Leveled Reading Is Intuitive but Misguided
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses Timothy Shanahan's argument that leveled reading — matching students to books at their reading level — actually holds back struggling readers.
Key Takeaways
- Leveled reading feels right but isn't - Matching students to easy texts prevents them from building the skills they need for grade-level material
- Shanahan's research is compelling - Students grow more from engaging with challenging text with support than from reading easy text independently
- Grade-level text with scaffolding works better - Struggling readers need access to complex text, not a steady diet of simplified material
Transcript
What if the idea of leveled reading is just completely misguided?
It's so intuitive, it makes so much sense that we would want kids to read books that they're ready for, that are just at that right level where they're a little bit challenging but not too challenging.
But what if that idea was a false idea?
What if it resulted in students actually learning less than if we have them read grade-level text in school?
I just spoke with Timothy Shanahan, the literacy expert, about his new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives.
And you can listen to the full interview on our podcast, Principal Center Radio.
And he makes the case against leveled reading.
He basically says when a kid is below grade level, they still need grade-level text.
And as an example, one thing you can do if a student is below grade level in their reading ability and a text is too challenging for them you can simply read it twice like there are lots of things like that that we can do to scaffold grade level text but if we don't and we instead differentiate not our instruction but the curriculum and lower the level of the curriculum that we're exposing a kid to and say having a fourth grade student read a second grade text because a fourth grade text would be too hard well that student is never going to catch up So this idea that we should organize our classroom libraries by level and only let kids check out books that are at their level and have reading groups that are divided up by level, he says there's just not evidence for that.
This is something that we have done for years and years and years that is holding kids back and we need to move away from that.
So check out the podcast interview with Timothy Shanahan and let me know what you think.