Just Right Reading Level Books

With permission I am posting here some important comments my colleague Jill Lemon wrote in her blog the other day about the importance of book selection.

Last week I finished conducting our reading assessments and began one-on-one conferences with students, all with the intention of helping students select just-right books. In our mini lessons, we are focusing on a multitude of behaviors good readers demonstrate, helping everyone make concrete what it is that good readers do. One of the behaviors in which good readers engage is to select books that are just-right for them. Research demonstrates that students who find books to read that are not too difficult or too easy will experience greater success in reading. Most students, however--and this is an issue in schools across the country!--are reading books that are simply too difficult for them.

To help students understand the importance of finding just-right books, I make a sports analogy: if I wanted to learn to play tennis, the best place to learn as a beginner would NOT be at Wimbeldon with Rafael Nadal. Rather than learn to play, I would simply get pummeled, my skills not improving and my self-confidence pouring down the tubes. No matter how many times we played--if that was the only experience I was having--I would simply not improve. Rather, I need to play against someone who is willing to play just above my level, who will help teach me how to become a better player: the challenge of Nadal is not one that will improve my ability. I need one that is just right for me. The experience of learning to reads works much the same way: we need to read books that are just a tad bit difficult in some way, along with explicit, solid instruction, to learn to become stronger readers.

Together, we identified some signs that a book is not just-right:

1. reading is not smooth (fluency)
2. reading is not expressive (fluency)
3. reading is too slow (fluency)
4. student stumbles over words--over 5 per page is too many (decoding)
5. student fails to recall or understand what s/he read (comprehension)

Students and I have been reading together as I ask them to judge--using the above criteria--whether or not the book feels too difficult. Then, most often, I am guiding students to different book choices. Needless to say, this has been difficult process for some students. Many students seem to believe that if a book they are reading is found to be too difficult, that they have failed in some way. Many have argued with me that they "always stumble over words that way--I like to be challenged." I am trying to help them see that they should NOT be stumbling over words that way, and that doing so is not helping improve their reading skills. (When they experience difficulty retelling me what they have read, they are more easily convinced, however.) These are very imbedded beliefs that we will work diligently to change.