The Joy of Reading: A School’s Charge
Within our world of screens and scrolling, post-Covid learning loss, and 30-second Tik Tok content bursts, a devastating casualty has occurred: our ability to impart profound joy and love for reading in young people. According to a 2020 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the number of 9 and 13-year-olds who say they read for fun has dropped by double digits since 1984. Our kids today – receiving phones earlier than ever and changing the way they consume and experience content – have overwhelmingly fallen out of love with reading.
As a girl who lined up at midnight for every Harry Potter book release, this news is heartbreaking. But as a woman who works partnering with schools on literacy curriculum and implementation, this news presents a unique charge for schools today.
Schools must take full ownership and accountability for reading joy. Imparting a love, fervor, and excitement for reading is paramount to our children’s mental health, their confidence as intellectuals worthy of space in an academic setting, as well as their ability to interact as meaningful citizens in our world and larger democracy. But most importantly, fostering reading joy is an equity mission: loving reading is a privilege not equally afforded to all children in our country. And that has to change.
So if we’re saying the onus is on schools to change this trajectory–what conscious decisions must schools make to turn the ship back towards a space that honors and elevates reading for fun?
At Novel, we believe that schools can implement several basic programmatic priorities to establish the baseline conditions for students to fall in love with reading. (And unfortunately, far too often, we see schools neglect these principles in favor of deficit-based mindsets: elevating a joy for reading gets deprioritized for priorities - like test prep - that, when done to extreme, suck the joy from reading entirely)
So what can schools do? Without further adieu, see the top 4 moves schools can make to elevate and celebrate the joy in reading at an organizational level–
4 Steps Schools Must Take to Elevate and Celebrate Reading
1. Schools must teach ELA curricula that elevate the reading of whole novels, rather than passage-based instruction. Much instruction, especially at the middle school level and increasingly in high school, focuses heavily on passage analysis and even reading from dense textbooks. This, coupled with an over-emphasis on standardized testing, all but robs students of any joy in reading a book - turning its pages - to completion.
Not only is the practice of passage-based reading tedious for both teachers and kids, but it inhibits the practice of deep analysis, of enjoying a body of work and drawing thematic connections over an extended period of time, one of the most critical skills of a good reader (as well as a necessity for falling deeply in love with a book or an author).
If you take nothing else away from reading this: schools must select high-quality ELA instructional materials that elevate the teaching of whole novels (like our MS or HS ELA curriculum at Novel, Fishtank Learning, or Wit and Wisdom). Need help finding the right curriculum for you? That’s our specialty - get in touch with us!
2. Schools must financially prioritize putting 1:1 physical copies of ELA books in students' hands on an annual basis.
Before we begin here, I know purchasing 1:1 books for ELA is really expensive; it's a priority that requires a significant investment on an annual basis– but it's a budgetary item many schools eliminate without consideration of the consequences. Some schools fall victim to the temptation to purchase "class sets" and have kids annotate with sticky notes so they can be used year-over-year; other schools, faced with the reality that many state tests are transitioning to digital, increasingly want to give kids at-bats with computer-based reading through platforms like Kami.
But hear me out: there's something empowering and transformative about putting tangible pages in kids’ hands and messaging to them that they own these pages - that they have the freedom and agency to take them home, keep them, and annotate up a storm. It's theirs. There's something about turning, smelling the physical pages that's going to impart - consciously or subconsciously - a love and pride in reading.
This isn't to ignore the reality that kids are being tested digitally and that they need at-bats with digital texts and assessments. There's certainly a time and place for that practice and it must be done at regular intervals throughout the school year. However, if it's our mission as educators not just to pass a test, but to inspire a lifelong love of reading, the investment in and elevation of physical novels is well worth it.
3. Schools must build rich libraries that enable students to access high interest texts.
Schools must support student with access to books and texts within and outside of class that are high interest / relevant to the age group, are in a range of levels and genres, and are intentionally diverse (and inclusive) in their representation of identities and human experiences. Schools must invest in their libraries in order to ensure that students have access to a wealth of options from which to choose.
The joy of reading is the variety of purposes that can be met by exploring new titles and authors: you can see yourself in a story or be transported elsewhere in time and place entirely; you may cultivate a new interest or deepen one. Reading vigorously nurtures kids' curiosity, as well as the desire to read through exposure to different texts and perspectives.
4. Outside of the core ELA curriculum, schools must evaluate their broader literacy culture to ensure they’re hitting the four “i’s”: intervention, independent reading, interest, and incentives.
If schools truly want to inspire a love for reading, they must evaluate on an annual basis the literacy culture on their campuses: how effectively have we created a culture that gives kids access to language and comprehension, celebrates and incentivizes independent reading, and activates kids’ core memories around literacy through unique experiences?
We’ve got four “i’s” through which schools should evaluate literacy culture:
Intervention: Schools must recognize the role of intervention in ensuring that all kids have access and tools to the language and comprehension that will enable them to enjoy reading for fun. (If you want to learn more about Novel’s vision for an intervention block, see our Intervention Block Guidance here.).
Independent Reading: We know that students learn to read by reading. Schools must have robust independent reading programs that encourage reading for joy, rather than solely analysis. Schools must support teachers in creating high-quality independent reading lists and incentive programs and tracking systems in order to ensure that this reading is accountable (For example, Novel’s curriculum includes independent reading lists for each unit that complement the core text - and each unit ends with a choice Book Project).
Schools must consider ways to support students with their independent reading to ensure they have the tools to make the most of this time in text: "When we set children loose day after day with no focus or support, it can lead to fake reading and disengagement," write Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss in No More Independent Reading Without Support. "It's our job to equip children with the tools they need when we're not there." Independent reading that offers guided choice, that teaches children how to select books that are on an appropriate reading level for them, and during which teachers confer with students yields positive results (Kuhn et al., 2006; Moss & Young, 2015).
Interesting Experiences and Incentives: Experiences create core memories for kids – and why not create core memories around reading? A school’s literacy programming - which often means dollars saved in the budget to invest in unique experiences and incentives - play a huge role in core memories that celebrate reading.
So each year, schools must consider (and create budget for) the following questions:
Do you have a book fair?
Space in your school schedule for DEAR (Drop Everything And Read)?
An Accelerated Reader program?
An active librarian or a budget for programming that elevates new books, visits from local authors, field trips centered around a novel?
A student-published literary journal, magazine, or newspaper?
Incentives or annual rewards that celebrate voracious readers and writers?
We can't forget that kids are motivated by rewards and incentives. They're motivated by physical experiences. And that it takes planning, programming, and financial investments to make these things a priority for your students.
So who says we can’t put the JOY back in reading at school? I argue that it’s not just optional, it’s an obligation.
