Hello everyone and welcome! I can officially say that I am on summer break! I turned in my grades last week and I closed out my first year as a University Supervisor! It was a great year and one of the best career decisions I’ve made! I’m excited for summer but looking forward to next fall and a new group of preservice teachers!
One of the things I’ve always believed about teaching ELA is that our job is bigger than teaching a novel, a standard, or a particular reading skill. At some level, I think most of us hope we’re helping students develop a relationship with reading that lasts beyond our class.
That’s a big goal and it’s also a difficult one to measure. We can look at student growth and class performance, but it’s much harder to know whether we’re helping students develop a lasting relationship with reading.
And yet, I think that’s one of the most important things we do.
The reason I’ve been thinking about this so much lately is that I can’t help but notice how much reading instruction has shifted over the years. More and more schools are moving toward highly structured programs. Teachers are being asked to follow strict pacing guides. Reading instruction is becoming increasingly standardized, and in many places there is less flexibility than ever before.
As I watch these shifts happen, I keep coming back to the same question. If our goal is to help students become readers, are we giving them enough opportunities to actually become readers?
That’s not an easy question to answer because reading is already at the center of what we do. Students are interacting with text every day. Reading instruction is happening in classes across the country.
The question I’m wrestling with is whether reading instruction and reading practice are being used interchangeably.
I think they are.
In our effort to improve reading achievement, I worry that we’ve unintentionally reduced the amount of time students spend actually reading.
When students are working with text, much of their time is often spent demonstrating or applying their understanding. Those experiences are valuable and absolutely have a place in our instruction. But they create a different experience than simply spending time immersed in a book.
Reading instruction and reading practice however, aren’t the same thing.
Reading instruction helps students learn how reading works. This is where we teach comprehension strategies. We model thinking. We help students analyze author’s craft, evaluate arguments, and make connections. Those are important parts of our job.
But, reading practice serves a different purpose. Practice is where students begin applying those skills independently. It’s where they build stamina. Where they start developing the confidence that comes from successfully navigating a text on their own.
The challenge is that reading instruction is easy to see. We can point to a lesson or an activity and We can measure whether students mastered a skill. Reading practice often feels less visible. A student sitting quietly with a book doesn’t always produce immediate evidence that learning is happening.
And yet, that’s often where some of the most important growth occurs.
What concerns me is that many schools are becoming increasingly focused on instruction while practice receives less and less time. Students are interacting with text all day long, but much of that interaction is tied to a task.
The result is that students may spend years learning about reading without spending enough time simply being readers.
Becoming a reader involves more than developing isolated skills.
It involves developing a reading identity.
At some point, students begin forming beliefs about who they are as readers. They start to develop a sense of whether reading feels like something they can do successfully. They begin to view books as either interesting or frustrating. They also form opinions about whether reading belongs only in school or whether it has value beyond the classroom.
Those beliefs don’t develop from instruction alone.
They develop from experience.
When I think about students who genuinely see themselves as readers, the word that comes to mind is curiosity. They aren’t reading because a teacher assigned pages twenty through thirty. They’re reading because they found something that connected with them.
Curiosity is difficult to create through a worksheet. It grows through experiences with books.
Students discover what they enjoy by reading enough to develop preferences. They discover that some genres appeal to them more than others. They learn that one author may capture their attention while another doesn’t. They begin making choices and developing opinions.
In other words, reading starts to feel personal.
That’s an important shift because once reading becomes personal, it no longer exists only as a school task. It becomes something students can choose for themselves.
And that’s what keeps pulling me back to this conversation.
If our goal is to help students become readers, are we creating enough opportunities for students to have those experiences?
Because students can become very skilled at completing reading-related tasks without ever developing a meaningful relationship with reading itself.
They can learn how to annotate, cite evidence, identify themes, and answer complex questions. Those are valuable academic skills.
But those skills alone don’t create lifelong readers.
Readers develop when skills and experience work together.
Instruction helps students understand how reading works. Practice helps students experience what reading feels like…We need both!
I sometimes wonder what students think reading actually is.
If most of their experiences with reading involve a task or a written response, it makes sense that they associate reading with schoolwork.
Think about it from a student’s perspective. They read a passage and answer questions. They read a chapter and complete an assignment. They read an article and annotate it. They read a story and analyze theme.
Again, none of those activities are wrong. But if nearly every interaction with reading is connected to producing something, what message are students receiving about the purpose of reading?
The goal for students becomes answering the questions correctly, completing the assignment, or proving that they understood what they read.
And while those are important parts of instruction, they aren’t the only reasons people read.
When adults read, we aren’t constantly trying to prove our understanding. Most of the time, we’re reading because we want something from the reading itself. We want information, insight, entertainment, or simply the experience of reading.
