This essay first appeared in The Bell Ringer.

We were mid-exam when the knock came at the door.

Before I could protest—we need quiet right now!—my principal’s face poked through the door, a conspiratorial grin on her face. Behind her stood the superintendent of my small district on the outskirts of New Orleans, a mythical figure I had only ever seen from the back of a crowded hall. She was clutching a large bouquet of flowers with both arms.

The principal entered and cleared her throat. My sixth grade students began to abandon their papers, turning to face her with wide eyes. Her mouth began to move, but the words didn’t immediately register in my brain.

“Let’s see a smile on that face, Mr. Morin,” she said, noticing my dumbstruck expression. “You’re the Teacher of the Year.”

I snapped back to reality with the raucous applause of my students, who were partly proud of me but mostly thrilled by the interruption. It was clear they would be demonstrating their knowledge of the unit vocabulary another day.

While the honor was real, the smile that formed was forced. As I posed for a picture that would appear in the paper, (grimacing slightly at the exam copies that were now beginning to scatter the floor), I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly made me deserving of such pomp.

At just twenty-four years old, I was more than a little wet behind the ears. Classroom management was still a daily battle. My curriculum, however earnest, was largely incoherent, and I was lucky to ever have a majority of the room truly on task during work time.

I was still a developing teacher, and I knew it. I knew my principal knew it. So why me?

What I would come to learn over time is that the qualities schools are quickest to reward aren’t always the ones most closely tied to student learning.

And years later, after becoming a far more effective teacher by the system’s own measures, that early recognition all but disappeared.

Recognition Without Results

Up to that point in my teaching career, I had put in my share of late nights and early mornings. I battled the copier, authored hundreds of worksheets, endured unpleasant parent phone calls. If exhaustion was any measure of effectiveness, I was hitting the ball out of the park.

My school was enduring a difficult stretch—high teacher turnover, rapid enrollment growth, and a new administration trying to find its footing. In that context I could almost see how I became a Teacher of the Year candidate—I was a happy warrior: eager, visible, and genuinely committed.

But none of that inherently made me an effective teacher. The truth of that hit with full force the following August, when my principal called me into her office to review my student data Not only had my students significantly underperformed their sixth-grade peers at the school, but some important subgroups, including language learners, students with IEPs and Black boys, had fallen the furthest behind.

Suddenly the college visits I had organized, the flashy bulletin boards I had assembled, and the “big goals” I’d called every family about didn’t seem to matter much.

“These are the kids you said you’re here to help, Mr. Morin,” she said bluntly. “So I suggest you begin to figure it out.”

Studying Excellence

At the time, New Orleans was in the midst of one of the most sweeping urban education reform experiments in U.S. history. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the state took over the city’s schools, laid off nearly every teacher, and reopened buildings to a new generation of educators with ambitious, and often controversial, ideas about what schooling could look like.

I didn’t fully understand the politics of it then1, but what I did understand was this: some of these new schools seemed to be working. Really working.

While I was still struggling with the basics of management, peers working inside those buildings talked casually about systems and routines so tight they barely needed enforcement.

When I considered abandoning my homework policies due to low completion, those teachers were answering student text messages, coaching them through math problems in real time.

And when I felt tempted to explain away a student challenge with demographics or circumstance, those teachers were mapping out how a particular student might defy the odds to earn a scholarship to one of the city’s most competitive high schools.

My award elevated my standing among this peer group, but the distinction was thin. When one of them asked about my classroom or pressed me for feedback, I found myself realizing, uncomfortably, that I had little of substance to offer. They were developing their craft more quickly than I was, and I didn’t yet know how to close the gap.

Eventually, curiosity overcame insecurity. I took a day off and paid one of those schools a visit.

Their abstract anecdotes felt almost magical when I saw them brought to life. Students gathered for vibrant morning meetings. Meticulous, chalk-smeared boards tracked progress toward school wide goals in the halls. Hand-painted quotes and value statements filled the stairwells. Attention was visible everywhere—snaps, nodding heads, steady eye contact. Robust student work proudly covered classrooms and hallways.

Nothing here felt accidental, and it was easy to see that the adults were all-in. So were the kids. Watching things work, my eyes welled up with tears. It may sound ridiculous, but to believe deeply in a mission like educational equity while remaining ineffective at realizing it is a slow grind on the soul. To witness excellence—just as doubts about what was possible in my own classroom had begun creeping in—was a powerful release.

Much of the mechanics behind the school’s success remained invisible to me that day. But once I had seen what was possible, I knew I wouldn’t be able to return to my own classroom without trying to close the gap, even if I didn’t yet understand how much of what I had seen extended far beyond any single teacher.

My first attempts to replicate what I had seen led to frustration. Asking thirty students to enter a room calmly, gather their materials and begin work is a fool’s errand when they’ve grown accustomed to chaos and flexible seating in the classroom across the hall. Safe hallways are hard to build when most teachers are checking email during passing periods.

So I returned to classrooms like this again and again. Over time, the focus of my visits shifted from inspiration to study. That discipline reshaped my practice, then my identity as a teacher and eventually my understanding of what kind of work schools are actually capable of doing together.

I began talking with my grade-level teammates about what I was seeing in these other schools: hallways, transitions, shared expectations and the power of coherence. Slowly, we started trying things together. We aligned routines, tightened norms, and began treating culture like a collective practice we could learn.

For the first time, improvement no longer felt mysterious. With a full team rowing in the same direction, we weren’t just seeing better results, we could name why they were happening, and how to sustain them.

Waiting for the Parade

Five years after I began spending my days off studying great classrooms, the classroom I’d imagined and worked toward had finally taken shape.

I had returned home to Denver in 2013 and joined a founding team opening a new school. We had a newly renovated building in a desirable neighborhood, open enrollment that attracted a diverse group of families from across the metro area, and a committed, coherent grade-level team.

Strong cultural alignment translated into safe hallways, bought-in students and classrooms where time was treated as precious. With excellent instructional support and a robust curriculum, my students spent their days immersed in rich, complex texts and wrestling with whole novels rather than fragments. An ambitious teaching partner pushed me constantly to read more, refine faster and take risks I might not have taken alone.

By 2017, things had progressed. Over the last few years, my culture, curriculum and instruction had improved dramatically. Class felt alive. My advisory group was inseparable. Students were producing writing and analysis that genuinely astonished me.

That year my sixth graders posted a median growth percentile of 90 on the state exam—well above the state’s threshold for “high growth,” and higher than any other middle school ELA teacher in Colorado2.

When the data arrived, I waited, somewhat naïvely, for the parade to begin. The gains in my practice had been hard-earned, and I was surrounded by colleagues doing exceptional work.

But the state didn’t notice. The superintendent sent no note. Even my own instructional coach didn’t observe my classroom for months. Aside from my teaching partner, no teachers came to see what was happening. No advice was sought. No blueprint requested.

My mind wandered back to the enthusiastic young teacher in New Orleans who had once gotten his picture in the paper despite losing ground with his students. The contrast was difficult to ignore.

If this is how the system responds to clear evidence of instructional impact, it seems worth asking: what, exactly, are our systems designed to notice?

Getting Past Good Intentions

Ask a principal to name the great teachers in a building and to explain why and you’re likely to hear a wide range of answers.

Teachers are admired for many reasons. Some radiate warmth and joy. Others anchor their communities through coaching, rallies or clubs. Veterans carry institutional memory, mentor new teachers and help schools feel coherent over time.

All of that matters. But it also raises a harder question: what is the most important function of a school?

Community, safety, and belonging are necessary precursors to learning. At the same time, it’s possible, even common, for a school to enjoy a strong reputation and graduate nearly all of its students without consistently producing strong academic outcomes.

Since 2001, we’ve had access to unusually robust data on student learning at the district, school and classroom level in tested subjects. Assessments are expensive and sometimes unpopular, but in a country where academic opportunity is unequal along lines of race and class, tests offer something rare: a clear view into which schools and teachers are helping students learn the most, often in classrooms serving students with the greatest needs.

By any reasonable logic, those should be the places most deserving of recognition, or at least curiosity. Instead, in a data-rich profession, we often treat the most important data as impolite.

This reluctance isn’t hard to understand. Teaching is a profoundly human enterprise, and the coherence of teams, the legitimacy of leaders and the trust of families are often more fragile than we care to admit. Evidence of instructional impact can destabilize those relationships. It raises uncomfortable questions: why a novice teacher might outperform a respected veteran; why students with exceptionalities are falling further behind; why schools with every visible advantage still struggle to produce strong academic growth.

Studying excellence also has a destabilizing effect: once positive outliers are visible, it becomes harder to explain away persistent underperformance elsewhere.

In a profession shaped by inequality, those questions can feel less like invitations to learn than moral indictments on the practitioners. Add overextended leaders, litigious parents and a workforce already stretched thin, and it’s easy to see why achievement data is often avoided rather than examined.

When that happens, excellence doesn’t disappear, it simply hides in plain sight.

An Open Door

As a struggling young teacher, my days spent observing other educators in the city’s best schools didn’t give me a script but instead set a standard, and gave me the hunger to find my own way toward it.

Again and again, expert teachers opened their classrooms to me, and each visit left me changed.

Teaching now faces a crisis of retention. But beneath the policy debates and technology promises is a simpler problem: too few teachers ever get to see what excellence looks like up close—or to know that, when they achieve it, it will be noticed.

Back in New Orleans, it’s easy to see that the flowers and applause marked my effort and presence, not the learning in my classroom.

Years later, when the learning was unmistakable, the silence that followed made the lesson clear: our systems are far better at celebrating intention than at recognizing excellence.

If we want to keep our best people, and become a profession where mastery is cultivated rather than hidden or designed away, we might start by making excellence in our schools impossible to ignore.

The concept resonated, but without a model, even practices we believe in are hard to implement. So, I made a model.

Resources

Full story, Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”

PDF of page 1 annotated

Of the many things I have tried in the classroom, none have produced better results than this practice (a claim I don’t make lightly) and I did a version of it nearly every day of the year.

