Why Is It Taboo to Have Kids Read Grade-Level Text?

I am suddenly obsessed with getting kids to read grade-level text.

A couple of years ago, I was talking with a high school principal in kind of a turnaround situation who said, Justin, the teachers are having the kids read middle school books in high school classes.

And I talked to the teachers and said, why don't you have them read, you know, a grade level appropriate books?

And of course, the answer was, well, that's not where the kid's reading level is.

For some reason in this profession, we've gotten the idea that a kid's independent reading level has to dictate what they read in class.

And I understand that you don't want to send a kid home with a book that they're not going to be able to read.

But in class, we have lots of options.

I recently spoke with Timothy Shanahan, the renowned reading researcher, about his new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives.

And you can listen to our interview at principalcenter.com slash radio.

on the podcast.

Lots of fun to hear his argument about why leveled reading is actually a bad idea and we need to be exposing kids to grade level text.

But the question remains, how do we do that?

How do we get kids to benefit from texts that independently are going to go over their heads?

How do we get kids to understand what they're reading if the text is up here and their reading level is down here?

Well, there are lots of ways to do that, but I would like to hear from you.

How do you do this in your class, in your subject, in your particular discipline, at your grade level?

What do you do?

And if you have video, I would love to see it.

You can send it to me.

One thing I'll share from Douglas Mobb's Teach Like a Champion is phase reading.

This is Number 24, technique number 24 on page 209 of the third edition of Teach Like a Champion, phase reading is an acronym that stands for fluent, accountable, social, and expressive.

And basically, it's not quite like round robin reading because you kind of skip over or scaffold kids who are going to be poorer readers, right?

And like nobody wants to listen to the worst reader in the class struggle through an equal amount of the text, you know, the same way everybody else does.

So you're strategic about it.

And if you have a kid who is a weaker reader, you give them an easier passage to read and maybe you prep them a little bit or you have the special ed teacher or you know somebody prepped them a little bit so they're going to be more successful so that the reading that the class is hearing is fluent that is really crucial here there's a whole lot more to this douglamov and his organization have a a lot of resources on how to implement phase reading but the thing about that is you can do it with grade level text with kids who are not reading at grade level And for some reason, this is a practice that in our profession we think is not allowed.

We think we are not allowed to spend time reading in classrooms.

But if that's the case, when are kids supposed to read and what are they supposed to read?

Well, if we can't actually read the textbook, an article, a novel, you know, an argumentative essay, a historical document.

If we can't read in class, when can we read?

For homework?

Well, then kids are only going to be able to read what they can read independently, and we know that's going to hold a lot of kids back.

So we've got to read in class.

Let me know what you think and send me your examples.