Too often we teachers find ourselves in either/or situations: either fiction or nonfiction, either skills instruction or independent reading, either standards-based lessons or a topic and text-first approach. What if we reconsidered this false dichotomy and instead worked towards implementing and/both? That is, finding ways to teach whole works of literature, both fiction and nonfiction, within a standards-based curriculum that addresses the development of critical reading skills while nurturing a love of reading.
Granted that this shift may require an artful reshaping of lesson plans since novels have not typically been the focus of instruction in recent years, but it has the potential to achieve the kind of progress in reading comprehension that seems to be eluding us. Scarcely a day goes by without a news story about students’ declining reading skills. Commentators blame the pandemic, social media, screen time, the list goes on and on. I think we need to stop making excuses and start making changes.
It is not hard to understand how novels began to disappear from ELA curriculum. 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 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), reading scores, across the board in grades 4, 8, and 12 are the lowest they have been in 30 years. While it is important to recognize that the National Assessment Governing Board which oversees NAEP has set the bar for proficiency very high, nevertheless it is more than a little worrisome when only 30% of eighth graders and 35% of twelfth graders score at or above the proficient level in reading.
Most worrisome are NAEP survey results that show 42% of our lowest performing students never or hardly ever read for fun. In my experience, if students don’t derive any pleasure from their reading, they will never be persuaded to read enough to become fully fluent readers. If our goal is raising readers, we need to help students to employ their reading skills with full-length works that engage both their head and their heart. According to Maryann Wolf, neuroscientist and Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA, explains, “One of the most important contributions all educators can make to the future of our society and our species is to ensure that deep reading processes are increasingly elaborated, maintained, and strengthened” (Wolf, 2025).
The challenges of integrating whole book instruction
Only someone who has never taught would think that bringing whole works back into the curriculum would be as easy as waving a magic wand. Challenges include but are in no way limited to:
- Deciding which books to teach can be a time-consuming (and heated) process.
- Teachers need access to class sets of books.
- Many students lack reading patience and stamina.
- Artificial intelligence offers students easy access to summaries.
- Balancing direct instruction with small and large group discussion requires careful planning.
- Time!
We need to give ourselves permission to work towards the goal of having a whole class engage with a common text without being hard on ourselves for less than perfect implementation. I can tell you first-hand that there never were any “good old days” when students all did the homework reading and arrived in class keen to talk about the book. That said, today’s teens pose particular challenges. Many have not developed the reading muscles needed to stick with a text over an extended period. Despite their teachers’ best efforts, the reading strategies that they have been taught haven’t become internalized. When these students meet a word they don’t know or syntax that confuses them, they often skim past the problem resulting in impaired or incomplete comprehension.
Maryann Wolf has written extensively about this in her book Reader, Come Home. She explains how today’s readers are skimming and scanning rather than engaging in the deep reading processes that result in engagement with a text and lasting learning. “This is not a simple, binary issue of print versus digital reading. At this hinge moment between digital and print cultures, society needs to confront what is diminishing in our brains’ reading circuits and what our children and older students are not developing and do something about it.”
The cognitive impatience we observe when students attempt to read complex text may be reflective of their inability to follow an extended argument or a complicated plot. And this inability just may be a result of their not being asked to do much of this kind of reading and thinking every day in school and out of school. Simply browsing a text will not serve a reader well when the stakes of comprehension are high.
The cognitive impatience we observe when students attempt to read complex text may be reflective of their inability to follow an extended argument or a complicated plot. And this inability just may be a result of their not being asked to do much of this kind of reading and thinking every day in school and out of school.
Some solutions for whole book integration
Working through a whole book together as a class helps to build community. What has worked for me—in an effort not to overwork a text—is to employ a gradual release model.
I teach the opening chapters of a book intensely, focusing on characters, settings, and structure. Depending upon the textual challenges that a particular book poses for the particular group of students I am working with, I might read an opening passage to help students hear the tone of voice the author is writing in. I might provide important background information by showing images of an unfamiliar setting or showing a video clip to help students visualize the time and place where events in the story are happening. I tell students upfront that we are embarking on a journey that will be difficult but that I am here to help.
One idea that can help students actually do the reading is to provide them with a kind of trailer for what is coming next in the story. Giving readers hints about what to expect helps situate them within the narrative. I also recommend that they put their phones away while reading so as not to be distracted. Please believe me that I don’t expect every student to do what I suggest, but maybe I have sown a seed. When students come to class the next day—some having read the pages assigned, some having “forgotten”—I begin with a lively discussion question (“What would YOU do if you were Odysseus stuck on an island alone with a nymph like Calypso?) that encourages students who didn’t do the reading to want to catch up.
As students begin to develop confidence with the text, I like to turn some of the responsibility for moving through the story from my shoulders to theirs. Employing a reciprocal teaching model, I assign a passage or chapter to small groups and invite them to present the unfolding events to their classmates. My role during these class sessions is to provide the standards-based instruction that the text invites. Often this entails drawing students’ attention to the reading skills they are developing and inviting them to think about the progress they are making, as well as the areas they continue to need help with. Putting students on the “stage” also allows me to observe where students are misinterpreting a text and in need of additional direct instruction.
The intrusion of artificial intelligence has made the assessment of student progress as readers increasingly fraught. Yet holding students’ accountable for doing the reading is critical. One method I sometimes employ is to display a short AI-generated summary of the homework reading and ask students to jot down three things that happened in the story that don’t appear in this summary. Students quickly get the idea that I want them to do the reading for themselves. Who wants someone else chewing your food for you?
Other instructional moves that help with holding students accountable include having them write for five minutes about what they remember most vividly from the reading and then having them share this moment from the text with a partner.
Why our work matters
Teenagers are intrepid explorers, sometimes to their own detriment. Books offer safe passage through dangerous territory by offering readers vicarious experience they can learn from. Adolescents long to peek into the lives of others and to compare these lives with their own (witness their fascination with Tik Tok). Books can satisfy this hunger. But as with any diet, the ingredients matter.
The books we choose to invest precious classroom time on need to be aesthetically rich—beautifully, masterfully written. Their language should be worthy of close scrutiny and even inspire a bit of awe in the reader. These books should contain a depth of information about places, periods, and events that will help students build the knowledge they need to achieve long-term academic success. The books should explore important ideas that stem from a wise source. Literature offers readers insight into what it means to be human.
That said, we are going to have to do more than simply hand out copies of a book and expect students to be enthralled by its aesthetic splendor. Making complex works accessible to young readers, particularly readers whose reading and language skills lag behind their thinking skills, will require artful and intentional instruction. Let’s help one another discover ways to make this possible.
References
National Center for Education Statistics. (2025). 2024 NAEP reading assessment results: The Nation’s Report Card. U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/
Wolf, M. (2025, October). Elbow Room: How the Reading Brain Informs the Teaching of Reading. Albert Shanker Institute.
Wolf, Maryanne. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. First ed., Harper, 2018.
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Built on texts that connect with students' lives, our HMH Into Literature curriculum builds confidence, standards mastery, and college and career readiness for every learner in the classroom.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of HMH.
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