Before I share it, a few quick notes on the work:

1. A few defaults exist in classrooms where this works. Students are operating with pencil and paper; the teacher has done intensive intellectual preparation with the text and knows where the “heart of the heavy lifting” lies; and there is a strong culture of “board = paper” in the room.

2. This kind of work doesn’t leave much room for distraction, but it does require intentional breaks—turn and talks, brief share-outs, or other structures that allow students to interact with the text rather than only listen.

3. Depending on the authorial craft you’re trying to uncover, you may focus on entirely different aspects of the text. Most of all, explicit instruction requires a great deal of uncovering of explicit meaning. You may be surprised by how much of the work ends up being establishing meaning rather than analyzing it. It can feel elementary at first, but it’s the most reliable way to free up student thinking for “the good stuff” later.

4. Most lily pad moments function best when you target either a passage that requires significant comprehension work (what Reading Reconsidered calls establishing meaning) or a moment that is emotionally resonant or plot-shifting—such as Jonas watching the video of his father completing a “release” in The Giver. The goal of this model is to help students see the tonal frame Bradbury places around the technology in the opening paragraphs and to give them the schema they need to read the next ~20 paragraphs independently. (For reference, my next lily pad would likely come on page 3, when Mr. Travis begins, “We don’t want to change the future.”)

No two paragraphs require the same approach, and I don’t advocate for consistently required markings or annotation patterns (such as always using ? for “I have a question”).

Depending on my aims, students might work on questions like these either during the model or afterward:

Establishing Meaning

Fill in the following chart with detail from the text.

Looking at the machine, Eckles sees:

Looking at the machine, Eckles hears:

Establishing and Analyzing Meaning:

The machine sounds like a “gigantic bonfire” because…

The machine sounds like a “gigantic bonfire” but…

The machine sounds like a “gigantic bonfire” so…

Analyzing Meaning:

How does Bradbury use imagery to pack motion into the description of the machine?

How does the description of the machine build on the ominous tone of the opening paragraphs?

How does the simile in paragraph 6 showcase the machine’s power?

(after finishing the story) How did Bradbury foreshadow that the machine was too powerful for man to control in paragraph 6?

The goal of a lily pad isn’t to slow students down indefinitely or to keep them tethered to the teacher. It’s the opposite. When students leave these moments with shared language, clarified meaning, and a sense of how an author is working, they are far better equipped to read forward on their own.

Done well, this kind of modeling doesn’t replace independent reading—it makes it possible.

Let me know what you think, and if you found this kind of modeling useful. I’d love to keep giving the document camera a workout!

“Mister, this is confusing. Is he like a robot zookeeper or something?”

The question made me blink, eyebrows involuntarily aloft.

It came after students had read a single sentence from Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder—a sentence I had assumed would spark curiosity, not confusion.

The activity, called Tea Party, was simple: students drew short snippets from an upcoming novel and, without further context, predicted what might happen next.

An example line from our opening novel, Freak the Mighty, might have been:

There are fair maidens to rescue, dragons to slay.

Expectedly, students invented a flurry of Arthurian scenarios, some surprisingly connected to the plot and others wildly off-base. One student was convinced Bowser (of Mario fame) would make an appearance. Groans followed; hands shot up. Wherever the discussion went, the activity reliably built anticipation and energy with our accessible texts.

By my third year, my ambitions had grown, and I tried the same strategy with more demanding prose.

Students once again pulled lines from a mystery envelope, this time from Bradbury’s time-traveling, Jurassic-era classic. The line in question described the time machine when the main character first encounters it:

“Eckels glanced across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue.”

My mistake was assuming that more sophisticated syntax would generate more sophisticated predictions. I imagined students speculating about the scientific nature of the aurora or the origins of the machine.

Instead, they offered ideas like:

“There’s gonna be snakes and Eckles is humming to them”

“Something exploded and lights are flickering everywhere”

And, in a district where fish was served on Fridays during Lent, at least one student concluded Eckels was “trippin” at Holy Mass.

“Interesting idea… but keep thinking about that,” became my refrain for the day.

What, I began to wonder, had gone so wrong?

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Complexity as an Interaction

What I hadn’t yet realized was that nothing had gone “wrong” with the lesson—only with how I understood complexity itself.

My students—already hamstrung by the intentionally context-less task— didn’t understand many of the words as they were being used. Nearly every student avoided making a prediction about the aurora, for example, because almost none of them had encountered the word before. In other cases, familiar words like snaking appeared in unfamiliar roles, describing shape and motion rather than animals.

At first, I blamed the task and tried to fix it by releasing students into the text itself. Surely the preceding paragraphs would clarify things?

References to a “safari in the past,” hunting dinosaurs (obviously extinct), and a vocabulary list that included a definition of aurora should have anchored their understanding.

Except, it didn’t.

Students tripped just as hard over the sentence the second time as they had the first. If anything, the Mesozoic Mass had grown more troubling, and most students still hadn’t identified the time machine.

At the end of the day, I stared at a stack of mostly inane student writing, cycling through familiar questions:

Had I failed to differentiate enough?

Were my lessons on personification insufficient?

Did we just need another graphic organizer?

What I would eventually learn was that students didn’t lack effort or strategy. They lacked the schema to make meaning, and I had sent them to pasture—confusing withdrawal of support with rigor.

The only real remedy was a heavy dose of explicit instruction, grounded in the text itself.

How Schema Works in Real Reading

When I first learned about schema, I understood it as a loose collection of facts stored in one’s head. The idea that dinosaurs are extinct, for example, or that “time machines” are often depicted as overbuilt metal boxes that flash and bang, seemed like the relevant knowledge a reader might need to make sense of a sentence like Bradbury’s.

Over time, I’ve come to understand schema as something broader and more functional. It includes, among other things:

• familiarity with how words behave across contexts

• comfort with complex syntax

• experience recognizing how authors signal a character’s inner state

In classrooms, schema is often discussed interchangeably with the more practical label of background knowledge. The terms aren’t identical, but they frequently function the same way. Background knowledge is the visible, teachable content that fills and activates schema—and without it, even careful rereading and close analysis have little to latch on to.

“Reteaching” Isn’t the Answer

When schema is missing, instructional systems tend to misdiagnose the problem as a “skill” deficit—and nowhere is that clearer than in how student performance is interpreted.

Many schools use data analysis protocols that funnel student results toward evaluating standards mastery and planning a corresponding “reteach cycle.” The underlying assumption is clear: if students struggle with a text, they must be missing a discrete skill that can be identified, isolated, and taught again.

We can spend full class periods on reteaching standards, but what exactly are we reteaching?

Can you “reteach” Bradbury’s humanism? His kinetic imagery, his metaphorical lilt, his control of tone and consequence?

Of course not. Devoid of a source text, you can describe imagery. You can catalog metaphors. You can read a dozen examples of literary pivots.

But when students finally face the real thing, it often feels like trying to lift a heavy weight after weeks spent studying pictures of the barbells in the gym.

Writing is human, stylistic, emotive, and complex. The more it deviates from expectation, the more we tend to treat it as worthy of serious attention.

Instead of keeping students in the shallow end with decontextualized excerpts, a more effective approach is to immerse them—carefully—above their heads in real texts, and wade in with them to teach them how to swim.

The Art of Curated, Collective Reading

What I’m describing here is often called model reading, but it’s better understood as collective close reading—a shared act of meaning-making rather than a demonstration to be replicated.

As such, the process rests on two principles: curation and collectivity.

Curation

Not all text is worthy of collective close reading. Opening pages often are. Climactic moments, the launch of a new conflict, or key moments of character development almost always are. At the same time, students still need opportunities—and tools—to move through large swaths of a novel on their own.

A well-planned collective close read, then, functions like a lily pad in the larger pond of a novel’s rigor—an oasis where developing readers can climb out of the muck of independent meaning-making and get just-in-time practice with the next challenge ahead.

In Lord of the Flies, for example, students need a lily pad early on, during the first descriptions of the island, not because the setting is particularly confusing, but because the language is doing more than it first appears.

“Here the beach was interrupted abruptly by the square motif of the landscape; a great platform of pink granite thrust up uncompromisingly through forest and terrace and sand and lagoon to make a raised jetty four feet high.” (pg. 13)

A moment of intentional reading helps students not only grasp the island’s Eden-like beauty (and the sharp, predatory undertones that foreshadow what’s to come), but also learn how to read the metaphoric, allusion-heavy register Golding uses to shape both setting and, later, character.

“Go slow to go fast” may sound trite, but spending several days analyzing the elements of dystopia in the opening chapter of The Giver gives students the tools to unlock far more complex insights later—at the speed the author intends and with a high degree of independence.

Too few lily pads in the pond and most swimmers drown; too many and they never grow stronger. Thoughtful curation—where supports appear, what tools are offered, and how far students must swim independently between them—pulls classrooms out of the tired “I do / we do / you do” progression and into something more responsive. Release is no longer gradual by default; it is modulated to the demands of the text itself.

Get the support cycles right, and students have the independence they need to tap into the text’s secrets on their own.

Collectivity

In real classrooms, student abilities are not neatly sorted into boxes. Even readers who test at similar levels often bring vastly different backgrounds, interests, and knowledge sets to the same text.

It’s commonly argued that these differences must be addressed primarily through differentiation. In practice, they’re more effectively bridged through thoughtful, explicit, collective instruction.

A few non-negotiables apply during a collective close read: every student has a paper copy of the text, a pencil in hand, and is accountable for recording the key ideas of the model and conversation in a predictable, checkable way. My strong preference is to capture those ideas live—on paper, under a document camera—so students can see my adult thinking unfold and record it alongside me.

From there, the teacher can drive collective engagement with a clear purpose (e.g. “How does the author signal mob mentality in this scene?”), while modeling fluent reading and rapidly clarifying the dozens of mini-lessons that even advanced readers need when they encounter something new.

