Doug Lemov on the Power of Whole Books | Literacy and the Science of Learning

“The book is in a death struggle with electronic and social media. And right now, it’s losing.”

Host Doug Lemov makes a spirited case for reading whole books in the classroom—especially since today’s students read almost no books outside of school. He’s joined by guests Stephen Sawchuk of Education Week and cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham and speaks with two Texas educators using whole books in their school.

“Learning to be able to struggle—to read a challenging text, and to persist with it—is one of the greatest gifts an education can give students,” Lemov says.

Sawchuk discusses the trade-offs of a common shift to reading shorter-form excerpts and articles instead of books, which builds attention and stamina because teachers can grow the length of reading assignments over time.

“In this drive to respond to the formats that we think kids are most engaged by, we end up further weakening the kinds of text and language structures that kids are exposed to,” Sawchuk says.

Willingham explains that books relay stories, which are “psychologically privileged”—our minds more readily understand and remember information contained in stories compared to other kinds of texts. Books also call on readers to actively engage and persist to make meaning. “In this novel, you can't flick your thumb and make something else happen. You kind of need to sit with it and see what you can make of it.”

Books also model long-form reflective thinking—which stands in stark contrast to modern social-media posts, where a few words or brief video provide a snapshot of right-now considerations, Lemov notes.

“Books are the medium in which people have been doing their best long form thinking for hundreds of years. They are the storehouses of almost every idea that is important to us. Whether it is the seeds of democracy or the foundations of science, chances are it has been communicated and passed down in the form of a book,” he says.

A visit to teacher Lori Hughes’ classroom in Amarillo, Texas, shows the benefits of reading books in class together. The way students read orally becomes the way they read silently, and the community activity builds engagement and enthusiasm. Principal Genie Baca notes, “The word I would use more than anything is investment. Whether you're a low reader or a very fluent reader, these kids get so invested in the book and the characters like we've never seen before.”

That’s no surprise–as Lemov says, “When what you read is meaningful, you are more likely to read again. But if what you read is an exercise in main-idea-ing, you are likely to choose your phone.”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Transcript

Doug Lemov

Once students have learned how to read, it’s important that they read a lot. But what they read also matters greatly. And books are perhaps the optimal medium for students to learn from. There’s research behind that idea. But the problem is, to put it bluntly, is that the book is in a death struggle with electronic and social media. And right now it’s losing. 

Welcome the Knowledge Matter Podcast, season three: Literacy and the Science of Learning. I’m Doug Lemov, co-author of the forthcoming book, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. In Episode 4, I’m going to tell you why books—whole books are the most powerful tool we have to help kids learn—and why we need to fight for them to stay in the classroom.

So, what do I mean when I say the book is in a death struggle? And how do we know this? 

Lori Hughes 

I do feel it has changed cus I know when I was in middle school, and we spent time reading novels. And I have a son in seventh grade now, and I'll ask him, you know, what are you reading? And it's usually never a book. He's just like, “Oh, we just work on things,” or they might read a passage. And so that’s what you mostly see now is just like more short texts that they work on, rather than novels. 

And we—I mean, you know, up until sixth grade, we'd read together every night until he decided he was too cool. But [laughs] I just think he doesn't seem as interested all the time because there's not something to look forward to in class. It's just: oh, another day, another activity. Rather than, you know, a focus on the same novel and you're learning from that. So I think—you just don't see as much excitement.

Doug Lemov

That’s Lori Hughes, a 5th grade teacher and mom in Amarillo, Texas. You’ll hear a lot more from Lori later in this episode. Her story about her son is a perfect example of what’s going on with reading right now.  

According to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of 13-year-olds who say they never or hardly read for fun has increased dramatically in the last 20 years. And the number who say they do, has decreased. You can probably guess how they’re spending their time instead. The average American teenager spends about 5 hours a day on his or her phone and less than ten minutes reading.

Those statistics describe out-of-school time reading. Even more concerning is that the news isn’t much better inside schools. There’s less and less reading in classrooms in part because schools often don’t understand the science behind it. As I talked about in episode three, there’s not enough time spent on fluency. And 45 minutes spent discussing “what we’re doing when we find the main idea” is 45 minutes spent not doing much actual reading.  

The reading that does happen in schools increasingly consists of excerpts and short passages that look a lot like what you’d see on a state test. Some reading is even being replaced by more allegedly engaging forms of media, like videos. I’ve seen this in many of the schools I’ve visited.

