The Reading Stamina Battle: Ideas for Secondary Teachers

“The End of Reading.” “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read.”

Reading has been a hot topic in the media lately, and with good cause. Literacy scores are declining, and leisure reading is less popular for adults as well as students (despite BookTok’s best efforts).

As English teachers, we don’t find these headlines particularly surprising. We’ve watched our students’ reading stamina decline in real time, and just this morning, we watched a debate play out on Teacher Facebook about how many pages AP Literature students (theoretically those with the most reading stamina) can realistically be expected to read in a week (spoiler: general consensus says “not a lot”). Short story roundups are some of our most visited pages, found through search terms like “one page short stories for high school,” “short short stories for high school” or “very short stories for high school.”

What’s Causing This Decline in Reading Stamina?

Naturally, when it comes to this decline in reading stamina, the first cause that springs to most minds is the prevalence of smartphones and social media. If you’ve ever tried to compete with 40 devices designed to attract and keep your students’ attention, you know this is a valid conclusion.

Jonathan Haidt presents a compelling case in The Anxious Generation that smartphones and social media do, in fact, bear a lot of the blame for the decline in reading stamina. 

In the Plain English episode “The End of Reading,” Derek Thompson suggests other factors as well:

• Educational initiatives like No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act that prioritized nonfiction and short excerpts over full-length novels
• Cultural shifts toward oral storytelling
• College admissions pressure to build resumes with extracurriculars and internships
• Increased options for entertainment when we do have leisure time

We don’t disagree with any of these suggestions, but we (along with many other teachers) do have some points of disagreement with Thompson (and others).

In Defense of Teachers Everywhere

In the episode, Thompson interviews Rose Horowitch, who published “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read” in The Atlantic in November 2024. Teacher Facebook was not thrilled with Horowitch’s article when it first came out, and Thompson’s conversation with Horowitch reveals a huge misunderstanding of how the education world works.

When the general public discusses education, teachers become the sole representatives and agents of everything that happens in a classroom. The implication in both pieces is that high school teachers no longer value a book-centered curriculum, that we have actively and happily made the decision to replace full-length texts with nonfiction articles and excerpts.

We know, as you do, that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. 

We don’t know a single English teacher who thinks, “You know what? I don’t think we need to read full books in class. I’d prefer to teach excerpts and articles.” Most teachers we know long to incorporate more full-length novels in their curriculum.

Those of us (ourselves included) who reduce the number of full-length novels we teach in a year are reacting to numerous pressures: 

• Administrator and district directives to focus on close reading short excerpts and assign less homework
• Students who won’t read on their own, forcing teachers to do all reading in class if we’re going to get students to productively engage in writing or discussion related to the text
• Pressure from districts and administrators to give good grades regardless of students’ proficiency in grade-level content standards
• Constant challenges from parents and communities about the appropriateness of both traditional classics and contemporary high-interest texts
• Students who need repeated practice with a wide array of content standards (including those from previous grade levels)

While we can’t speak for everyone, most teachers who have cut back the number of novels they read in a year are just attempting to stay afloat in a world that threatens to drown us, and individual classroom teachers don’t deserve the blame they’re being assigned for this trend.

Is the Shift Away from Full-Length Novels All Bad?

As teachers who have been in the classroom during this shift away from an entirely novel-based curriculum, we have to say that it does have its benefits.

Incorporating more nonfiction is good for students, as is the time spent close reading short excerpts.

Our world is changing—we need time to teach media literacy, and short-form content is a reality. 

Not all students will go on to be English majors: many of them will benefit from learning to read the content they encounter online thoughtfully and write a clear email more than they will from being dragged through multiple lengthy texts.

Our students do need to be prepared for tests like the SAT, ACT, and AP exams that require them to read and respond to short passages.

And, as Thompson acknowledges, there is value in thematic or essential question units: he describes a teacher who incorporates excerpts from Homer’s Odyssey as part of a larger unit on leadership that also includes music, articles, and TED Talks. Leadership (and many of the other ideas we cover in these units) is an important concept for students to think about and discuss, and students do enjoy the incorporation of music and videos.

Why We Still Need to Build Our Students’ Reading Stamina

But reading does offer important benefits, and our students need to exercise their muscles. They need to develop a longer attention span, grow in their willingness to do things that are hard and, perhaps, a little bit boring. They need to engage with difficult content and think deeply about it. And they need time away from screens. 

It’s clear that developing our students’ reading stamina is a worthwhile effort.

But how do we do it? How do we help our students develop this crucial skill that many of them have no interest in developing?

6 Strategies for Building Reading Stamina

Whether it’s a full class period each week or a small amount of time each day, it’s important to carve out time for your students to read something they choose for themselves.

This is beneficial for a few reasons.

First, it allows our students to practice focusing for an extended amount of time. Thanks to social media, all of our attention spans are shorter than they used to be, and sitting in a quiet room to focus on a task for 20 minutes or longer is genuinely challenging. Our students need to practice this skill, and they’re more likely to do so when they get to choose the book.

Second, it gives students the gift of time to read. Not all of our students who don’t read are reluctant readers. Some just have so much going on that they don’t have time to read—whether it’s homework, resume-building for college applications, family obligations, or a wide selection of forms of entertainment.

