Many college students, even those at elite universities, struggle to keep up with college-level reading loads and to engage with challenging texts. How is this possible? It’s because they haven’t had the practice—many of them never having read a complete book in school. 

Many schools across the United States have moved away from teaching whole texts in favor of using excerpts or informational passages to promote analysis and reading comprehension. This approach imitates the format of standardized-tests that, since the No Child Left Behind Act, link test scores to school funding and even teachers’ job evaluations. Creating such high stakes for test scores has left little room for teachers to promote the love and joy of reading in the classrooms. Instead, in many schools, reading has essentially become a way to practice for standardized tests. The consequence of this fixation on testing has led to students having diminished vocabularies, less facility with the language, and a decreased capacity to engage with higher-level texts. 

Despite the national obsession with testing, not all significant skills are quantifiable. In fact, many of the benefits from reading are not easily measured. We know that reading creates empathy, a much needed capacity in today’s divisive world. We also know that reading increases a student’s ability to perform across all academic areas by creating new neural pathways and strengthening existing ones. In order to reap these social/emotional and academic benefits, however, students need to develop a love of reading that cannot be achieved with excerpts or disconnected reading passages. 

At the Upper Valley Waldorf School we are not beholden to state testing and therefore have the freedom to allow students' love of reading to develop in an organic and developmentally appropriate way. From early childhood to middle school, students are told stories and read to daily, fostering deep connections to material often above their individual reading levels. Students are also given generous amounts of class time to read books for their own pleasure, a proven method for developing passionate readers. Classrooms are stocked with books across reading levels and containing diverse characters designed to appeal to a variety of students. Our school library is a hub of activity, with students and teachers sharing recommendations and exploring new worlds. In the 7th and 8th grades, students are expected to read a novel every two weeks and share with the class via book talks. Thus in the course of a school year, each middle schooler will read between 20 and 25 books– just for school. Many of them read more. 

At UVWS we believe that enthusiastic readers become strong readers. And studies have shown that strong readers become strong students. We foster that enthusiasm by offering a plethora of enticing reading material, time to engage in deep reading, and an atmosphere steeped in language and story. We find this immersive approach to be highly successful!