Perhaps you read that article in the Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” It’s about a Columbia University professor whose student sought him out after class. The student was concerned about all the books he had assigned. In high school, she’d only been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles. Not a single book cover to cover. She was alarmed now to find herself asked to read several in the course of a single semester.   

But this student—whose comments raised a lot of hackles on social media—may not be such an outlier. EdWeek Research Center surveyed third through eighth grade teachers and found that just 17 percent of them primarily teach whole books. Far more alarming, about a quarter of the teachers said that books were not an important part of their curriculum. Stephen Sawchuk, Editor of EdWeek, explains.

Stephen Sawchuk 

If teachers are in fact systematically assigning fewer whole texts, right, or shorter or snippets or whatever, I understand why. You know, because it's such a challenge to get kids to do the reading. There's like a part of me that would completely understand that response because you want kids to read something.

What I fear is that it could ultimately be unproductive and potentially compounding what's happening outside the classroom, right. Where in this drive to respond to the formats that we think kids are most engaged by, we end up, you know, sort of further weakening the kinds of text and language structures that kids are exposed to.

Doug Lemov

Last episode, I discussed the importance of building up students’ attention span. Whole books are a fantastic way to do this.  

Stephen Sawchuck

I mean, it used to be when—[sighs] when we had—were assigned a book, right—the teacher would say, “Tonight you have to read chapters two, three, and four,” or “pages 68 to 114.” You know, and you'd groan and you moan and you do it over the weekend. But anyway, the bottom line is, it's like, a book is a really good way to build stamina in a kid because you start with 10 pages. Middle of the year you go to 20, 30. End of year 40, 50.  So if you're looking for just a mechanism to increase the amount of volume a kid is expected to read, a book is not a bad option. You cannot do this with excerpted text. 

That's a really basic and fairly obvious, like, observation I'm making. But an excerpt of something is a really different thing from the whole work, where in an entire work of fiction, there's allusions and elusive language that change over the course of whatever many pages you have. You see character development and theme. I think you're exposed to, like what we might call different narrative structures in a different kind of way, right, because those are usually developed over the course of an entire work rather than, like, in this one single chapter or whatever it is you might be reading. I think it—I think the argument can be made that it is a richer reading experience ultimately. 

Doug Lemov

Cognitive science research shows that we’re more likely to remember the things we read in books, because stories are what is known as psychologically or cognitively privileged. We have evolved to pay special attention to what we hear in stories. I spoke with University of Virginia psychologist Dan Willingham about this.

Daniel Willingham

Stories are psychologically privileged in that, the way these experiments are usually done, you take some core information that you want students to understand, and you either put it in a narrative format, a story format, or you put it into an expository sort of essay format. And then you can test immediate understanding of the ideas. You can bring students back the next day or a week later or something to check their memory for it. And so the psychological privilege is that content's easier to understand if you perceive it in the story format, and it's going to be better remembered as well. 

There are almost certainly several reasons that this is true. The two most important, I think, are first: students come to school knowing how narratives work. They understand what, what a story is and what the elements of a story are. And that helps you because it gives you a sort of framework in which to put the information as it's coming in. There's usually a protagonist, they have a goal, they're being foiled in reaching that goal. So that doesn't need to be completely conscious—and probably wouldn't be in a young child—but nevertheless, they sort of intuitively have that idea.

The second reason is that stories are very big on causation, and people are very big on causation. The way humans work, we see the world as filled with agents, things and people who are trying to do things. And you can sort of see what the evolutionary purpose of this is, as a social animal, but also just as someone living in the world. It's to your advantage if you're constantly thinking: Everything around me, you know, might do something and has goals in trying to do that. And so if I can anticipate what this agent out there might do and what it wants and how it might try to achieve that, that's to my advantage. Stories are built on causation. Much of the logic is causal logic in a story. So that's another reason that we sort of get stories very readily.

Doug Lemov

So when information comes to us in the form of a story we remember it better. We recall more details. The information feels important and meaningful. You can probably remember important moments even from books you read years ago, possibly decades. But very few people remember much from a passage they’ve read. Particularly when it’s about a topic to which they feel little connection. When what you read is meaningful, you are more likely to read again. But if what you read is an exercise in main-idea-ing, you are likely to choose your phone.

So, the format information is packaged in matters. Deeply. In fact you might be familiar with the mid 20th century media theorist Marshall Mcluhan’s phrase: the medium is the message. The way we get information shapes its meaning.