That’s a different mindset.
As a lifelong reader, reading is less about performance and more about enjoyment.
I think students need opportunities to experience that side of reading too.
And I think that’s where the distinction between instruction and practice becomes important.
Students need instruction that helps them build skills, but they also need practice that allows them to experience reading without every moment becoming a performance task.
The reality is that most teachers don’t control the curriculum they use. Many of the decisions that shape reading instruction are made at the district or administrative level.
This isn’t really about criticizing a particular program or approach. It’s about paying attention to balance.
As schools continue searching for ways to improve reading achievement, I think it’s worth asking whether students are getting enough opportunities to experience reading beyond the lesson itself.
I also think it’s worth asking: What does success really look like if our goal is helping students become readers?
That’s a difficult question because many of the things we typically measure are skill-based. We can measure comprehension. We can measure fluency. We can measure whether students can identify a theme, analyze an argument, or support an idea with evidence from a text.
But that doesn’t tell us the whole story.
If we’re trying to help students become readers, many of the outcomes we care about most are difficult to measure.
That’s one of the challenges of this conversation. Schools need evidence that students are growing. Teachers need information that helps guide instruction. Those things are important.
At the same time, some of the most meaningful changes happen gradually and are difficult to capture on a spreadsheet.
We don’t have a benchmark assessment for whether a student now sees themselves as a reader. We can’t easily quantify whether a student is more likely to pick up a book on their own than they were six months ago. Those are important outcomes, but they’re difficult to measure with the same precision as a reading standard.
That’s why I don’t think the question is whether students remember every novel we teach or every strategy we model.
The question is whether they leave believing reading is something worth returning to.
Because long after students forget specific assignments, they’re still carrying their beliefs about reading.
And I think that’s one reason independent reading sometimes gets pushed aside. The benefits are real, but they often reveal themselves slowly. They’re visible in conversations, in habits, and in the choices students make over time.
The challenge is that not everything that matters is easy to measure, and not everything that’s easy to measure represents the full picture of student growth.
Ultimately, we’re preparing students for more than success in our class.
Students eventually move on. They move to the next grade level. Eventually, they leave school altogether.
And when that happens, nobody is assigning reading anymore. Nobody is asking them to annotate a passage or complete a graphic organizer. There aren’t discussion questions waiting for them at the end of a chapter.
What remains is the relationship they’ve developed with reading.
If reading has existed primarily as a school activity, there’s a good chance that’s how students continue to view it. Reading becomes something connected to school.
But if students leave our classrooms understanding that reading serves a purpose beyond completing schoolwork, that’s a very different outcome.
That’s one reason I think it’s important to distinguish between reading achievement and creating readers.
Reading achievement is important. Helping students understand increasingly complex texts and develop stronger literacy skills is a major part of our work.
But when I think about why most of us became ELA teachers, I don’t think it was simply to help students perform better on assessments.
I think most of us hope to do something bigger than that. We hope students leave our class with the confidence and desire to continue reading long after the class is over.
As I think about everything we’ve talked about today, I keep coming back to that original question. Are we helping students become readers?
That’s not a question with a simple answer. It’s also not a question that’s easy to measure. But I do think it’s a question worth asking.
Because if our goal is helping students develop a lasting relationship with reading, then reading instruction and reading practice have to coexist in our classes. Students need the skills that help them navigate increasingly complex texts, and they need opportunities to experience reading in ways that help them develop confidence, curiosity, and ownership.
If today’s conversation has you thinking about how to create more opportunities for students to simply be readers, you might be interested in the ELA Reset Summit next week, June 23rd through the 25th.
The summit includes sessions from a variety of ELA educators sharing practical ideas for reading instruction, writing, engagement, classroom systems, and more. It’s a great opportunity to gather ideas you can take back to your classroom this fall.
My session will focus on making independent reading work within a structured curriculum. We’ll look at practical ways to create routines and carve out space for reading without feeling like you’re falling behind everything else you’re expected to teach
If today’s episode resonated with you, I think you’ll enjoy that session as well. The summit is free and you can grab your ticket with the link in the show notes.
We’re also working through Kelly Gallagher’s In the Best Interest of Students in our Building Strong and Confident Readers community. We meet each Monday for about 30 minutes. We started on June 8th, but you’re welcome to join us at any time. Even if you don’t have the book, you’re still invited to participate in the discussions and share your thoughts. You can find the link to the community in the show notes.
Whatever your summer looks like, I hope you’re finding time to rest, recharge, and enjoy a little time away from school. Summer has a way of disappearing faster than we expect, so don’t forget to save some time for yourself too.
Thanks for spending part of your day with me. I’ll be back on June 30th with our fifth-Tuesday bonus episode, and until then enjoy your summer!