Kids Should Read Whole Books in School, Not Just Excerpts
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses Doug Lemov's argument that students need to read complete books in school rather than relying on short passages and excerpts.
Key Takeaways
- Excerpts aren't enough - Reading short passages doesn't build the stamina, comprehension, or love of reading that whole books develop
- Whole books build sustained attention - In an age of distraction, reading entire books is one of the best ways to develop focus
- Lemov and his coauthors make a compelling case - The research and practical arguments for whole-book reading are strong
Transcript
Kids should read whole books in school, right?
It sounds like a totally logical, totally normal idea, but not having kids read books in school is normal enough that Doug Limov and his colleagues had to write an article in Edutopia, Why Students Should Read Whole Books.
And in this article, they make the case for reading whole books as a class, not just in independent reading, but as a class for students to work through.
And they point out how odd it is that we even need to make a case for this.
But the reason...
that a case needs to be made is because it is normal practice in a lot of schools to not teach with whole books, to teach short passages, excerpts, the kinds of things that might be on tests, and especially the kinds of passages that are intended to develop individual skills, like isolated skills, like finding the main idea.
But that thinking that reading is some sort of collection of skills that you can practice independent of content is a flawed idea.
And they explain that knowledge is the underlying Factor in reading comprehension finding the main idea all of these things that are supposedly skills are really functions of knowledge And I have to give credit to my colleague Natalie Wexler who wrote a great book called the knowledge gap a couple years ago and has a more recent book called Beyond the science of reading where she really explains the science behind this idea that students need knowledge in order to Comprehend and we can't just teach these abstract skills like finding the main idea because you can't find the main idea of something You don't understand you need knowledge to understand.
So check out Beyond the Science of Reading by Natalie Wexler.
She's been on my podcast, Principal Center Radio.
And also check out this article in Edutopia by Doug Limov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway, the authors of the Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading.
And let me know in your school, do kids read full books, not as independent reading, but actually as part of the curriculum that they do as a whole class?
Leave a comment and let me know.