Perhaps you’ve caught the article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed that’s gone viral, My Students Can’t Read. In it, Tyler Jagt, talks about what those of us in the reading trenches have seen coming for well over a decade. Students have no stamina for sustained reading or writing tasks.

I’ve been doing this work of teaching students to read, write, and think critically for 20 years. I run a full-time private reading therapy practice running 30-40 sessions weekly with students ages 4-20. I’ve coached and trained in some of the smallest, rural public school districts as well as in some of the most elite private schools around the country. This is not an isolated problem. It’s universal.

My husband, a theologian and professor of graduate students at a top tier university, sees this increasingly each semester. His students are seeking an advanced degree at a top 25 university, and they have limited stamina for reading or critical writing.

It’s not that young kids can’t decode at a basic level. The push towards phonics instruction in primary grades has worked to help kids decode, or at least, sound good when reading basic text. Districts across the country are making good gains in K-2 with foundational phonics. But then, schools stop teaching kids how to read. This is why the reading scores of 4th, 8th, and 12th graders drop precipitously and have been in a steep decline for a decade. This was happening before COVID. Even those who are performing in proficient ranges in 2nd likely won’t continue to do so in the absence of continued instruction.

Because our language is complex and consists of so many layers, reading instruction can’t stop at 2nd grade. Most students require continued instruction to cross what some researchers refer to as the decoding threshold. It’s not developmentally appropriate to teach an eight-year-old to decode words like symbiosis, but that ability to read and understand multi-morphemic words of Greek origin is a necessary skill for STEM in middle-school.

This lack of higher level decoding instruction in combination with an emphasis on oral reading fluency, testing comprehension on short passages, and an over reliance on technology is leading to a whole generation of students who lack stamina and don’t know how to read deeply. If they can’t read deeply, they most definitely cannot do the work of synthesizing information across texts required for college level writing.

Students who were taught to read quickly don’t understand that they actually need to slow down as text becomes more cognitively complex.

This emphasis on oral reading fluency, which I have been warning against for nearly a decade, is really beginning to bite us all in the behind. When instructors emphasize words per minute, the cue most often provided is, “keep going.” This teaches kids that when you read, your ability to “just get to the end,” is the goal.

Good readers stop to ask questions.

Deep reading often requires that you stop, highlight, and revisit sections for clarification. The instruction in a primary grade classroom in a post-common core world, is to simply read the short text multiple times and find the main idea. This is not the way good readers read.

Students who struggle to unlock longer, multi-morphemic words or to untangle figurative language and semantic meaning, struggle with comprehension.

Imagine the middle-school student attempting to read this sentence from Ray Bradbury’s All Summer in a Day:

It was as if, in the midst of a film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, something had, first, gone wrong with the sound apparatus, thus muffling and finally cutting off all noise, all of the blasts and repercussions and thunders, and then, second, ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a peaceful tropical slide which did not move or tremor.

Without the know-how to unravel the figurative language and the word usage, comprehension is lost.

Teaching these concepts in isolated programs is not helpful. Context is everything. Conversation is everything. To be clear: please stop spending thousands of dollars on shiny new programs.

Students who have spent their entire lives with iPhones, Tik-Tok, and Instagram reels now have brains that are wired for the 7-60 seconds of content. Maryanne Wolfe warned of the changes to the reading brain in a digital world in her book, Reader, Come Home in 2018.

Reading digital text rewires the brain to prioritize skimming. As students skim or read in a digital medium, UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield states that less attention is paid to deep reading processes. Our ability to inference, to think critically, to develop empathy is intimately tethered to our ability to read deeply.

This has tangible repercussions for daily interaction with books. Students simply aren’t reading for pleasure anymore. When they do read, it’s not an entire book. Inside my private practice, I have very few middle or high school clients who have completed a book for fun.

Only fourteen percent of 13-year-olds read daily for fun, down from thirty-two percent in 1996.

