In a time when school districts struggle to implement educational reform and students attempt to improve performance on assessments, the focus returns to critical areas such as literacy. As students enter into middle and high school below grade level in reading, they are already behind classmates. Stanovich (1986) identifies the Matthew effects in early reading problems, which result in them falling further behind their peers as they progress through school. More than five million high school students do not read well enough to understand materials written for their grade level (Hock & Deshler, 2003). If students are going to achieve success in secondary education, a literacy focus has to continue throughout the middle and high school years (Manzo, 2001).

In order to have an impact on literacy, efforts must be school-wide (Denti & Guerin, 2004; Perks, 2006). I designed this mixed methods action research project to study changes in free reading habits and the culture of literacy. This change project implemented, investigated, and measured the effects of the implementation of a Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) program within a middle school. First, I explored teacher opinions of literacy and their perceptions of the effectiveness of the SSR initiative throughout the school year. Second, I evaluated student free reading habits and perceptions. Additionally, the purpose was to implement SSR and determine its effects on the free reading habits of middle school students. The study also investigated ways to improve SSR in order to support the culture of literacy and student learning. Finally, I evaluated my leadership growth throughout the change project.

According to the data, implementing SSR was a positive course of action, which was consistent with the literature (Fisher, 2004; Gardiner, 2001; Jacobs, 2003; Krashen, 2006; Perks, 2006). Findings from this study measured the second order change (Patterson, 2003) that occurred as the middle school underwent both a structural change (Fullan, 2001, 2007: Patterson, 2003) and the initial phases of a cultural change (Deal & Peterson, 1999; Schein, 2004). Growth occurred in faculty and student free reading habits as well as positive changes in perceptions about literacy.