These clarifications may be tangential to the day’s central question, but they’re no less essential to understanding the scene. As notes1, insufficient background knowledge can turn productive struggle into unproductive confusion—and it is precisely these small, in-the-moment distinctions that keep students in the former rather than the latter.

In this setting, adding techniques like cold calls and structured student talk don’t just increase participation—they allow the teacher to respond in real time to comprehension with the most important scenes in a text, while it is unfolding.

For example, a teacher might surface an inference from a confident reader, briefly test it through partner talk, and then ask a developing reader to summarize—responding to comprehension in real time rather than planning multiple parallel lessons.

And it only works when meaning is built together, grounded in the mess of text itself.

The Work That Lasts

So if we want to build more resilient readers, there are few better approaches than providing heavy, collective modeling in the moments that truly call for it.

Over time, those moments of deliberate practice become internalized. Students read with greater independence because they’ve repeatedly experienced what it feels like to wrestle with thorny text—and how to persist when meaning doesn’t come easy.

It is these residual effects—habits of attention, stamina, and confidence—that grant students not just access to the next text, but to a lifetime of reading.

So seed your lily pads generously throughout the pond—not only to help students face the deep, but to give you places to stand together, making meaning and finding pleasure in the work, before it’s time again for them to swim again on their own.

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Interleaving: a short guide

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“He took the DINOSAUR SUBTRACTION!” the teacher yells in mock horror as his class erupts in cheers. The camera lingers on a triumphant young boy, radiant as he claims his prize—a math worksheet.

So ends an iconic video—a staple of teacher training in the late aughts, and one of my earliest introductions to teaching. In it, a young teacher works the room, letting students in on a “secret”: they just might get away with trying advanced math—if he can manage to sneak it into the building late at night.

The third-graders eat it up. Leaning over their desks, they beg for more math. The teacher raffles off extra practice to “lucky winners,” and the class erupts into a spontaneous chant about their own abilities: yes we can!

Even now, I’m impressed by his charisma, his preparation, and his ability to so thoroughly enmesh students in the culture of his room by the fourth day of school. It’s a masterpiece.

As a young teacher, I was no less inspired—and plenty confident. I believed my students would lean in, attentive and hungry for everything I had prepared. Class would be raucous, joyful, and productive, so long as I brought the right material and the right attitude.

But once in the classroom, I learned that good intentions don’t organize a room. What filled my days instead was endless chatter, heads on desks, and constant bargaining to keep students on task. Class was chaotic, unproductive, and largely indifferent to my ambitions.

“You need to engage them more,” a mentor advised, doing her best to help. “Get them up and moving!”

Without any real management muscle, that advice backfired. When activities entered my lessons, things got worse—not better. A five-minute gallery walk might stretch to fifteen, with more property damage than text analysis completed by the time we returned to our seats.

Over time, those activities began to exist only on paper. In practice, they were replaced by my exhortations for students to sit silently in their seats, an attempt to survive the day.

Despite my intentions, I had adopted stillness as the default for my class—driven by a fear of losing control. And it was a decision that would strip the room of the very energy it needed to thrive.

Why Stillness Fails the Adolescent Brain

Prolonged stillness carries real cognitive costs for adolescent learners. A large review by Donnelly et al.1, synthesizing decades of research on physical activity and cognition, writes:

“There is strong evidence that physical activity has a positive effect on cognitive functioning, particularly on attention and executive function.”

When movement disappears, attention erodes. Sustained passive listening is associated with gradual attentional decline—especially for adolescents.

The classroom I had created was developmentally misaligned with the students in front of me. Low productivity, frayed relationships, dragging bodies, and a brittle classroom culture shouldn’t have been surprising—they were built into the design.

The answer, of course, isn’t chaos. Swinging too far in the opposite direction—toward high-energy, low-accountability activity—creates its own problems.

Students still need substantial amounts of explicit instruction and carefully structured discussion, much of which happens from their seats and demands sustained cognitive effort.

The challenge, then, is not choosing between stillness and rigor. It’s designing classrooms that privilege attention to make rigor possible.

My breakthrough came when I stopped asking students to fight their bodies and started designing class with them in mind.

Listening is a Physical Act

Teachers are typically great at defining what students should do during work time: how much to write, who they may talk to, how to ask a question, and how much they’re expected to complete.

Listening, however—the part of class that occupies the most time—is often treated as if it needs no instruction at all.

When someone is speaking, teachers may say “listen carefully” or “pay attention,” but more often they say nothing at all, implicitly treating silence as a sufficient condition for classroom talk to proceed. Students respond accordingly: some listen, some doodle, some drift. From the outside, it’s difficult to tell the difference.

The solution is surprisingly simple: make listening a visible, physical act.

In practice, that means asking students to square up and look at whomever is speaking in the room.

In my classroom, if I’m speaking, I wait until students are looking at me.

If a classmate is speaking, I direct students to orient toward them—and we don’t continue until everyone is ready.

And if I catch myself distracted while a kid is speaking, I stop, apologize, and ask them to repeat their point, modeling the kind of attention and respect that I expect from everyone else.

So why insist on something this small?

Looking while listening works because attention is both physical and contagious.

Orienting your body toward a speaker quite literally spatializes your attention, anchoring it to whatever you’re facing. When a group does this together, others are naturally drawn in. We are wired to follow the gaze of the crowd, and that impulse works in the classroom’s favor.

Even small shifts in posture or alignment can interrupt attentional decay and restore alertness. And because students need regular body “resets,” I build them in: a shoulder turn, a nod, a clap, a brief percussive moment on the desk—small movements, repeated constantly, without ever stopping instruction.

So when I notice attention drifting, I don’t scold or command students to “wake up.” I simply call on someone in the back of the room, and bodies turn almost in unison. Eyes widen as the student prepares to speak.

Suddenly, I have thirty things to positively narrate—each one reinforcing the expectation that attention here is visible, shared, and sustained.

“I love how Jackson is leaning in, ready to listen. Imani, everyone’s ready—go ahead and share.”

A Room that “Crackles”

So why are these routines still relatively rare in classrooms, despite how simple and effective they are?

The most common critique is that this kind of structure feels robotic, clinical, or controlling. In practice, the opposite tends to be true. When a class erupts into a chorus of snaps and nods after a strong contribution from a shy classmate, the atmosphere in the room becomes electric.

That electricity is palpable in BreOnna Clanton’s seventh-grade classroom. In the short clip below, Ms. Clanton (Tindall) facilitates a whole-class discussion. Watch what the room does while a student is speaking: bodies orient, eyes track, hands fly. Attention moves laterally through the room rather than bottlenecking at the front.

The classroom, as Lemov writes,“crackles to life.”

(Note: the whole clip is worth your time, but around 1:15 is where the magic really starts)

As the discussion unfolds, snaps and nods ripple through the class when a student makes a salient point. These responses aren’t prompted or performative. They emerge organically—and they invite participation. Students who might otherwise stay quiet raise their hands because the room feels ready to receive them. The class is alert and present without being tense.

At its best—as in Ms. Clanton’s classroom—you can glimpse what Émile Durkheim described as collective effervescence: a shared emotional and attentional state that arises when a group responds and focuses together. Learning stops feeling like a series of individual performances and begins to take on a genuinely communal character.

Research on interpersonal synchrony helps explain why moments like this matter. Shared physical cues—even subtle ones—are associated with increased trust, cooperation, and affiliation. As Tarr et al.2 observe, “When moving at the same time as others, we experience some blurring of self and other.”

That blurring reduces social risk and makes participation feel safer—even inevitable.

Humans bond through shared physical signals. In classrooms, those signals accumulate until attention no longer has to be enforced. It’s carried by the room itself.

The Daily Reset: Brain Boosts 🧠 🚀

Most of what matters in a classroom happens in the flow of instruction. But in a movement-oriented room, there’s another element worth naming: the Brain Boost.

One under-appreciated benefit of a well-managed classroom is that time starts to feel less scarce. When a room can work with focus and intensity for most of a period, it becomes possible to give a few minutes back without anxiety about what’s being lost.

Enter the Brain Boost: a brief, non-optional, daily reset designed to disrupt stasis, restore readiness, and reinforce the social fabric of the room.

Here’s a short clip of my advisory playing a game I made up called The Monkey Game, the rules of which are highly proprietary (er, nonsensical).

As you’ll see, we sing, we dance, we throw things, and occasionally stand on chairs. The rules matter far less than the experience itself: the temporary suspension of seriousness, the shared indulgence in chaos, and the freedom to move.

Over time, I’ve built a small bench of these activities. Some are classics; others are invented on the fly. Don’t Flinch, Ninja, Poison Dart Frog, Night at the Museum, and Simon Says all work for the same reason: they are short, structured, and played with full commitment.

@espnThis game looks too fun 👏 @7DC 🧀 #game #friends

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Effective Brain Boosts are tightly timed—three minutes is the sweet spot—and fully bounded. Every student has a role. There are no screens, no opt-outs, and no ambiguity about when the activity begins or ends.

Just as important, they end cleanly. A Brain Boost is always followed immediately by a return to rigorous work. When used this way, these moments strengthen routines rather than undermine them—and often reveal the health of a classroom culture more clearly than academic tasks alone.

Attention is Built Together

Teaching often treats attention as something to be managed, corrected, or demanded.

Left undefined, what students do in class collapses into stillness: bodies go quiet, attention thins, and distraction predictably creeps in. But when teachers deliberately intermingle attention with movement, students are drawn into the flow of class rather than managed through it.

And when a room “crackles” with energy and joy, it’s the surest sign that the conditions for students to thrive are taking root.

The invitation caught me a little off guard.

“You’ve got to get in to see what they’re learning. They LOVE it,” he said with an inspired glint in his eye.

The next morning I made a point of slipping into a desk in the back of his room to see what all of the fuss was about. “This book is awesome,” one of the sophomores whispered at me, thumbing through his tattered copy of Born a Crime.

The bell rang and the teacher tapped play on his laptop. Trevor Noah’s voice filled the room—bright, effortless—as students bowed over their books.

