Four Strategies for Reducing Literacy Instruction to Increase Engagement, Accelerate Learning, and Decrease Stress

(for students, teachers, and leaders)

Photo by Michael Olsen on Unsplash

A consistent message I hear from other educators is the level of stress teachers are feeling as they anticipate the new school year.

As leaders, we may see this manifest in different ways, from the subtle - for example, not responding to a request from you in a timely manner - to the apparent, such as being visibly upset over a decision or situation that may not have led to this strong of a reaction in the past.

The reasons are also varied, but they seem to boil down to three primary factors:

• We are still teaching and leading in the middle of a pandemic.

• The political climate around education has become even more confrontational, e.g. book bans¹, literacy curriculum challenges.

• Teachers are asked to do more than ever within the same amount of (or even less) time, resources, and salary.

These stressors seem to come in waves, sometimes all at once. And I have been guilty of sometimes causing these stressors. By being mindful of my actions, such as by increasing support while reducing obstacles, I hope I am at least not creating more challenges for teachers.

I also know that I can also only do so much.

One way I’ve observed teachers reduce stress, as well as increase student engagement and accelerate learning, is by reducing instruction.

Reducing Instruction: An Uncommon Approach

In 2012, Peter Johnston wrote a blog post titled “Reducing Instruction, Increasing Engagement” for the Stenhouse Blog.²

This 799 word essay is one of the best pieces of educational writing I have read. In it, Johnston summarizes a research study he co-led with Gay Ivey. They partnered with 8th grade classroom teachers around a driving question:

“What might happen with student engagement and achievement if we reduce reading instruction?”

Their hypothesis was that, if they got rid of the book reports, comprehension quizzes, and required reading, students would be more motivated to read and talk about they were reading with peers. This project also included a robust classroom library that contained edgy fiction. Worth noting: the teachers limited the number of copies of the books kids wanted to read to 1-3 for each title; they wanted to create a sense of scarcity in order to increase demand for the books.

Their hypothesis about engagement was proven correct.

“What happened? The students read like crazy (averaging forty-two books each in the first year). They pushed themselves to read complex texts. They began talking about their books—with peers (including those they would not previously have imagined talking with), with teachers, with parents and family, at home, in school, and in class. They sat up in bed and texted each other about books. Talking about books at lunch became normal, not nerdy.”

Next are some of the academic, social, and emotional outcomes:

• Trust increased.

• Behavior problems decreased.

• According to students, parents, and teachers, students became more open, less judgmental, more responsible, more empathic, more mature, more thoughtful about and in control of their own futures, and happier—yes, happier!

• The teachers were happier too.

• Students’ test scores also increased, and more of them passed the state test.

Ten years ago, this post prompted me to investigate my own school’s practices.

“So, what does this look like in my classroom/school?”

I have observed successful (and less stressed) teachers applying the following four strategies to achieve similar outcomes.

1. Replace the text with something shorter and more relevant.

I realize the demands some teachers have to teach the literacy curriculum program.

That doesn’t have to mean reading through the entire excerpt from the anthology. If the goal is to teach a specific skill or strategy, what does it matter if it’s taught with another text, especially one your students might find more relevant?

This is also an opportunity to reduce the length of time you need to teach the skill and strategy. For example:

• a picture book in place of excerpted fiction,

• a recent news article instead of informational text, or

• a poem for learning foundational reading skills in context.

I am not advocating for doing this all the time or even a lot, as I understand the expectations one may have for building consistent knowledge through the adopted literacy curriculum. But when appropriate, a shorter and more relevant text can result in less time teaching and more time for students to read independently.

2. When preparing a lesson, plan first for discussion.

After observing thousands of lessons, student discussion is one of the least used teaching strategies.

It’s too bad, because it is also one of the most effective strategies for building comphrehension, engagement, and community. John Hattie found through a meta-analysis of student discussion that it has an effect size of .82. This translates to doubling your influence on student learning (.4 is the hinge point for one year’s worth of student growth within one school year).

A way to get started is with thinking routines. These are discussion protocols that provide structure and a safe environment for learners to effectively listen, speak, and learn. Check out Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero for ideas.

3. Reframe the learning target as a guiding question.

Targets are great for straight forward actions. Teaching is rarely straight forward.

This is why I have changing my thinking around learning targets and moved toward guiding questions. When framed as inquiry, learning intentions become more invitational, challenging, and interesting.

Here’s one example:

• Original Learning Target: “I can read with purpose and understanding.”

• Updated as a Guiding Question: “How does having a purpose for my reading improve my understanding?”³

Think about how this guiding question can raise awareness about what students are reading as a group, or what they selected from the classroom library, or what they choose to read independently outside of school. They can better see how purpose drives understanding.

4. Use shared demonstration instead of lecturing.

Of course, you must teach. But you also have options in how instruction is facilitated.

Shared demonstration offers the best of both worlds: explicit instruction while engaging students in the process of teaching and learning. This works especially well with writing. Any time students have some sense of authority in how the narrative in front of them will take shape, they are more invested in making it the best version that it can be because they own it.

Just as we want them to own their reading and writing, as we strive to support them in their personal literacy endeavors.

To learn more about leading literacy, I will be publishing a four-week email course in this space, on how leaders can get into classrooms to support teaching and learning. If you aren’t signed up already, subscribe below - it’s free.

1. For an excellent commentary about book bans, check out Regie Routman’s most recent “What I’m Reading” post here. I always find at least one book from Regie’s lists to add to my own to-read list.

2. When Stenhouse updated their website, they lost a lot of their blog content. Fortunately, I had previously saved Johnston’s post for a curriculum course I was teaching. You can read the whole thing here. For a longer read, see Johnston’s and Ivey’s article that summarizes this research here (Reading Research Quarterly).

3. This example comes from my new eBook, Resist the Script: Five Critical Questions to Adapt, Adopt, or Develop a Literacy Curriculum That Works for All Readers and Writers. You can purchase it for only $0.99 through the rest of this week (Kindle).