What now?

I’m so exhausted by all the new programs on the market. What we need is NOT another program.

What we need is a return to what works.

Teachers need to be teaching, not assigning another online module or utilizing an AI bot. ChatGPT has no place in an elementary or middle school classroom.

Do you want students to know how to read over an extended time? Model it.

Teachers should be engaging in read aloud daily. In 1st through 8th grade, teachers should read aloud, at minimum, three complete novels of various genres a year from start to finish.

In so doing, you model for students how to engage with text in meaningful ways. You have the opportunity to build strong vocabulary. You can move from priming before reading, to connections inside the text, to utilization in written work. Teachers plan for vocabulary, grammar, writing, and comprehension around one text rather than attempting to cobble together various programs with no gains.

This also models for students the value of sustaining attention to a text across multiple days and weeks.

Older students should have the text in hand as teachers read aloud. All students should take notes as the reading happens.

Research tells us that print text allows students to feel a concrete sense of time and encourages deep reading.

Each day, after the reading, students should engage in some sort of writing task that integrates the usage of new vocabulary terms and emphasizes strong grammar and mechanics.

Rather than emphasizing fluency, instructional time would be better spent engaging students in conversation around texts, teaching students how to take notes, and helping them understand the importance of creating the imaged gestalt in the mind’s eye.

The imaged gestalt is the ability to visualize. If you consider yourself a good reader, you are intimately familiar with the immersive experience of reading. That moment when you can see, taste, feel the essence of a story. It’s why the movie version is almost always a disappointment.

In 1986 Nancy Bell began discussing the significance of teaching struggling readers to visualize. In 1991, Lindamood-Bell published the first book in what would become their evidence-based program, Visualizing and Verbalizing®️. This is not new.

We don’t need another new program. Schools squander thousands of dollars annually on shiny, expensive programs that off-load actual teaching into an increasingly technology driven realm.

The foundational tenets of building an image in the mind’s eye are easy to utilize across the curriculum from Pre-K through high school. As an aside, the NIH states that only roughly 4% of the general population has aphantasia, the inability to visualize; however, the bulk of our students are struggling to see the imaged gestalt as they read. In the Hey Siri culture there’s no need to imagine what something might look like. Students are all-too ready to ask technology for a quick answer.

As you read aloud, ask students what they imagine. Good readers craft images filled with sound, mood, and texture in the mind’s eye. This is the start of deep reading.

This ability to form the imaged gestalt is how comprehension is best built. From this, we can begin to make connections, think critically, and even feel deeply alongside the characters in novels. Longer texts allow students to become invested in the lives and stories of the characters, cultivating empathy, sustained attention, and delayed gratification. Conversations help build oral language and critical thinking skills, which positively impact written expression and vocabulary development.

This is not new. Stakeholders and legislators should be investing in meaningful trainings that provide support for practical application without relying exclusively on technology.

This is not about more training for phonics for primary grade teachers. It’s about training ALL teachers in primary through high school to actively engage with students through text across the curriculum. Teachers need the freedom and the support to lead discussions and to engage in conversations that lead to critical thinking and vocabulary development.

Every school is different, and the way they support teachers will vary based on that particular population.

Sweeping legislation that ignores that nuance and places all the power in the hands of an elite few who aren’t actively engaged in this work is a waste of time and resources.

Prioritizing test scores neglects the fundamental skills that we know our kids need to thrive in the world. According to Jagt’s article, universities with an average SAT score of 1400+ are filled with students who can’t write, struggle to think critically, and balk at lengthy reading assignments.

A return to the fundamental best practices of teaching is necessary to prepare our children for the world.

Spend money on teacher training that actually translates to immediate practical application.

Invite coaches with proven track records into your schools and districts, who have been successfully doing this work of teaching deep reading and writing for years.

Read books aloud.

Have conversations.

Put away the screens.

Think deeply.

Slow down.

Our kids and our world deserve better.