Consider social media, which communicates ideas via short, decisive and often simplistic “takes” offered in the immediate wake of some event, or some other post. This communicates to young people that the world is easily understood in increments of 280 characters and your initial take—your hunch—is almost assuredly correct and requires no further reflection.

On the other hand, with a book, meaning doesn’t come quickly or easily. The protagonist reflects deeply over a sustained period of time in order to understand something complex about the world or themselves. A protagonist rarely believes at the end of the book what they believe at the beginning. Characters—and readers—learn from experiences, reflection and consideration. 

The more we can model long form reflective thinking that shows  that the world is rarely a simplistic place, the better. And reading books teaches persistence, and the ability to delay judgment.  

While Dan Willingham did say he thinks short pieces have their place, with books students get to really live with the characters and their thoughts. It takes longer, and that’s a good thing. 

Daniel Willingham

One of the things that you do get from novels is initially thinking you don't really think much of this novel and then spending sufficient time with it so that you realize: Okay, I'm actually, I'm coming to some deeper appreciation of this and I see why my teacher wanted me to read it. I see why people see this novel as culturally important and so on.

I do think that's potentially a very important conclusion for students to draw. Especially, you know, much broader implications in my mind to that when, yeah, you know what? In this novel, you can't flick your thumb and make something else happen. You kind of need to sit with it and see what you can make of it. And, you know, there's a risk you never will. It never really will resonate with you. But you'll never know if you don't stick with it for a while and see.

Doug Lemov

Books are the medium in which people have been doing their best long form thinking for hundreds of years. They are the storehouses of almost every idea that is important to us. Whether it is the seeds of democracy or the foundations of science, chances are it has been communicated and passed down in the form of a book. 

The works of Shakespeare, Darwin and the US Constitution are good examples. They are hard to read. But imagine a future where young people never struggle with difficult long form text. Where they are never expected to persist. In that case, only specialists will have actually read, say, the founding documents of our government. From the point of view of a thriving democracy that seems like a bad thing.

Students should learn that understanding does not come easily. Learning to be able to struggle—to read a challenging text, and to persist with it—is one of the greatest gifts an education can give students.

Dan Willingham says he’s hoping for more conversation in the educational world about how to encourage students to read harder texts. To appeal to what students are interested in is great, but that isn’t all they need. 

Daniel Willingham

I love the idea of students having an opportunity to pursue passions within the school day. It's not easy for the educators to do that, to try and accommodate that, but I love the idea.

On the other hand, almost nobody is going to think that's sufficient. There are things that we want students to know that we think: This is important, and we would be doing you a disservice if we didn't, you know, ensure some sort of competence in this content that students are just not very interested in. And reading longer pieces of prose seems to be one of those things right now that a lot of students are not interested in. And it feels to me like there's less conversation than I would hope about what to do about that.

Doug Lemov

If a key goal of reading is to think deeply about ideas and understand them from multiple perspectives, the perspective of how people thought about things in the past is one of the most important and undervalued forms of diversity we can expose young people to.

Young people can access how people conceived of life in the past through books. How people in different places and times understood their society as increasingly fractured. That they went to war out of a sense of duty. That they stereotyped and often discriminated. That they experienced the loss of loved ones with shocking regularity and went stoically on with their lives.

The beliefs and values of the past are more than just quaint relics and deserve inquiry, regardless of whether we agree with them. Those too are messages that books bring our young people. Books remind them that the present does not have a monopoly on wisdom. 
Still, if you’re a teacher you may be thinking, reading a whole book takes up a lot of time. And texts from the past are often a real challenge for students to understand. But that is okay. 

Over generations, important ideas that are widely familiar have been passed down. Another name for this idea is “cultural capital.” This means, if you’ve read things that have been important to society, it gives you access to conversations. And if you haven’t, you miss out. 

Consider the case of Cedric Jennings, the protagonist of Ron Suskind’s nonfiction book, A Hope in the Unseen. Cedric, having grown up in poverty, arrives at Brown University. When he hears his classmates making references to Monet, Marx and Dickens, he knows he should know who those people are, but he doesn’t. 

As a result, Cedric doesn’t get their references and even their jokes—and perhaps fails to develop relationships and seize opportunities that access to the touchpoints of culture would give him. His classmates—observing his blank stare at a reference to 1984, or The Great Gatsby—fail to recognize his intelligence. Cultural capital is a key source of equity for students. 

