Reclaiming the ‘Love of Reading’ in ELA

The Workshop Model defined the way teachers talk about "love of reading." Catlin Goodrow wants to reclaim it.

Recently, Catlin Goodrow (EvidentlyReading on Twitter) wrote a thread that knocked our socks off. It captured the emotional pull of “sparking the love of reading” for teachers, and reminded us that the Workshop Model defined the field’s way of talking about it.

Balanced Literacy doesn’t own the love of reading, and we agree with Catlin’s take on instruction.

Please enjoy our latest guest post.

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What It Means to Love Reading

By Catlin Goodrow, intervention teacher and author of Reading Beyond the Basics

I’ve been thinking a lot about what teachers mean when they say they want students to “be readers” or “love reading.” Promoting the love of reading drew teachers to balanced literacy, and our conceptions about it are slowing adoption of curriculums and teaching practices that align to newer reading research, especially the research about the need to build content knowledge and read complex texts.

Lucy Calkins, speaking to journalist Emily Hanford, explained her hesitation about structured literacy this way: these teaching practices weren’t “exciting, and poignant, and beautiful, and you know, getting kids on fire as readers and writers” (2022).

Calkins’s ‘reading workshop’ approach defined the way teachers talk about promoting the love of reading”. In the balanced literacy paradigm, it often means a very specific, culturally-constructed type of love that looks a certain way. It means curling up around the classroom with a choice book at the student’s reading level. It looks like reading books that students can already read with high accuracy and understanding. In short, it looks like a mirror of their teachers – like the way competent adult readers look when they read for pleasure.

And because this vision of an engaged reader is reading a book of his or her own choice, independently, it often means that the reader is reading a text below his or her grade level.

I know this because I once believed this was the right model. I carted around my copy of Lucy Calkins’s The Art of Teaching Reading. I taught my students how to find a comfy spot for reading (it was a whole lesson!). I taught them how to pick a book that was neither too hard nor too easy. I believed that this was the way to grow readers because it’s what I was taught.

This paradigm (known as “workshop” or “balanced literacy”) feels energizing to teachers, because it matches their mental model of what it means to be a reader.

Yet, I was providing an experience that was fundamentally inequitable. Some children couldn’t read grade level text independently, so they didn’t. Some of the books they were reading didn’t allow them to have grade level conversations. Because everyone was reading something different, I taught content-agnostic skills. I worked in small groups with leveled texts, and while a lot of students grew, they often stayed below grade level. And some languished far below level.

I’d like to propose a different model, one that is not centered on the individual in their comfy spot, reading a book they chose.

In this model, students and teacher are reading the same book, so everyone is having the experience of grade-level text.

This model can be just as galvanizing, just as enjoyable as the balanced literacy model, with the advantage of a more equitable experience. It creates a shared community of wisdom grounded in reading books together. This model is practiced by many teachers who have moved away from the balanced literacy paradigm, teachers who will tell you that they have students who absolutely love to read. I’ve seen it firsthand through my experiences teaching high-quality curricular materials (in my case EL Education English Language Arts), interviewing teachers across the country to write my book, Reading Beyond the Basics, and my experience as a Goyen Foundation Literacy Fellow.

No one feels like they have to read a “baby book.” If students are second grade or above, this is not a read-aloud by the teacher. (For those learning to read, more controlled texts are advised.) Students are reading with the teacher’s support. For some passages, the teacher might pair students and bring them back together for discussion. They might pull some students’ to the teacher table to provide a higher level of support for decoding or vocabulary. Many teachers have adopted the practice of FASE (fluent, accountable, social, expressive) reading as one way to read together.

Because the teacher is in the mix, guiding and supporting, the conversations around the book will often be deeper – not for some, but for all students. I vividly remember a group of my fourth graders discussing the definition of the word refugee, with a student from Ukraine taking the lead in the discussion. All of these were students who supposedly read two-three grades below level, but because they had support, were able to read above their “instructional level” (and had massive amounts of reading growth by the end of the year). If we’d stayed at their “level” they would have had fewer opportunities to build their knowledge and vocabulary.

If we widen the aperture of what it looks like to foster a love of reading, we don’t have to choose between reading enjoyment, research-aligned instruction, and high-quality, book-centered curricular materials. But it might mean giving up some comfy spots to bring everyone in the classroom together into a shared experience of reading together, not apart. It means seeing our readers for who they are, providing the support that they need, rather than lowering the bar so hey can read independently. And it results in a whole classroom that shares what it means to be “on fire” for books.

Note: If you are a balanced literacy teacher, who – like I did – feels anxious that changing your practice will mean kids disengaging from reading, I invite you to widen your view. One of the key readings that helped me understand the value of complex text was this one: Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read: Why It Reduces Their Opportunity to Learn, by Timothy Shanahan. It details how newer research suggests the “instructional level” model that many of us learned doesn’t necessarily lead to the most growth for students.

Paired Reading

Caitlin’s points pair perfectly with Chris Such’s guest column about the weak evidence for independent reading during ELA time.

Karen Vaites collected evidence for the whole group approach in a column, “Leveled reading groups don’t work.”

We hope you caught our last two posts on books in curriculum: “Why have books disappeared from many ELA curricula?” and “Is the Science of Reading Community Anti-Book?”

In Education Week, Sarah Schwartz recently wrote two excellent pieces with similar themes “Are Books Really Disappearing From American Classrooms?” and What Is a Basal Reader, And Why Are They Controversial?

Stop Everything And Read This

Don’t miss Holly Korbey’s recent reporting on the issues with EdReports and other curriculum reviews, “My kingdom for a reliable curriculum review.” It’s worth it for Holly Lane’s insights alone.