Soon, Noah relayed a childhood incident in which he relieved himself on a newspaper in the kitchen rather than brave his family’s vermin-infested outhouse.

“You are never more yourself than when you’re taking a sh*t,” Noah boomed, sending the boys into roaring fits of laughter.

The teacher shot me a nervous look, worried I wouldn’t like what I was seeing. And in a sense he was right. But the opportunity I sensed that day wasn’t what he imagined.

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Apartheid is obviously worthy of study. And the bathroom humor? Crude, yes, but funny and illustrative of the living conditions Noah’s family endured.

The problem wasn’t the topic or the poop jokes. Born a Crime, which the publisher recommends for grades 11–12, carries a Lexile of 770—firmly in the elementary band.

The kids were having fun, but they were capable of so much more.

Why Students Still Need the Classics

In today’s equity-saturated discourse, “old, dead, white guys” has become shorthand for texts assumed to be irrelevant to a diverse student body—or worse, ideologically dangerous. And while the impulse behind this skepticism is understandable, it often collapses into a false conclusion: that students can’t handle complex literature and therefore must be protected from it.

To understand the importance of the canon, you needn’t accept that its core virtues are derived from some fixed idea of a “cultural inheritance.”

Instead, it’s important to recognize that the texts within it embody a level of linguistic, structural, and conceptual complexity that modern texts—especially modern YA—rarely even attempt.

And while the layered density of canonical prose can feel daunting, Reading Reconsidered reminds us:

“(Difficulty) becomes a hurdle to be overcome by good teaching, not an argument against reading it… when the criterion is solely accessibility and not greatness, the result is that students who start out as weak readers almost never study the same rigorous texts that imply our highest expectations.”

Sidelining classic literature in the name of accessibility has the side effect of depriving students of the very struggles that build strong readers.

Put simply, complexity isn’t a barrier to equity; in many ways, it’s the surest path toward it.

Modern Texts Are Easier — And That’s a Problem

The research is unequivocal: modern prose is shorter, flatter, and less syntactically demanding than the prose students routinely encountered in previous generations—often sharply so.

The consequences of this shift show up clearly in performance data. ACT’s landmark 2006 study found that students across nearly all score bands struggled profoundly with complex texts. Performance rose predictably on “uncomplicated” and “more challenging” passages—but on complex passages, all but the highest performers hovered only “slightly above the level suggested by chance.”

Its conclusion is blunt:

“The clearest differentiator in reading between students who are college ready and students who are not is the ability to comprehend complex texts.”

And students cannot develop that ability without sustained exposure to demanding prose.

Attempts to formalize expectations around complexity—like the Common Core’s introduction of text complexity bands—have done little to shift classroom realities.

Publishers still push below-band materials, districts still adopt excerpt-driven curricula, and many teachers have never encountered the complexity guidance at all.

As a result, the pattern persists: a student interested in mythology is still more likely to be handed The Lightning Thief than The Once and Future King

Interrupting that pattern requires a nuanced understanding of how complexity is measured in the first place.

What Lexile Misses About Complexity

No measure of text complexity is more widely recognized than Lexile.

Its appeal is obvious: almost every book a student could encounter has already been scored, and any passage can be run through the algorithm to generate a quick, concrete number. In a field where quantification is rare, Lexile provides a metric that feels objective—and often useful.

But Lexile measures only two things:

• sentence length

• word frequency / rarity

…and that’s it.

This narrow focus produces predictable anomalies: Charlotte’s Web “outscores” Of Mice and Men, for example, and invented terms in YA fantasy novels (“muttations,” “muggles”) inflate scores despite adding no real linguistic challenge.

None of this captures the structural intricacy, abstraction, narrative techniques, or knowledge demands that make literature resistant to easy meaning-making.

So while Lexile can signal surface difficulty, it rarely captures the full picture of why a text is complex.

For that, we need a qualitative lens.

Luckily, a simple but powerful framework exists.

The Four Dimensions of Text Complexity

Student Achievement Partners (SAP)—co-founded by three lead writers of the Common Core—has produced some of the most genuinely useful resources available for understanding the standards.

In my view, the crown jewel is their set of text complexity rubrics, freely available from Achieve the Core.

Across both the literary and informational rubrics, complexity is assessed in four dimensions—text structure, language features, meaning, and knowledge demands—rated along a continuum from “slightly complex” to “exceedingly complex.”

What makes the rubrics invaluable is that they take the concept of “complex text” out of abstraction and ground it in something teachers can actually analyze.

Used well, they help illuminate which texts merit whole-class study and how to approach them instructionally.

A Tale of Two Texts

To prepare students for the literature they’ll face in the upper grades and beyond, we have to begin with the end in mind. Dickens is a useful benchmark—not simply because he consistently shows up on the AP exam, but because his work engages every strand of the complexity framework.

Consider the iconic opening of A Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, … we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”

It’s a 94-word sentence, built through parallel antitheses (“best of times / worst of times,” “wisdom / foolishness,” “direct to Heaven / direct the other way”). To follow this, a reader must navigate:

• Complex text structure, via long, patterned sentences

• Demanding language features, via irony, abstraction, formal diction

• Layered meaning, via contradictory clauses that generate thematic tension

• High knowledge demands, via historical context about revolution and moral upheaval

None of this is explained. The sentence assumes stamina, inferential ability, and background knowledge on the part of its reader.

Now read the opening of The Lightning Thief, a novel widely adopted across middle-grade curricula and routinely treated as a 6th grade anchor text:

“Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.

Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.”

Later chapters keep the same simplified register:

“Most kids would freak out if they saw a teacher turn into a monster. But me? I was already thinking about how I was going to get blamed for it.”

Brief declarative sentences, conversational diction, fully explicit meaning, and no demands on a reader’s historical or conceptual background. A reader simply follows the narrator’s literal statements in chronological order.

The cognitive load is virtually nonexistent.

A curriculum built on novels like The Lightning Thief—however enjoyable—cannot prepare students for Dickens, Hurston, Ellison, Brontë, or any writer operating in a more demanding register.

In the end, choosing texts is less a question of taste than of preparation — and the stakes for students could not be higher.

Building a Runway

If Dickens represents the deep end of textual complexity, middle-grade students need a runway—texts that stretch them in the right ways without overwhelming them.

Reading Reconsidered offers one:

“(A book like C.S. Lewis’) The Magician’s Nephew is, in short, a starter kit for students who aspire to one day read Dickens.”

And it’s true. Lewis’s writing in The Chronicles of Narnia introduces the very features students will face later: antiquated syntax, formal diction, narrative intrusions, and a tone that assumes the reader can infer, reflect and keep up.

Take this line:

“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. And this was the case with Uncle Andrew; for he began to believe in his own magic, and the more he believed in it, the more he invented.”

It’s funny and wise, but it also asks something of the reader. The sentence coils back on itself, folds in nested clauses, and lets the narrator poke his head out to address you directly.

Or consider the White Witch Jadis, whose language mirrors the grand register of Victorian prose:

“I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of State? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.”

Students have to track abstract political vocabulary, follow Jadis as she slips between four different pronouns, and discern the formal, imperious tone that constructs an insidious moral hierarchy.

Importantly, that’s the same kind of linguistic and conceptual work they’ll later face in Dickensian figures like Scrooge or Madame Defarge.

Lewis challenges developing readers without overwhelming them, offering early practice with antiquated prose in a manageable context.

Now contrast that with Riordan’s universe—prose built from short declarative sentences and direct emotional cues:

“Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary.”

There is simply no comparison in the cognitive work these texts demand. And a school year is far too precious to spend on books that are merely designed to amuse.

Raising the Horizon

“The surest way to hold students back is to keep them in books they can already read.”

— Timothy Shanahan

Back in that sophomore classroom, the familiar pattern was playing out.

In our debrief, we set Born a Crime beside a brief passage from Mark Mathabane’s classic memoir of life under apartheid, Kaffir Boy, and the difference in cognitive demand was impossible to miss.

“There is a death far worse than physical death, and that is the death of the mind and soul… when you cannot clothe, shelter and feed your loved ones, suffering miles away, forcibly separated from you.”

My colleague saw it immediately, reflecting that he had chosen the book out of a desire to engage his kids—not giving heavy consideration to the extent to which it was developing them as readers.

Every curriculum choice either raises or lowers the horizon students can reach, and building serious thinkers requires serious texts.

If we want students to inhabit a bigger world, we have to give them the books that will expand it.

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon when I found myself casually scrolling education job boards, wondering what else a washed-up old teacher might do with his life.

I expected the usual: curriculum, coaching, maybe even a cushy crossing-guard coordinator gig.

Instead, one company, clearly on a hiring spree, dominated the board: Alpha Schools.

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Oddly, none of the jobs were for teachers. Every listing invited me to join a “learning rebellion” that “doesn’t play by the old rules.”

Hell yeah, I thought. A rebellion with comprehensive benefits.

Naturally, it wasn’t quite that simple.

Selling Utopia

“They’re learning twice as fast.”

That’s the promise of MacKenzie Price, founder of the Alpha Schools—born in Austin and now expanding anywhere with enough tech-minded millionaires to fill the $40,000/year seats.

“2 hour learning” is Alpha’s trademark. Two hours to, as Price says, “crush our academics.” Four recesses. A lineup of sleek workshops in “21st-century skills” like coding, public speaking, and entrepreneurship. And no teachers—just “guides,” paid handsomely enough to attract impressive resumés.

Parents are eating it up. Price is a social-media star with more than a million Instagram followers, a podcast, and an endless queue of glowing interviews.

The pitch is irresistible—Hogwarts vibes with a venture-capital twist, and more Starship Enterprise than schoolhouse.

And, they insist, the kids really are learning. Twice as fast!

It’s a utopia on paper—but behind the promise lurks a somewhat stickier question: learning twice as fast… at what?

Fueled by Discontent

Parents have real reasons to be frustrated with the status quo.

Too many schools are inefficient and incoherent. Even wealthy suburban districts—often founded on the promise of “superior” schooling—aren’t delivering.

