When I have read your post, I have felt the necessity of commenting on it.

First of all, I would like to say that unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to see two different schools during my Practicums because I stayed at the same school twice.

The school where I was, is the Gredos, the same than yours. As you can imagine, I could observe and reflect on how they carry the activities out, and I disagree with you in that point.

It is true that in that school, students have to read after classes, during the breaks, but as a compulsory task. Based on my experience, the students pretended to read and in most of the times, they were talking with their partners and playing the fool. It is obvious what they needed after a class: stand up, talk, move their bodies and relax themselves.

In my opinion, what teachers wanted with that was keeping them in silence and that activity had a severe lack of any didactic purpose.

But, what should teachers do if they do not have any classroom library?
If they can, of course, carry it out. In the case we are talking about, maybe they can do something special. We know that routines are really good for students but if a routine becomes a duty or a tedious task, we have to think that our activity is not working well.

Finally, I would like to congratulate my partners because I think most of us have done great classroom library projects. I am sure that if we could apply our proposals into a real school, education could be improved little by little.