the system doesn't go stale and articles from 5 years ago are still generally usable
Each week, students pick an article of their choice from the website and summarise it. Mine did this on OneNote, but digging through my back archives I found a printable workbook I'd made before I switched to OneNote. With AI, I now would now be going back to the booklet.
It's super easy to run. You can print the booklet at the start of a term or half-term and just set the expectation that they do one a week. I scheduled the assignments on Teams for the whole term in one go and glanced over them each week, but honestly if that is too much for you, you could just take the booklets in to check at the end of a half-term. (Yes, some won't do one a week and will do all 10 in a panicked heap at the end of term, but even so, they're doing something).
One strong recommendation: ask them to handwrite it, unless they have accommodations that mean they shouldn't. That way, even if they're getting AI to summarise the article for them, they've at least got to engage with the material enough to copy it out and, I hope, some of it sticks. Because the formatting of the articles is consistent, you can give them a framework to help quality control: 2 to 5 sentences per heading. Each heading is given as a question, so you can get them to use the words in the question as a sentence stem. It gives them just enough structure to write something useful without it turning into a copying-out exercise.
That's it, really. It's not as ambitious as Class Read, but it's a low-effort way to get students reading good economics every week, and it nudges them towards finding the bit of the subject they actually care about. If you're not ready for the full Class Read palaver, this is a nice place to start.