Enrollment is falling, families are defecting, and trust is eroding. Grade inflation, pandemic absenteeism, and the long tail of failed movements like balanced literacy have pushed achievement into steep decline.

Meanwhile, well-intentioned but performative district policies—like San Francisco’s decade-long ban on middle school algebra in the name of “equity”—make education feel “zero-sum” and signal to many parents that schools aren’t really in it for their kids.

The result is a broad disillusionment with public education. In that context, Alpha’s promise doesn’t sound like a gimmick; it sounds like a cure.

Bending under Scrutiny

As Alpha’s footprint has grown, so has the spotlight. WIRED Magazine published a detailed exposé last month that raises plenty of issues, but two questions linger for me: what students actually do during “academics,” and what they actually learn from it.

Neil Selwyn, education professor at Monash University and author of Should Robots Replace Teachers?, notes:

Alpha’s trust in software-enabled repetition is typical of ventures started by people who were self-taught in coding or engineering—but they didn’t learn history, poetry, or the humanities that way.”

It’s no shock that tech founders built a school in their own image, favoring math and engineering over the messy, language-driven work of reading and writing.

But without that foundation, no student will be college- or career-ready, no matter how many “Managing an Airbnb” workshops they complete in sixth grade.

An example of a parent’s story in WIRED makes the stakes painfully clear: her eight-year-old left Alpha able to read words quickly but not understand them, and writing at a kindergarten level.

These aren’t anomalies; they’re the predictable outcomes of outsourcing reading, writing, and thinking to an algorithm.

To see why, it’s worth looking at what those “2 hour” academics actually involve.

A “Drill and Kill” for the 21st Century

We’ve already discussed what makes up high-quality reading instruction: reading whole books, building background knowledge and schema, fluency practice, structured academic talk, and, of course, annotating texts.

But if your goal is to “crush academics in two hours,” there’s little space for any of that.

What fills the gap is not mysterious. Algorithmic learning programs with “adaptive pathways” — like i-Ready MyPath, Amplify mCLASS, Achieve3000, and DreamBox —form the backbone of what Alpha brands as “personalized AI learning.”

And the beating heart of Alpha’s “instruction,” as WIRED reported, has been IXL Learning.1

If you’re a seventh grader, here’s what that looks like: you log in, you see a grid of skills, and you click through a sequence of micro-tasks.

Under “Analyzing Literature” you might answer a question about a short, disposable snippet of text—sometimes solvable by reading only a single word.2

The program is “adaptive,” in theory: its diagnostic figures out which skills a student hasn’t yet “mastered” and then assigns more practice on those exact skills.

But this is where the model collapses. The cognitive work that builds real thinking — constructing an argument, writing a coherent essay, conducting a science lab, academic discourse — cannot be automated, nor can it be isolated into bite-sized skills.

So how are students “growing twice as fast” if this is the core academic experience? The answer lies, in part, in how the learning is being measured.

The MAP Mirage

A confession: I’m a data freak, and I take growth measures seriously. So when Price flashed graphics showing Alpha students in the 99th percentile of growth every year—in nearly every subject and every grade—I gasped. That’s an extraordinary claim.

But anyone who’s lived inside a classroom knows how slippery adaptive data can be. A low-investment fall test can make spring growth look miraculous. An unfocused testing environment can tank a score. And MAP, for all its usefulness, has two structural weaknesses: it contains no writing, and it’s far simpler and shorter than state tests.

Add up multiple retakes within the testing window, cash incentives for kids who hit targets, and the predictable “low effort in fall = big gains in spring” dynamic (which students learn quickly—especially when money’s involved), and the 99th-percentile gains start to look a little less magical.

Tellingly, Alpha’s parent company declined to provide its MAP data to WIRED for analysis. You can imagine that explaining the messiness of multiple retakes and fall-score tanking might be inconvenient to the narrative.

Despite all this, you could write Alpha off as a faddish school for the rich.

But then you’d miss the real story: that same adaptive-learning logic has already seeped into public schools—and it’s quickly accelerating.

The Fallacy of Adaptive Learning

As part of her pitch, Price leans on a narrative that has already caught fire with school leaders:

“What our team of scientists and software developers have built is like a CAT scan of a child’s brain—showing what they know, what they don’t, and how we can fill the gaps to mastery.”

It’s a compelling metaphor, but hardly a new one. As I wrote last month, this view of literacy as a collection of small, “masterable” skills has shaped early and middle-grade instruction for more than a decade—and contributed mightily to the wider reading collapse.

In other words: what Alpha is doing isn’t innovative. It’s a hyped-up mirror of what districts are already implementing.

Take my own district: we were encouraged to dedicate an entire class period to i-Ready MyPath, replacing teacher-led Wednesday reading instruction with adaptive computer lessons.

The rationale was identical to Price’s: “strong research,” “personalized learning,” “massive gains.”

And i-Ready does call itself research-based. But the strongest studies are vendor-funded or produced by organizations tied to the publisher.

A recent review of adaptive-learning systems noted that many evaluations report gains only on in-system or course tests, with much more mixed evidence on external exams such as state or national assessments.

Even in vendor-funded research, the story is underwhelming. A Johns Hopkins study commissioned by Curriculum Associates found that school-wide i-Ready use did not significantly raise state ELA scores; at best, heavy users saw a tiny gain of a few scale-score points after hundreds of minutes online.

Tl;dr: heavy doses of i-Ready practice make you better at the i-Ready test.

What it does beyond that remains far murkier.

Cheap, Scalable, and Wrong

So why doesn’t any of this slow districts down?

Because algorithmic learning is cheap and easy to implement. A district choosing between hiring reading interventionists or buying a district-wide adaptive program knows exactly which option fits inside a crowded budget.

Add growing parent demand for “AI-enhanced learning,” and the sales pitch practically writes itself.

Meanwhile, carving out minutes in the schedule adds up fast. Even 10 minutes a day totals up to 30 hours a year—roughly six full weeks of ELA class—not spent on the irreplaceable work of knowledge-building, writing, and reading whole-class texts.

Beating Back the Tide

So how do we fight back the adaptive-learning creep—especially when the stakes for real curriculum implementation are so high?

Three starting points:

1️⃣ Be loudly skeptical of mandatory adaptive blocks—especially as “intervention.”

If your school wants to carve out explicit minutes for algorithmic skill practice, ask why. Ask what evidence supports it. And most importantly, ask what students will no longer be doing during that time.

2️⃣ Come armed with research—and persuade the adults closest to you.

The narrative that these platforms are “research-proven” is sticky but inaccurate.3 Admin teams often have flexibility in how to interpret district mandates. Re-establish reading—and intervention—as knowledge-building, whole-book reading, writing, fluency, and structured talk, not isolated micro-skills.

3️⃣ Show what responsible AI use actually looks like.

AI isn’t going away, and parents expect it to show up in classrooms. Use it where it actually helps: quick writing feedback cycles, stronger exemplars, sharper questions.

Use AI to elevate thinking—not to outsource it.

Where the real “ROI” lives

Research is remarkably consistent: a highly effective teacher (top quartile) can move students 10–20 percentile points on standardized assessments in a single year.

Most software—even when used “as intended”—shows 0–3 percentile points of impact on those same assessments.

In other words: a great teacher may cost more, but delivers something like 10x the learning gains. When you look at impact per dollar, teachers aren’t expensive—they’re a bargain.

So if we truly want students learning “twice as fast,” we don’t need to replace teachers with algorithms.

Real acceleration comes from people, not programs.

And the future of learning isn’t artificial.
It’s human.

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It was the opening line of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany that sealed my fate as a reader—a serious one.

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God.”

Reading it today still racks my nerves. As the narrator promised, Owen has never left my consciousness.

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In a sense, I’d always been “a reader”—staying up late with Hardy Boys mysteries or leafing through Reader’s Digest for jokes to impress adults. Even my textbooks pulled me in; I rarely drifted off to sleep without a book propped open beside me.

But Owen Meany struck a deeper chord. It was the first book that I was devastated to finish–the first to make me cry, and later, to make me confront my own values. It lit a spark of intellect in my teenage mind that made the obligations of school feel suddenly small, and the world suddenly vast.

I was assigned the reading, but somewhere along the way, I began to read it for myself.

By the end, a book about a strange boy with an armadillo on the cover had changed my life. It started with those first fifty words—and a budding understanding that some beginnings never really end.

Reading Like a Writer

What I felt back then, though I couldn’t have named it, was the subtle power of an opening line—the way a few sentences could hold the weight of an entire worldview.

As literary theorist Jonathan Culler noted, great openings do more than “open” stories — they teach us how to read them.

When we point that out, we can accomplish a lot. Reading Reconsidered writes,

“When students attend closely to how a text is built — the words, structure, and choices — they begin to read like writers.”

Once students start to read like writers, they begin to notice the deliberate design of a text. Focusing those noticings help students to see the opening lines as both an invitation to engage and an instruction manual on how to proceed.

“Knowledge builds on knowledge. Each text we read should prepare us for the next — strengthening the web of understanding that makes comprehension possible.”

- Student Achievement Partners

Learning to See What’s There 🌌

Authors face a monumental task in those early pages: to establish characters, spark conflict, build a world, and hint at the story’s deeper truths.

I love this line from George Saunders on all that an opening has to accomplish:

“The opening has to be like a compressed moral universe. Everything that matters will already be implicit in it.”

That’s solid advice for writers, but it’s also an important insight for nascent readers.

Recognizing that compression—and slowing down enough to unpack it in class—has major implications for how well kids comprehend and connect with a novel for the rest of the unit.

How We Lose Readers

Even brilliant writing can fall flat without guidance. I learned this the hard way from my AP Literature teacher, who believed “rigor” more or less meant letting us fend for ourselves.

His lectures were lofty, his questions mostly rhetorical, and our discussions often stalled into a puzzled silence.

The limits of that laissez-faire approach came into focus when we encountered the opening lines of Ralph Ellison’s dazzling Invisible Man:

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me… When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.”

