ELA Programs and the Convenience Trap
What happens when we remove friction from our students' reading and writing lives?
👋 Hi, it’s Matt. Today, I explore how curriculum programs promise to make teaching easier, even if easier isn't what students are asking for. When one ELA team let student voice data challenge their assumptions, they learned kids don't want convenience; they want purpose, depth, and connection, and no program can manufacture that on its own.
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I could see the teachers’ defenses show up as we reviewed their student data. A few arms crossed as I shared a chart showing chronic absenteeism had not recovered since the pandemic. When I pulled up a graph that highlighted the difference between students with and without disabilities on their state reading assessment, one teacher started scrolling through their smartphone. I could feel the group closing themselves off from the analysis with every dataset I introduced.
I was brought in to support a secondary ELA team in selecting a literacy curriculum program. So far, they had looked at one core resource from the same publisher that the elementary school in their district went with. “It seems to make sense, right?” one educator asked. “Go with the program our younger students are using? Then they are getting the same experience.” Another educator commented that they were “loving this program” and were ready to commit to it only three weeks into their pilot.
I mentally hit pause when I heard these comments. They seemed to have a case of “solutionitis”, a term coined by Anthony Bryk and colleagues to describe “the propensity to jump quickly on a solution before fully understanding the exact problem to be solved.” Not every educator felt that way: a special education teacher, leafing through the three-pound anthology, wondered aloud how excited his students would be opening up this resource each day.
We are seeing this desire for convenience and control show up in our lives outside of school. While people are reading more words than ever before, what we are reading has become fragmented and lacks depth. Writing is being outsourced to AI in areas previously deemed essential, for example, doctors’ notes after seeing a patient. While it’s easy to blame smartphones and social media (Peter Gray makes a reasoned argument to counter the ham-fisted solutions Jonathan Haidt recommends in The Anxious Generation), I am convinced that modern technologies in general have smoothed out the wrinkles of inconvenience that make life interesting and purposeful.
In his book The Uncontrollability of the World1, Hartmut Rosa offers a model for imagining what is lost when we seek too much convenience.
Control < ----------- > Resonance
Our desire for control, whether that’s to get ahead in our notes and tasks at work or to deliver an ELA curriculum with fidelity, comes at the expense of resonance. Rosa points out that people see challenges as “points of aggression”: problems to be solved instead of challenges to experience and grow from. There’s little room for “resonance”: the ability to be influenced, changed, and even transformed by new ideas presented to us in literature and from each other.
How can students feel empowered as readers, writers, and thinkers if they have few opportunities to be challenged during their ELA experiences? This is the consequence of programming our curricula: treated as a technology to make our lives easier, we inadvertently remove the obstacles our students could find in authentic literature and complex writing tasks.
After hearing these comments from the ELA team, I asked if I could collect student voice data through empathy interviews. I wanted to help the team understand the students’ experiences during literacy instruction. Was implementing a new program with fidelity the solution to the problems students were experiencing?
Their students didn’t hold back. In my open conversations, they expressed a desire for more relevant activities. More hands-on tasks. More project-based experiences that lent themselves to authentic audiences and purposes. Not one student said they wanted an easier experience, or to reduce literature down to readable excerpts. As one student put it:
“It would be great if we knew what this could lead to in the future and understood why it’s needed exactly. Otherwise, it’s something in school that we have to do.”
The teachers read the anonymous student comments. After some honest conversations about the pilot, they agreed that, while they would still move forward with acquiring the program, they would adapt it to ensure it was meeting students’ expressed needs. One teacher summed up the team’s thinking succinctly.
“We could do better in proving to students that reading fiction, writing creatively, and analyzing style and form in language can have a huge impact on their real-life skills.”
In a world of social media influencers and talking points, that might feel like a tough sell for a teenager today. But based on what the students told us, what they desire isn’t an excerpted version of life. It’s depth, meaning, and connection with each other. The tools we choose can support that outcome or crowd it out. The choice is ours to make.
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Matt, this is a powerful and insightful article. Commercial reading programs can serve as useful frameworks, but they can never meet the full needs of our students because they don't know our students. The "convenience trap" you mention is real, especially if teachers and leaders lack the knowledge to teach readers well. That convenience trap often becomes a "coercion trap." Teachers "go along to get along." What a terrific finding from students as readers: that they like challenges and authentic experiences. I think that's true for most of us, especially if we know we have the full support and requisite strategies to be successful.
Shared on my LinkedIn account. This is important during these moments of curricular decision-making. I, unfortunately, have watched too many teachers opt for convenience that leaves kids out of the richness of truly becoming a lifelong reader.