Jago: When reading, the whole is much better than a part

 

Heinemann

By Carol Jago

This is the first entry into the Bring Back Whole Book Reading series. Check the landing page for new posts.

Reading whole books can make kids both smarter and nicer. Don’t believe me? In study after study, cognitive scientists have found that students who read stories are not only better able to understand others but also better able to understand themselves. 

This alchemy doesn’t happen when students read excerpts.

It is not hard to understand how short passages came to replace novels. After all, high-stakes assessments feature excerpts to measure reading comprehension. Mirroring that approach seemed a logical way to raise test scores. Except that it didn’t work. According to results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), reading scores across the board are the lowest they have been in 30 years. Most worrisome are the survey results that show lowest performing students never or hardly ever read for pleasure. In my experience, if students don’t read with pleasure, they can never be persuaded to read enough to become fully fluent readers. Maybe instead of focusing on raising test scores, we should be thinking about raising readers.

No one becomes an avid reader on a diet of text tidbits. Practicing reading skills on paragraph-long excerpts lacks authenticity; it is absent of purpose apart from “doing school.” From a student’s perspective, it is just one more reason to let artificial intelligence do the work for them. On the other hand, reading a whole book — a much more strenuous and time-consuming task — requires students to use their reading skills for real reasons: to watch a character stumble, to figure out a mystery, to enter a world they never imagined. Part of the rationale for employing short passages has been in the hope meeting screenagers where they are. What if we instead invited them to read books that took them to places they have never been?

To be clear, the move away from whole works was well-intended and, in many cases, a practical solution. For one thing, it solved the homework problem. But assigning only short texts robs students of the pleasure that can only be experienced when grappling with longer, more complex literature that more fully reflect the complex world they are navigating. This includes contemporary young adult works with appealing (sometimes lurid) covers. 

In Teens Choosing to Read, Gay Ivy and Peter Johnson describe a study they conducted with middle school students who were reading almost nothing. Their teachers invited these students to read books of their own choosing with no strings attached, providing classroom time for both reading and discussion. Over time, not only did students’ reading scores improve, but students reported that reading helped them manage their stress and feel more in control of their own behavior. Students felt that the books were helping them to become better people. Later interviews with family and teachers corroborated the students’ observations. While adults often worry that the topics in some YA fiction – self-harm, poor decision-making, graphic violence — might be dangerous, these young readers reported that they learned from the mistakes the fictional characters made.

Volume in reading matters. We get good at the things we do. The challenge is finding ways to make reading part of this generation’s everyday habits. To facilitate this, teachers can:

• Provide students with a generous classroom library
• Make reading together an everyday experience
• Talk about the books you are reading
• Offer choice when assigning books
• Give students time to talk about the stories they are reading

Today’s young people are in desperate need of the things that whole books can offer. According to a recent New York Times article, we are in the middle of a youth mental health crisis. Jia Lynn Yang reports that, “Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates.” Many young people feel lost, swallowed up by social media and seduced by AI chatbots.

Teachers report that their students are disaffected, disengaged from school, barely putting in seat time, stuck in neutral. Absentee rates are appalling. Some of this is a continuation of habits formed during the pandemic and/or a result of too much screen time, but the moment for excuses is past. Let’s move on from an excerpt-based curriculum and get back to real reading.

Books are more than tools for teaching children how to read. They are the reason to read. 

Works Cited

Ivey, Gay and Peter Johnson (2023). Teens Choosing to Read. Teachers College Press.

Paul, A. M. (2013, June 3). Reading literature makes us smarter and nicer. TIME Ideas. https://ideas.time.com/2013/06/03/why-we-should-read-literature/ ideas.time.com

link to the time mag article

Yang, J. L. (2025, November 24). Youth mental-health crisis in schools. The New York Times Magazine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/magazine/youth-mental-health-crisis-schools.html

Poem in your Pocket Zine

 Teach the Poem in Your Pocket Zines Lesson

This 826 Digital lesson, designed in collaboration with Academy of American Poets, introduces students to Poem in Your Pocket Day and invites them to create their own pocket-sized zine featuring a poem they wrote (or a poem they love). Teach the lesson to your students and discover how zines can be a powerful medium for self-expression.

7-minute write (edutopia)

 The research confirms her assertion: Writing both records and generates thought, leaping forward in sudden bursts of inspiration before doubt emerges and the author senses the need to loop back and revise, close gaps, and clarify their thinking.

Asking kids to “quick write” for 3- to 10-minutes gives students a low-stakes space to put pen to paper in response to a prompt. Quick writes are versatile, simple, and repeatable; they can be assigned several times a week, and can become a staple of paper notebooks across subject areas.

Middle school English teacher Meghan Rosa uses 7-minute writes “almost daily” as an “idea generator.” Students write the date and provocative statement like “homework should be banned” at the top of notebook paper, then share and refine the resulting written work in pairs. In social studies or history classes, students might engage in a 5-minute, written reflection about the importance of a towering figure like Frederick Douglass, or quickly respond to a prompt like “Was the U.S. Civil War avoidable?” to commit some initial thinking to paper. 

Edutopia: avoid rushing

 Many good suggestions in this article.  