Along with my classmates, I drifted through the page—and eventually the novel—unaware of the message and out of sync with the narrator.

What did I miss? The gap wasn’t vocabulary—ectoplasms was the only unfamiliar word, and you can go without it. Nor was it complexity; Beloved, for example, had been harder, and we’d risen to the challenge—with gusto—under the guidance of a different teacher.

I would argue that a simple thing held us back: no one guided us through the novel’s opening paragraph.

In retrospect, that paragraph doesn’t just introduce a narrator; it contains the novel’s entire thematic heart in miniature. Every image, allusion, and syntactic turn gestures toward the narrator’s central struggle.

By the end of that single paragraph, readers already hold clues to the novel’s themes:

• the tension between visibility and erasure

• the intersection of identity and perception

• the self as a mirror of others’ perceptions

If you don’t slow down to hear those notes when they’re first played, it’s easy to see the narrator as only a madman raving in the dark. From there, you drift—confused, unmoored, and miserable through a masterpiece.

That’s exactly what happened to us.

Cracking the Comprehension Code

So what are the lessons for us to help prepare students to meet the demands of their own challenging texts? Two simple interventions in the first days of a unit can make all of the difference:

1️⃣ Lay the Groundwork with Background Knowledge

For many students in the middle grades, a novel’s first chapter isn’t just the start of a story—it’s their first encounter with an entire genre.

The Giver may introduce dystopia; Esperanza Rising, magical realism; Animal Farm, allegory; Night, memoir.

Each of these “firsts” demands more than enthusiasm; they require background knowledge of the author, era, or theme to prepare students for the world they’re about to enter. Simply “launching” into Night, for instance, without grounding in the Holocaust, would be disastrous.

Some texts demand more groundwork than others, but all benefit from context. Studying the Russian Revolution before beginning Animal Farm is an obvious move.

The Giver, though, is subtler — its world unfolds slowly, with a quietly unsettling logic. Reading a short dystopian story like Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron first can help students navigate the warning signs with firmer footing.

Knowledge organizers and pre-reading artifacts — a map, a timeline, a photo set — are among the most useful tools to shrink the cognitive distance between the reader and the world they are about to encounter.

2️⃣ Model Reading to Make Thinking Visible

A mentor1 shared a brilliant line from Kelly Gallagher that stays with me:

“The teacher is the best writer in the room (that’s you and me); therefore, it is critical that the best writer in the room models the confusion, the messiness, the stopping and starting, the hesitation that comes with trying to compose.”

In a reading classroom, the same principle applies. You are the best reader and thinker in the room—so let them watch your mind at work.

Use your document camera to illustrate the process of thinking: pausing, wondering aloud, underlining, doubling back. Demonstrate early and often how readers struggle productively when the meaning begins to layer and the language thickens.

By playing in “real time” with a text, you’ll uncover dozens of small moves and considerations that you make instinctively—things that might never otherwise occur to you to name for students.

And after a few rounds, you’ll begin to notice (with deserved satisfaction) that their thinking starts to mirror your own. 📝

For more on the “how” and “why” of annotation, and why I always choose paper over tech:

A Case Study 📖

All of this takes time, but there’s a real payoff on the line.

Consider this excerpt from the opening of Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting:

The road that led to Treegap had been trod out long before by a herd of cows who were, to say the least, relaxed. It wandered along in curves and easy angles, swayed off and up in a pleasant tangent to the top of a small hill, ambled down again between fringes of bee-hung clover, and then cut sidewise across a meadow… On the other side of the wood, the sense of easiness dissolved. The road no longer belonged to the cows. It became, instead, and rather abruptly, the property of people.

In class, you might do three rounds of annotations:

1. Read for surface meaning, fluency and implicit vocabulary.

2. Reread to notice how words and phrases like ambled, curves, ‘pleasant tangent’, and ‘easiness dissolved’ shape mood and tone.

3. Read again for pattern and interpretation — the road’s personality, the contrast between nature and “the property of people,” etc.

That deliberate pacing helps students internalize and digest the text’s logic in manageable chunks. As their fluency with character, setting, and language builds, so does their capacity for deeper insight and, importantly, far greater independence.

That “payoff” becomes clear in Tuck Everlasting: the winding road functions as a vivid metaphor for what’s to come—its curves, contrasts, and sudden turns foreshadow the moral terrain of the book itself.

A careful read of the opening becomes a rehearsal for everything that follows, teaching students not just how to analyze a paragraph but how to enter the story.

Cultivating Astonishment 💫

“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” - Mary Oliver

When we teach patient, attentive reading, we uncover one last thing for our students—the staggering beauty of what’s already on the page, hidden in plain sight.

Openings matter, so treat them like art.

Show students how the smallest brushstrokes of craft can reveal the whole design, leave them in awe at the precision and beauty of the language, and give them just enough thread to grasp until their curiosity sparks and does the rest.

Make them tremble, and they’ll never read the same way again.

“It looks like spaghetti, mister!” the student teased, earning a few quiet snickers from his classmates.

And I could hardly blame them. As a minimalist at heart, the sight of a once-pristine novel scarred with notes, arrows, and sticky tabs used to make me flinch.

So it’s no surprise that when my students first see a model of my own messy attempt to wrestle with a complex text—full of scribbles, boxes, arrows, and half-formed thoughts—they can’t resist poking fun.

But beneath the madness, there’s a method. And done well, it’s damn effective.

The margins, it turns out, are full of opportunity. And the process of filling them up is where the real thinking begins.

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“Just Reading” isn’t Enough…

“Dependent readers often fail to see reading as an active process.”

So begins the most important section of Kylene Beers’s seminal work, When Kids Can’t Read, What Teachers Can Do—"Constructing Meaning.”

It’s a familiar scene: a student hunched over a book, brow furrowed, eyes scanning the page. Then the prompt drops, and… nothing.

They’ve done what they thought was expected: moved their eyes, turned the pages, and almost certainly enjoyed the pictures.

“I read it all!” they protest. And of course it’s true — but it’s also not enough.

Meaning has to be made — a highly technical process we in the business sometimes call “thinking.”

Reading isn’t enough. Meaning has to be made — a highly technical process also known as “thinking.”

…and Hope isn’t a Strategy

Beers describes how skilled readers constantly re-read, question, and monitor their understanding — the quiet, invisible work of making meaning. As a young teacher, I spent many class periods urging students to “do these things,” believing that if I just reminded them to predict and connect, comprehension would follow.

For the next twenty minutes, read Chapter 3 and write down five text-to-self connections.

Or later:

Jonas just found out something big about the community. Write down one question you have about it.

These prompts moved the needle a little — creating reflective pauses and giving us something to talk about. But the fatal flaw was that I asked students to build meaning from their own experiences, not from the text itself.

The result was predictable: shallow insights (“I also have a baby brother who cries when he’s upset”) and heavy dependence on my strongest readers to carry the conversation. No one else produced anything worth discussing.

With no real “right answers,” my monitoring devolved into grimacing and hoping for more. Mostly, though, we wasted a lot of precious class time and thought very little.

Making Thinking Visible

It’s far more useful to tell students what to think about than to tell them simply to think. Defining a clear purpose gives students an intellectual target — and that focus sets the stage for deeper comprehension.

Ron Ritchhart, in Creating Cultures of Thinking, captures the essence of effective classrooms:

“In a culture of thinking, there is a sense of purpose to the learning.”

And indeed, the turning point came in my classroom when I learned to focus and externalize student thinking. This meant narrowing our aim, shaping our questions, and making the invisible visible. As Ritchhart later wrote in Making Thinking Visible:

“When we make thinking visible, we get not only a window into what students understand, but also how they are understanding it… making students’ thinking visible becomes an ongoing component of effective teaching.”

Purpose gives students direction; visibility gives teachers insight.

In my classroom, annotation is the tool that bridges the two. It’s the mechanism by which students put their thinking on the page — and the window through which I can see them “constructing meaning” in real time.

An Aside:
You can hack together annotations on Google Classroom with the comment tool, but it’s 100× better on paper. That’s why I’m a paper guy—and why my favorite classroom tool is still the document camera.

Doc cams are basically standard issue now, but the cheap ones on Amazon do everything you need.

A Brief Note on “Coding”

Many people associate annotation with “coding” symbols like “?” or “!” or “👓” to indicate “a question,” “I’m surprised!,” or “I have an inference!”

It’s a start, but all you end up with is a page full of reminders that you felt something, not evidence that you understood something. It’s more process than processing.

On the other end of the spectrum is the “free-range” approach: “Go mark up a few thoughts as you read.”

That might please your inner John Keating, but students quickly wander. Developing readers underline and restate; advanced readers write long, irrelevant tangents (“I also experienced darkness… when my rabbit died”).

If a text is worth analyzing, then it holds a deliberate insight — an intentional authorial move. Students won’t nail it without guidance, and that’s fine. In fact, that’s why they’re in class with you!

Instead of generic logographs or the “free-range” method, try firing up the three pillars of annotation—a set of guidelines that work especially well for middle-grade readers.

The Three Pillars of Annotation 🏛️

Here’s the model I use in my classroom when we tackle the opening paragraph of Sandra Cisneros’s classic short story “Eleven” during the first week of sixth grade.

These are the simple principles that bring it to life.

1️⃣ Bread Crumbs 👣

Rule: Every time you underline or highlight, leave a margin note.

Why: Margin notes ensure underlines aren’t random. They help us track thinking and share it later in discussion or writing.

“No notes” means random highlights and lost thinking.

2️⃣ Focus 🎯

Rule: Always annotate for a purpose — and make your margin notes align with that purpose.

Why: A clear purpose anchors comprehension and grounds us in our reason for reading. It’s often tied to the day’s objective, standard, or writing prompt.

Texts can be rich — tone shifts, figurative language, character development all at once — but focus is a virtue. When a passage is dense, have students read it twice for different purposes rather than going a mile wide and an inch deep.

3️⃣ Goldilocks ⚖️

Rule: Not too many, not too few.