Reading together and creating a shared meaningful connection is perhaps the book’s best hope in its death struggle against the smartphone. On top of supporting long-term thinking and cultural capital, cognitive science research shows reading books build empathy and connection among readers. It builds community.

Annie Murphy Paul writes that the brain doesn’t distinguish much between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life. The two are surprisingly similar, neurologically speaking. When the book is read aloud, students connect meaningfully to it and to each other. This doesn’t happen through reading passages. 

Listen, for example, to students reading aloud in Lori Hughes’ fifth grade classroom at Eastridge Elementary in Amarillo, Texas. 

Lori Hughes (classroom video)

Open up to page 81…

Doug Lemov

The audio is a little hard to hear, but Lori’s class is reading using the FASE technique I talked about last episode—Fluent, Accountable, Social, Expressive.  

Lori Hughes (classroom video)

…Alright we’re going to read the story of the paper of happiness. Do you want to start?

Student 1 (classroom video)

Sure. Once a long long time ago, the family grew things for their happiness. it seemed odd this would happen…

Doug Lemov

Lori said she’s seen enormous benefit reading out loud together for her students. Each class feels like a community, and her students look forward to what book is coming next.

Lori Hughes (classroom video)

…Alright we are going to continue on. Will you pick up please?

Student 2 (classroom video) 

Even the dogs do not bark but wait patiently to be fed. The family circle is one complete harmony. “That’s impossible!” the magistrate said. Astonished! But as he thought about it, the more he began to wonder, what was the secret the family had?...

Lori Hughes

Reading the novels, they really engage more in the reading. They're more excited about it. They all want to read more. And then it's really exciting to hear them when they're all at the same time [gasps]. And they have reactions altogether as they're reading. So you can see more of their interest and their joy for reading. It’s kind of built a little community in each classroom where they can discuss the books and learn from one another. So it’s been a good opportunity for all of them. 

Doug Lemov

It’s important to note too, that Lori’s students are reading in hard copy. When they read out loud, everyone is following along. They make notes and annotate in the book, which means their attention is focused. This is not a small thing. Reading out loud also allows her students to learn from each other. 

Lori Hughes 

A lot of times too I might start with the ones who I know are more expressive so that they kind of lead that and then the kids hear it. And that way when it's their turn they'll do the same. And then you might get some laughs because sometimes kids want to change voices and things. [laughs] And so, as the other kids have their turn, they try the same thing. And so you just see more of—more and more of the students reading expressively. 

A lot of them, in the beginning of the year, it was just about reading fast. And we'd have to stop —don't read through the punctuation, think about the character, you need to sound like the character, what are they feeling? And so we've done a lot of that practice throughout the year that now they're all able to just kind of pick that up on their own. And you even notice that if they miss something, like they read a little bit and they realize, Oh, that wasn't quite the right tone, or—they'll go back and correct themselves. 

Doug Lemov

Students who read expressively aren’t just learning to read with fluency and meaning. They are sending social signals—telling other students through their actions that they value reading. Being into the book is a sort of social contagion in Lori’s classroom. Students experience a sense of connection, sharing the psychological experience of the book.

Lori’s Principal, Genie Baca, said she’s seen this connection first hand. While on morning duty, Genie overheard 5th graders talking about the book they’re reading in Lori’s class, When the Mountain Meets the Moon. The kids were disappointed they only had two lessons left on the book.

Genie Baca 

So they're sad about that. They're very sad that the book is fixing to end. And so I get to hear every morning where they are in the book and what they're enjoying in their connection. And I think the biggest thing, the word I would use more than anything is investment. Whether you're a low reader or a very fluent reader, these kids get so invested in the book and the characters like we've never seen before. 

So that's what I like as a principal, walking into classrooms and seeing kids just so into the book and wanting to know what happens next. And it's—as a principal, I see that kids don't get off tasks because they're more worried about hearing what's gonna happen next in the next page or the next paragraph or the next chapter. And so, what it's done for classroom management for some of our kids who normally would be off task because it's hard for them, it has kept them engaged because of that anticipation of what's coming up.

Doug Lemov

Research suggests that the way students read orally becomes the way they read silently. And by reading novels and whole books the students have built a relationship with the characters over time. They become connected to the narrative voice and—with the context—understand more deeply. After 80 pages, they care. Here’s Lori again.