Suppose a science lesson identifies 15 pages of reading and 10 related questions for students to complete within a 45-minute block. Many students will struggle to meet this expectation, so teachers are faced with two choices: spread the lesson over more than one class, or determine what portions of the text and which questions are most important for achieving that day’s learning goal. I recommend the latter because it will not only prevent the dreaded problem of falling behind but also help teachers learn more about how the curriculum supports important standards.

To avoid rushed grading, it helps to reflect on what feedback actually accomplishes. As Youki Terada and Stephen Merrill note, “The hours you commit to grading and commenting on every assignment and quiz are likely to be met with a shrug by your students.” Instead, they recommend focusing on a few high-impact areas for improvement. One of my favorite strategies for streamlining feedback is the holistic sort, which places formative data into two or three categories (such as “met,” “approaching,” or “not yet”). That way, we get a brief yet accurate picture of how students are doing.

For example, if students write a short constructed response (say, a paragraph) with the goal of identifying a main idea and some students have not done this correctly, the teacher is aware of who exactly is struggling. The next day, this teacher might allow students who met the standard to work independently for 20 minutes while pulling the “not yet” students aside for small group instruction on the skill. To try this out, pick one major assignment per week to receive detailed feedback and mark the rest with a quick holistic sort only. Research also indicates that students respond to feedback better when they see it without a grade—the latter is evaluative but is not considered feedback in and of itself.

Also a link to another article about the holistic sort

When teachers get bogged down in grading a large number of assignments, students do not receive feedback in time to make necessary adjustments to their understanding and are therefore more likely to give up. Providing feedback is not synonymous with giving a grade, and the value in letting students know where they stand informs their future success. Deciding which assignments deserve a grade and which exist solely to give the teacher data requires some discernment, but it’s well worth the effort. As for student pushback about not getting graded on everything, they will not be as vocally opposed to feedback for its own sake once they see the value of correcting their mistakes before their work is evaluated.

Suppose a sixth-grade science teacher wants to assess how accurately students identify mutually beneficial relationships within ecosystems by asking them to make a list of such interactions among organisms. Rather than grade the assignment or spend time making numerous comments, the teacher can divide student understanding into two categories labeled “Met” and “Not Yet.” Then, looking for overall patterns, the teacher makes notes about what mistakes students who are in the “Not Yet” category seem to encounter and uses that information to guide next steps.

This process is short and direct and provides the sort of visibility about student outcomes that makes instruction more relevant. In addition, students receive far more incisive feedback that helps them improve before a higher-stakes opportunity presents itself in terms of grades, and they are therefore less likely to get bogged down in a sense of failure.

Read in and out of comfort zone

 

from NYT learning network - 

read NYT - windows and mirrors

Before you read any further, try a quick experiment:

• Go to the NYTimes.com home page, or to any of the individual sections.

• Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is immediately interesting to you because it is on a topic you know or care about, or are somehow connected to already.

• Now take a second look. Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is outside your usual comfort zone, yet still seems potentially interesting.

• Read — or watch or listen to — them both. What happened?

This is exactly the challenge Kim Butterfield, an English teacher at Central High School in La Crosse, Wis., and a member of this year’s New York Times Teaching Project, gave her students.

What they discovered is that no matter how foreign a topic feels initially, you can nearly always find a way to connect to it and learn something valuable. And, as Ms. Butterfield explains below, when her students shared what they chose, “all of our worlds widened.”

We liked the idea so much we asked other Teaching Project members to try it. We ended up with students in schools from four U.S. regions — the South, the Midwest, the East Coast and the West Coast — all attempting the same exercise, and all discovering the same things Ms. Butterfield’s students did. Below, you can read excerpts from the reflections of a few students in each of these classrooms.

We have labeled the students’ choices “windows” and “mirrors,” because all of these teachers explained the assignment in terms of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s often-cited metaphor of “windows and mirrors,” which she described this way in a 1990 essay:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.

When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

What mirrors and windows can your students find in The New York Times? If you’d like them to try the exercise described above, we have a related Student Opinion question, “How Often Do You Read, Watch or Listen to Things Outside of Your Comfort Zone?” that challenges them to take the same steps, then post their answers to our comments section.

If they enjoy that, they might also be interested in our annual Summer Reading Contest, which invites teenagers to tell us what got their attention in The Times each week and why. This year it begins on June 11 and runs through Aug. 19.

Choose 3 and tell me what you think

 From NYT learning network:  summer reading

Every summer for 16 years now, we’ve invited students to read (or watch or listen to) anything they like in The New York Times and tell us about the experience. We’ll be doing that again this year, and, as always, we’ll be offering students dozens of free pieces a week to choose from if they aren’t already Times subscribers.

But if you would like to help your students practice this kind of independent reading before turning them loose, our spring challenge can help.

All your students have to do is choose three articles (or videos, podcasts or photo essays) from three different Times sections; read, listen to or watch them; and then tell us what they thought — in writing or via a short video.

Clarify Priorities Constalty

Clarify Priorities Constantly from Leadership Freak

Fuzzy priorities waste energy. What is your priority today? This week? This month?

If you can’t list your priorities, you don’t have any.

If you have more than five priorities, you don’t have any.