Why: Left alone, an 11-year-old will either do the bare minimum or fill every inch of the page. Structure helps them thrive.

I keep it simple: if there are three key things to notice, I tell students to make three marks. Don’t overcomplicate it.

What Grows from the Margins 🌱

Once you establish a routine with the pillars, annotation becomes an everyday tool. Students grow efficient and eager to wrestle with challenging text, and as complexity increases in the high school years, the young adults you’ve been training can produce some truly astonishing work.

The recipe is simple: paper > laptops. Clarity and structure are your friends. Model your process more than you think you need to — then let kids loose.

Annotation is thinking made visible, and students will surprise you with the weird, creative, and brilliant ways their minds spill onto the page.

And the first time a kid beams while you show off their chicken scratch on the big screen, they’ll realize the spaghetti scribbles were beautiful all along.

Here’s a simple fact about me—I’m a paper guy at school. The scratch of pencils, the silly doodles, the woody nubs scattered across the floor at day’s end… they do something for my soul.

But it hasn’t always been that way. When I started in the classroom, computers were decidedly in.

One upside of working in a recovering disaster zone was the influx of federal funding, and among the most popular uses of that funding was high-end laptops—an important signal that we were taking the digital age by the horns, even in rural-ish Louisiana.

The laptop cart was to be reserved at least a week in advance, but sooner was better as competition was stiff. We saved challenging lessons for laptop day, and for good reason—mundane activities like essay-drafting took on a transcendent quality when the MacBooks were involved.

To handle the “machines,” as we called them, copious paperwork was first to be submitted by parents, fingers were to be cleansed of Cheeto dust at the science sinks, and the ultimate behavioral threat loomed large over the students: loss of tech privileges.

So, with little other encouragement, students delved urgently into their work, fully in thrall to the glowing screens. And as a struggling first-year teacher, some of my only moments of true peace came on laptop days. Technology was a boon to us all.

But, as with most things we cherish, the sheen was destined to fade.

How the MacBook lost its magic

Most of the issues with school-aged kids and excessive screen time are either well-known or easy to infer. , author of The Anxious Generation, doesn’t mince words on the topic:

“The presumption should be that anything you do digital (in schools) is worse than anything you do manual.”

And anyone who has watched an 11-year-old use a custom keystroke sequence to swipe to a hidden screen to refresh their Minecraft farm in the middle of a math lesson has a pretty good sense of what he means.

There are a lot of feelings on this topic, and I know teachers who use “machines” with prudence and care. They save time and paper, get great work out of students, and can’t imagine living any other way.

I applaud them, but that was never me, and it’s usually not the reality that I see in classrooms, either.

So what happens when we take the machines away? And what takes their place?

The secret weapon is…packets?

This is where my favorite classroom tool comes in: the structured student packet, the workhorse of middle school learning.

It’s fair to ask: how does a worksheet—almost the definition of sterility—fit into a human-centered classroom? The answer is simpler than it seems.

Packets are the staple of high-quality curriculum (Fishtank, Reading Reconsidered, Novel, and Achievement First, to name a few) and there’s good reason for that. The team calls this “Double Planning” and writes,

“A well-designed packet gives both teacher and students everything they need for the lesson at their fingertips … Further, having a copy of the packet yourself enables you to work from the same set of materials as your students, allowing you to manage the student experience … quickly and effectively.”

Here’s how that looks in practice. Consider the student sample below, from a lesson on “The Giver:”

It may look, well, sterile at a glance, but there are a few tricks hidden in plain sight.

The circled “P” at the top of the page indicates the “whom” in this case – “Partner Practice.”

The printed directions contain some light annotations – with my model packet on the doc cam, I circled the pages for this segment, then we all opened them together. Then, we defined key characteristics of paraphrasing together. The words, “short, accurate, own words” were written on every paper in the room, modeled again on the document camera up front.

At the bottom of the page, the “x____” was also hand-drawn by students during the activity introduction – that was the teacher-check point. And this student, having successfully met the criteria for this page with their partner, received the coveted signature indicating that they completed the work to expectation and were approved to move on.

Three things paper does that screens can’t

So let’s account for what I really have here.

1️⃣ A quick record of who’s tracking directions.

2️⃣ A built-in reason to circulate and give feedback.

3️⃣ A grading shortcut that reinforces mastery.

“Your Paper Should Match Mine” 📝

We basically never read directions without annotating them. Students might squiggle a key word, box an action, draw arrows to connect a sequence. There’s no rigid formula—but there is an important output: they have something to do while we review (often complex) procedures, and I have a record of who was paying attention. Left unchecked, middle schoolers have the approximate attention span of goldfish, so this tiny ritual pays outsized dividends once the activity begins.

In a world where most classrooms are 70% teacher talk (yes, that’s the actual number!) annotating directions helps us “steal” many more minutes back for the worthy work of digesting complex text.

“Mister!” 🙋🏽‍♂️

Kids can’t move on without my eye on their work, so you’d better believe they’re demanding my attention, often with the cartoonish urgency of a retriever who caught wind of the word “walk.”

This might seem arduous (especially for upper grade teachers used to “playing it cool,”) but that constant movement is actually a feature, not a bug. It keeps the room alive, and it keeps me on my toes, too. Every lap of the classroom tunes me into the work as it’s happening—the sticky spots that need whole-room clarity, the small imprecisions that need a push, and the flashes of creativity that deserve a quick doc-cam share.

And honestly? It’s really fun. The kids lose themselves in the moment. High fives, cheers, and fist bumps flow easily. They’re always surprised at how class went by in a flash, and they’re equally surprised by how much they got done.

It’s a massively efficient use of time.

The Virtuous Cycle 🔁

Grading classwork is an undeniable headache.

Nothing is more cliché than teachers marching cartons of papers to their cars on Friday afternoon—only to march them right back in on Monday morning, untouched.

The beauty of my manic packet-monitoring routine is that it doubles as grading. Once my mark is on the page, it’s done—and it earned a 100%. No extra hours. No stacks looming on the passenger seat.

Students get feedback in the moment that moves them to “proficient,” and the reward is immediate: a positive grade they already know before it ever hits the gradebook.

The system reinforces itself. Either you got your signatures, or you’ll get the assignment back to complete. There’s almost no in-between.

Once that becomes clear, the cycle feeds itself. Students stay on task, I stay present, and the packet handles most of the classroom management for me.

Losing the Room

All of this assumes paper is the organizing technology in the room. But when screens take over, the dynamics shift fast, even if the content stays the same.

Let’s look at two of the biggest obstacles teachers face when those same materials move online.

Supervision

In a classroom arranged in rows, you can see faces or screens—but never both. Cords snake through the aisles, making movement awkward, and every assignment is scrolled to a different spot, raising the “cost” for teachers of giving feedback face-to-face instead of staying tethered to their desk. The mechanics of managing class turn from “working together” into a game of whack-a-mole.

Efficiency, Feedback, and Cognitive Overload

Even when the tech works, the cognitive load is brutal. You’re tracking tabs, chasing visibility, and typing out notes that students might never read.

Meanwhile, students—tucked behind screens that they can dip and dim at will—simply feel less accountable. They produce less, need more reminders, and get far less feedback in the moment. The feedback loop collapses, and distractions creep in.

Sure, going digital saves some printing, sorting, and stapling. But if we care most about the student experience, the better tool is obvious.

A Worthy Sacrifice

At the end of the day, prioritizing paper takes both sacrifice and planning.

Stories of teachers squirreling away reams of copy paper in “times of plenty” are legion, and honorary certificates for copy machine whispering are owed to many. But despite the challenges, keeping text, attention and accountability at the center of the lesson makes the trade-offs seem small in comparison.

Plus, if you’re lucky, maybe that collection of pencil nubs will be worth something someday. 🤞🏻

“A Matter of Equity”

“Take a moment,” the man urged, eyes boring into the crowd, “and write about your favorite teacher. What made their class special?”

It was the third day of Teach For America’s summer institute, and our instructor — a self-assured Harvard graduate, hardly further along in his teaching career than us — was enjoying himself.

Being the literacy team, we tore into the task with verve. We were, after all, high achievers who loved to read and write. Each of us had someone who pushed us, inspired us, made us feel at home — and we were here to be like them. I began to write about a high school teacher who introduced me to my favorite author, had us annotate our novels, dedicated whole blocks to Socratic discussion, and—

“Stop!” he interrupted. A wry grin crept across his face. “Now take that paper… and tear it in half.”

He stared us down from behind his podium as the sound of ripping paper filled the auditorium.

“What worked for you isn’t going to work for them. These kids,” he said pointedly, “need something different.”

The “different” that our kids needed, it turned out, was a rigorous focus on standards instruction. The theory, as he told it, was that our students had been underserved for their entire educational careers and lacked basic skills.

“It’s a matter of equity,” he solemnly explained. The argument was heavy, immune to retort.

Weeks of class spent immersed in full books, essays and discussions were for the privileged, he continued. We were here to teach skills. And if we didn’t like that, “a private school might be a better fit.”

The insinuation sent a collective chill through the room. We cast shameful glances at our torn papers, embarrassed by the blindness to our own privilege.

Those “missing skills,” laid out in the newly articulated state standards, were discernable, teachable, trackable, and testable. And we learned that just as a student could master multiplication and division, a student could also master the nuance of finding relevant details and applying them to determine a text’s main idea.

Once we helped our students master these skills, the possibilities for them were endless. This was the road map and the core mission, and it was accepted with a kind of religious zealotry. Our young trainer had done his job.

Over the next few weeks of summer school at my training site, the nine teenagers that had been placed under my care were subject to a clinical and regimented series of pre-tests, worksheets, quizzes, and reteaches. Wall charts were assembled and visions of smiley face stickers representing mastered reading skills-to-come crowded my mind as I wrote up lesson plans in my dorm room late into the night.

The pre-test revealed many opportunities for things to “master.”

23% on figurative language? A full-day lesson on similes should fix that.

“Say it with me again… ‘Like or as!’ — we’re getting there.”