Lori Hughes 

I noticed that a lot of the students, you know, they connect to the characters.They—as the story continues on, they're following them and see their changes. They really have these connections. 

And just the other day I noticed um some of the girls were talking in class and I'm not  even sure who they were talking about, but they said, “Well, she's like Magistrate Tiger.” And so they're using a character to describe somebody's personality. And I thought, well how great? I mean, I don't know who they're talking about. I hope it's not me, but I thought how great that they're using a character in the book to do that. [laughs]

Genie Baca 

That could have been me, Lori. [laughs] And so, they see this character from the beginning and how the character changes or grows or develops all the way to the end. And so just getting to see that process novel after novel after novel is what—as a parent, my daughter's in Mrs. Hughes' room. I'm not only the principal, she has one of my babies in her room. And she just absolutely loves every book that is put in front of her.

Doug Lemov

Another general principle of cognitive psychology is that the more you know about a topic, the more you learn from reading about it. Students have more context for what the writer is talking about and this too helps them learn and remember more, whether those things are factual or emotional. 

Listen to how much students have to say—and how eager they are to say it—when Lori pauses her readers and asks them to discuss.

Lori Hughes (classroom video)

... Turn and talk to your partner. Why might the magistrate be so envious of this family? And jot it in the box. Go. [Students talking] 

Doug Lemov

Did you hear the reaction? On cue, the room gets loud. Students can’t wait to talk about the book. It’s come to life for them and  they feel emotionally connected to it.

Lori Hughes

On any given day, that’s the level of excitement you get when it's time for them to talk about the reading. They're always—rarely do you come across them being off topic. It's usually they are really engaged in um the reading and responding to the questions and sharing their ideas. And even the—the vocabulary that they use within their own conversations between each other is just, it's amazing to hear and to see every day.

Doug Lemov

It’s worth noting that Eastridge is not an easy place to teach reading. Principal Genie Baca says it’s a complex campus, where 39 languages are spoken. Many students are refugees from countries all over the world. And about 98 percent of its students receive free and reduced priced lunch. But with reading whole novels in fourth and fifth grade classes, fluency scores have improved dramatically. And so have behavioral issues. 

Genie says it makes her principal heart happy to see how excited kids are to be engaged in reading. But she wishes more grades in her district were reading out loud more. 

Genie Baca 

I think that's the key, if principals and teachers could just see kids loving to read. Like, so engaged and loving it and no classroom discipline problems. I think it would sell itself. If there were more teachers and more administrators could see what it looked like for reals, like a novel come to life.

Doug Lemov

Books help students care about what they are reading. They help them to focus. And when we teached shared books, we make teaching better. Because the value of many ideas we seek to teach corresponds to how many people can discuss them. 

“Network effects” is the term used to describe this phenomenon. The benefit of a product or technology corresponds to how many people use it. A fax machine is only useful when everyone else has a fax machine. The value is in the network.

Knowledge, too, has network effects. The book 1984 is a decent example. It is one of the few books with broad, if shallow, network effects. Most teachers presume that their students know a bit about the idea of Big Brother. But think of how much more powerful discussions about society would be if the network effects were deeper. If we—as teachers, parents, and colleagues—could talk about Newspeak and the way constraining language is a means of censorship across a broader network of people. It would enhance the conversation. 

Or, if students’ understanding about totalitarianism was not from one book but from a dozen. Instead of only having read 1984, they had also read The Hunger Games, The Giver, and Brave New World. Now, we can compare depictions of totalitarianism or the coercion of the individual across books. As an educator, if students have read the same books, you can know every student will be able to join you in that comparison. 

The point is that when we have read stories in common, we also have the power to refer to complex ideas that we share. We create the possibility of allusion, comparison, and conversation. The more we have read in common, the more we can do with it, connect it, make meaning out of it. That’s the power of the book. 

In the next episode, Natalie Wexler is going to apply the science behind literacy and learning to reading’s challenging but important counterpart: writing. 

The Knowledge Matters Podcast is co-hosted by me, Doug Lemov, along with Natalie Wexler and Dylan Wiliam. To learn more about my work and pre-order The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, visit: teachlikeachampion.org

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Learn more about this episode and their work at knowledgematterscampaign.org. There, you can find curriculum resources, blogs, and sign up for their periodic newsletter. 

To catch all of the Knowledge Matters Podcast, Season 3: Literacy and the Science of Learning, make sure you subscribe to the Knowledge Matters Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.