Why Students Should Read Whole Books

Nothing instills an idea of the world as a complex place demanding deep understanding like a book does because a book is almost always an extended narration on this idea. A book always involves a change in thinking about the world. If there is a hope for our increasingly fractious society, it lies in part in students learning that lesson.

We also learn especially well from stories. Cognitive psychologists often describe them as “psychologically” or “cognitively privileged.” Researchers find that people remember ideas and insights better when they encounter them in a story. We remember the facts because they are connected to a story and the more memorable and compelling the story—the deeper our relationship to it—and the more context we have to understand it, the better. This is one unique power of books.

Stories also improve people’s capacity for empathy, their ability and desire to understand what other people think and feel, and the longer and deeper the story the greater the benefits. When you build a relationship with a narrator and care about him or her, you are primed to build memory and understanding. This is the power of historical fiction in particular. We remember the facts because we are connected to the story. If background knowledge is critical to comprehension, books are a powerful place to get it, and to get it in the sustained, connected webs of understanding (called schema) that most aid us in comprehension.

Finally, books are the format in which the important ideas of society have been transmitted for centuries. The world is full of allusions and references to ideas contained in books, so it is a gift to students whom we want to be full participants in society to let them be party to the shared knowledge they contain.

But books can be hard. They are often old, written in the parlance of a bygone era. They are often complex, occasionally even resisting the efforts of readers to make easy meaning of them.

This is beneficial. Students should learn to be comfortable struggling. The only way to sustain access to the ideas encoded in the history of books is to struggle with archaic syntax, say, and to read it two and three times until its style becomes more accessible. If students never read text that is more than, say, fifty or a one hundred years old, the writing of the past will increasingly slip further and further away from them. Do we want a society where students lack the familiarity with outdated writing and the mindset to persist at the challenges it presents? Our next and final principle of reading instruction will discuss how complex text is the gatekeeper to future success and books are the best source of many of the forms of complexity students require exposure to and experience with. Decisions in society are especially likely to be entrusted to those who can access its most complex texts. We can’t imagine it will be a good thing when only a small number of experts can read directly from Origin of Species or the Constitution of the United States.

How does this pro-book vision contrast to what English and reading classes are based on today? What are schools doing if not reading books? Why does one even need to make the case for the book?

There are several alternative models to book-based literacy instruction prevalent in K–12 classrooms today. One is what we might call “passage-based” reading instruction. In this model, which often goes hand in hand with the belief that reading is made up of transferrable skills, reading consists of a series of short passages, a different one every few days, with the passages chosen and organized based on the “skills” they enable teachers to instill. So, if we’re working on being able to explain the main idea, we’ll read an “interesting” passage about cooking empanadas and tomorrow we might read one about the American Revolution. The unifying theme is that the teacher is asking students to find the main idea in each of these passages. In some versions of this model, the class might read a novel like Lois Lowry’s The Giver, but mostly as a device to present main idea questions to students, rather than to reflect on humanity, free will, and society. The book is passage-ized. And nothing kills a book faster than making it a tool for strategies practice, and nothing is less likely to help students become effective readers.

Another alternative is the “choice-based” model. In these classrooms students do read books but each student chooses and reads their own book on the premise that students will be more motivated if they choose what they like. Beyond the fact that this presumption is questionable (a student who has read a handful of books is unlikely to choose something great, something that changes her world view, something that causes her to see the world differently, whereas an well-read adult is well positioned to do so), a key part of the experience of a book is lost when it isn’t shared. We benefit from discussions in which we hear different interpretations and reactions and come to change our point of view, and we benefit from being connected through sharing the experiences and emotions a book provides and elicits.

We want to be clear in expressing these reservations about “choice” as a tool to promote reading. We are not talking about limiting students’ choice in their independent reading. We are all for encouraging and assigning independent reading beyond what happens in class, and we’re all for students choosing what interests them. But in class, in the reading that makes up the core of our curriculum, we think the benefits, in terms of shared experience and motivation to read, are strongly on the side of shared books chosen and curated carefully by teachers.

In part this is because, in an era when social media disconnects and isolates young people, books can connect them through a shared experience of reading together, and in part because we think experiencing the best books through the eyes of a teacher who can bring them to life most likely will help students to develop as readers, most likely will expand their conception of what books can be, and most likely will motivate students to become more consistent readers.

Given that precious few kids are reading books at all—on their own and in the classrooms—it is ironic that there’s so much sturm und drang about book choice and book restriction. Even college professors report difficulty in getting students to read books when they are assigned. What if this sad state of affairs is not the cause, but the result, of how much a love of reading has been driven out of our K–12 classrooms, where we’ve failed to light students’ minds on fire and maximize their learning by giving them interesting and important books to read?

For these reasons we are “unapologetic about the book”: we believe that even—perhaps especially—in a digital age, books create a critical experience that can be created through no other means. Ensuring that students read books—excellent books, whole books, together in groups, often aloud to maximize the sense of connection they create—will maximize the chances that they become better readers, more knowledgeable students, and that they come to love and value reading.

This is an edited extract from The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading: Translating Research to Reignite Joy and Meaning in the Classroom, by Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway. It is due to be published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Brand, in July 2025.