“Main idea” only at 43%? No problem—fifteen more practice passages should do it.

Predictably, the summer I spent writing exhaustive explanations of what a “supporting detail” is and authoring inane quiz questions comparing the Arctic Circle to the school’s air conditioning unit (using “like” or “as,” of course) led nowhere. The class managed to regress on their post-test. Only 1 student met their goal.

On the long drive back to my regional site, I contemplated how my 9th grade year had been spent immersed in literature, writing complex essays, and exploring the worlds laid out by Steinbeck, Lee, Angelou and other influential thinkers. In contrast, the kids in my class hadn’t read a single thing...unless you counted the childish passages I was printing and assembling into packets in the library in the early hours of the morning.

Blessedly, great books and great mentors eventually guided me down a different path, but it was a long time before I was ready to hear it — and countless administrators and district leaders continued pushing the mastery gospel. As time went on, a simple truth became clear–the foundations of so many of our nation’s classrooms are built on an illusion.

In a secondary literacy classroom, the truth is this: mastery doesn’t matter. In fact, in many instances, it’s not even possible.

The Myth of Mastery

Consider the 6th grade Common Core Reading: Informational Text Standard 4 – “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings.”

As an adult reader who likely has a college degree, your schema, fluency and experience shouldn’t make this a challenging task for virtually any middle school text.

But take the following sentence from this week’s “Times of India,” covering a cricket match:

Hope achieved his first Test hundred in eight years with a boundary off Mohammed Siraj but was soon dismissed when he dragged the ball onto his stumps.

If you are an American, the odds of complete befuddlement are high. You probably guessed at the meaning of “Test,” but the concept doesn’t translate to any sports that you are likely to be more familiar with, so your context is useless — you’d be guessing at best.

Does that mean you haven’t mastered a 6th grade skill? Of course not. But the only way you could accurately work through the sentence is with more background knowledge.

While the example is niche, the concept applies much more broadly. Even the most sophisticated adult reader of literature would fumble around with this month’s edition of JAMA, just as 6th graders with significantly below grade level reading skills can usually make easy meaning of The Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Drilling, not Reading

So what’s the point? Nationwide, reading results are in the gutter. Most of our middle grade classrooms are spending the vast majority of their precious time with students on mindless activities that not only waste time, but also make school bleak and boring to endure. All of this erodes the student self-concept as a reader, with disastrous results for student learning and positive associations with reading.

As an example, take a look at this snippet from a workbook put out by Scholastic and linked to by a New Jersey School District as a “core resource.”

Anyone who has spent time in middle-grade classrooms in the last 20 years will recognize these types of activities in a heartbeat. They dominate “lesson starters” and “reteach stations,” while edtech platforms gamify them so students can keep “practicing” at home.

By contrast, consider this sample from the Caldecott-winning book, “Eye to Eye: How Animals See the World.”

Both samples fall in a Lexile range appropriate for upper elementary students (despite the extremely questionable marketing of the Scholastic book as “appropriate for grades 4-8.”)

In the world of text complexity, the Scholastic passage has its virtues. But despite whatever curiosities might be aroused in a student about planetoids, orbital patterns, telescope technologies or the scientific implications of “ancient ice,” students never get to visit the concepts again. There are 35 passages in the workbook, all on different topics, and none of which allow for instruction, building, or depth. It’s a veritable TikTok of reading instruction.

The second sample comes from a book on exactly one topic – eyes. The illustrations are precise, beautiful and enhance comprehension. There’s blank space for margin notes, observations, arrows and lists. Concepts like photoreceptors and retinas are not only complex and interesting, but they’re also explored in significant depth across the text. For example, the topic of how light is detected and processed by eyes to create images in the brain (or not, depending on the type of eye!) comes up 13 times over the course of the book. This gives students ample opportunities to utilize domain-specific vocabulary in context.

Can you imagine how much richer the inferences of a student writing about the differences between the image-forming pinhole eye of a clam and the light-detecting eyespot of a sea star become when they are operating with days of immersion and context-building? It’s vast.

Breaking the Spell

With more complexity and context comes higher-quality writing, which leads to more pride, engagement and joy in school. Teachers often feel the biggest boost.

Most of what I’ll write about in the future is what I (and what my most admired writers and thinkers) believe that teachers should do instead. But our collective desire for a “silver bullet” has led to an interpretation of how to get kids to the endpoint that is not only lazy, but tremendously damaging.

Just as early-elementary teachers are reckoning with the damage wrought by the dogma of ‘balanced literacy,’ our middle-grade classrooms must now confront—and urgently correct—the harm caused by our mastery-first obsession, especially for our most vulnerable students.

You might even say it’s a matter of equity.

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

There is a sense of panic in the air as educators and leaders have had some time to reflect on on this year’s dreadful NAEP scores, seemingly in free-fall since the pandemic. The 74 called the results “cataclysmic” and signaled that we had a “lost generation” of students.

The trend looks even worse when you consider the accomplishments of the early 2010s. noted this for the Fordham Institute back in September:

But here’s an alarming fact that you probably haven’t seen before: The cohort of students who scored at record-low levels in 12th grade reading were part of the same generation of kids who scored at record-high levels in fourth grade.

Woah.

Then this week, The New York Times reported that even Harvard professors are struggling to get students to do their reading or show up for class, a trend almost certainly occurring nationwide.

The kids aren’t just skipping class; they’re opting out.

Yes, there are implications for our workforce, our national competitiveness, and our societal identity. But as a teacher who saw these kids through the most tumultuous years of the 21st century, it’s impossible not to experience a deep sense of mourning over the loss of human potential.

If you simply see the pandemic as the sole cause, then you see only a blip that doesn’t need addressing. But if you squint a little, you can see a longer thread pulling taut: years of schooling stretching into the post-pandemic era that asked students to participate in learning without ever requiring them to care about it.

The kids are flailing, and we’re to blame. So what’s the way out?

The “Reading Skills” Fallacy

Few people write more consistently or clearly than on how we have arrived here. Wexler, who authored “The Knowledge Gap” and “The Writing Revolution,” wrote this piece last week on her excellent Substack, . Here, she makes the point that in the decades-long shift to teaching reading as a checklist of transferrable “skills”—finding the main idea, making inferences, identifying tone—we’ve drained texts of meaning and deprived students of the opportunity to connect with them.

It’s the academic equivalent of a workout plan made entirely of finger stretches. Useless…and mind-numbingly boring.

Wexler has always argued that comprehension doesn’t exist in the abstract — it grows out of knowledge, vocabulary, and context. But we’ve built a system that sometimes feels allergic to those things. Instead of supporting students through nuanced arguments made over the course of a complex narrative, we offer “skills practice” on passages short enough to fit on a PowerPoint slide.

If you wonder why college freshmen don’t have the stamina or desire to read and reflect on an academic paper between classes, start there.

The Vanishing Weight of Rigor

I’ve long been obsessed with this 2018 keynote by Timothy Shanahan (the whole talk is worth your time, but the stuff from minutes 12:00-26:30 hits hardest for me)

I’ll come back to this clip, as well as Shanahan’s newest book, many times, but his core point—that reading practice without the “weight” of sustained attention to complex, grade-level appropriate text ends up being hollow and, often, a waste of precious classroom time—has guided me through hundreds of lesson-planning decisions in my own classroom.

In the talk, Shanahan cites an ACT study from the early days of No Child Left Behind that centers on this chart, demonstrating how students across a range of “reading abilities” perform on simple or “more challenging” text in a predictable pattern, but fall off dramatically when attempting to answer questions about complex text.

As ACT puts it in the study, “Performance on complex texts is the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are more likely to be ready for college and those who are less likely to be ready.” Unfortunately, in our modern environment, students performing well above “benchmark” struggle when it comes to this most important skill.

Students need to strain under the weight of complexity or the “muscle” of comprehension never fully develops.

The Lost Art of Attention

I will confess that despite being a acolyte, I’m still working my way through their newest project, “The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading.” But even in the first chapters, I’ve already been jarred by the urgency around their findings on the newest battleground around reading—attention itself.

The chapter that caught my eye, “Attending To Attention” is full of anecdotes and data that capture the seismic shift in student attention spans and reading patterns that are symptoms of our modern societal shifts.

In the face of the crisis, however, the authors posit that teachers actually get to shape a huge amount of the day-to-day experience, and as a result, have a major impact on (and responsibility for) shaping the habits that ultimately shape the brain chemistry of our students.

Because our brains wire how we fire, how we read consistently affects our neurological capacity for future reading. This means we can shape students’ reading experiences in classrooms, taking advantage of the social nature of reading, to develop our students into more attentive and deeper readers—and ones who enjoy it more. .

The problem today? Many teachers seem to simply believe that their students “can’t” or “won’t” so they don’t even try. Consider this anecdote:

…in an Atlantic piece on “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” a first-year student at Columbia University told her required great-books course professor that his assignments of novels to be read over the course of a week or two were challenging because “at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

To solve this, the idea is simple: attention isn’t a finite resource but a trainable one. Classrooms, they argue, shape what students focus on and for how long. When tasks are scattershot and expectations for focus are low, we wire students to drift; when we structure lessons around deliberate attention, we wire them to think.

Attention must be taught — not expected as an act of willpower, but cultivated as a habit of mind. Without it, even the best curriculum dissolves into noise and students fail to train for the challenges and opportunities of the real world.

The Opportunity

Even as the world changes around us, the classroom conditions that drive trajectory-altering student growth have remained largely the same.

• Read rich, full and complex texts

• Fill knowledge gaps and supporting student comprehension

• Craft unbroken chains of “flow state” time for students to be engaged with worthy tasks and text

Those ideas aren’t revolutionary. They’re just hard. They require teachers to believe that kids can handle difficulty, and leaders to believe that the training, curriculum and policy shifts are worth the time.

And those freshmen whose attention spans and achievement levels collapsed on our watch? They’re going to be furious with us, and rightfully so. We can’t let it happen again.

Let’s start believing in our kids. It’s time to expect more.