When we started making independent reading a regular part of our curriculum in AP Literature, some students were thrilled, telling us how much they missed reading for fun. It was a good reminder that there is value in making space for students to do something valuable that they can’t or won’t make time for on their own.

Finally, it motivates students to read more. If students learn that reading isn’t so bad or, even better, find a book they love and can’t put down, they’re more likely to read outside of the time we’ve allotted for them in class.

Making time to “advertise” books that your students will be interested in is a great way to not only create a reading culture in your classroom but to show students that reading can be fun.

Whether you literally read a chapter aloud on Fridays or use an activity like our First Chapter Friday Nearpods, we recommend prioritizing books your students will be interested in, not books you personally like or think they “should” read. Pay attention to where their interests lie, and look for books that appeal to those interests. Need suggestions? We’ve got plenty.

Obviously, we have a lot of content to cover, and we need to help our students develop their literary analysis skills

But consider using one of your novel units just to practice reading for an extended period of time. 

Some years, especially when we and our students were feeling burned out, we used To Kill a Mockingbird: we kept the activities relatively simple (maybe a study guide or an occasional reflection activity) and focused on just getting through the book together. 

For many of our students, this was the longest book they had ever read cover to cover, and the fact that they could say that about a book made the time worthwhile, even if we didn’t dig into deep analysis.

While we chose To Kill a Mockingbird because it was our district’s required reading at the time, you may want to prioritize high-interest and discussable themes over literary merit when selecting a book for this purpose. High-interest books also tend to get more buy-in from students (key when you’re practicing a skill that will be hard for many of them).

When we read a novel as a class, our students had three options and only three options:

• They could follow along in their book.
• They could sit quietly and listen (with their head up so they didn’t fall asleep).
• They could color a page from a coloring book we had printed out for them.

It’s tempting to insist that all students follow along, but when our students are resistant to reading, this becomes an exercise in keeping up a facade for appearance’s sake. Students may or may not even be on the right page, and having a book in front of their face certainly doesn’t guarantee that they’re listening.

It can be challenging for us to sit and listen for an extended period of time without something else to do (after all, we listened to Thompson’s podcast while doing the dishes, not sitting still on the couch). When we acknowledge this, our students feel validated, knowing that we understand this is something they don’t want to do or that they find challenging. We’ve met them partway, and they’re more willing to reciprocate.

This also reminds our students that reading can be a way to relax. If students enjoy the time so much that they try an audiobook for themselves, we’ve done something worthwhile.

It’s also important to remember what the point of reading is in high school. In elementary school, students are learning how to read. Of course they need to practice doing the reading, whether that’s out loud or independently. But in high school, we’re more concerned with content and ideas, not the physical act of reading. If our students hear those ideas rather than seeing them but actually hear them and think about them, we’re in better shape than if we’re all faking it.

Pro Tip: We recommend reading yourself or playing an audiobook instead of popcorn reading. Not only does popcorn reading usually devolve into an attempt to embarrass the students who aren’t paying attention, but listening to struggling readers stumble through a text in a monotone isn’t inspiring anyone to love reading.

Most students, even high school students, actually like to be read to. Struggling readers in particular like to hear you, not the audiobook narrator, read.

When you read, it’s easier to pause once in a while either to reflect, demonstrating to struggling readers how you think about a text, or to clarify what’s happening. When there’s a joke that nobody laughs at, an allusion students don’t get, a reference to outdated technology they’re unfamiliar with, or just an insight they may not have, stopping to comment on it helps them to understand the story better.

It can be really helpful, particularly if you’re reading an older text, to put what’s happening into “teenager speak.” Steph was recently reading Pride and Prejudice with a tutoring student and pausing to do this, and at one point, the student commented, “Oh my gosh, kids at my school act just like this.” Yes. That is a win.

Pro Tip: This approach does not work well if you have a classroom full of readers. If your students can read faster on their own than you can read out loud and aren’t struggling to comprehend the story, this approach is unbelievably frustrating for them (so say speedy readers everywhere).

For the most part, if you’re devoting a unit to building reading stamina, you want to choose books that are engaging for students and that don’t require a ton of literary analysis.

It’s also tempting, when faced with a room full of reluctant readers, to swap out all of our traditional texts for high-interest YA selections.

But considering that our college-bound students will need to grapple with complex ideas in challenging texts, it’s important to make sure you do put these challenging texts in front of them once in a while. 

Of course, you’ll need to be thoughtful about where in your curriculum guide you place them (we sandwiched Pride and Prejudice and Macbeth in the middle of our AP Lit curriculum), and you’ll want to balance between excerpts, short stories, and full texts.

But if we’re going to build students’ reading stamina, we have to push both the length and the difficulty.

While, as teachers, the public discussion over declining literacy in America can be frustrating, it’s also obvious that there is a problem. Attention spans are shrinking, adults and young people are reading less, and as Thompson points out, this tends to harm struggling readers far more than it does proficient readers. As English teachers, we have to find ways to help our students build their reading stamina without losing our minds, and making time just to read is crucial in giving our students the practice they need.

Interested in hearing us discuss these ideas further? Check out our podcast episode on this topic. If you’re interested in implementing these strategies in your classroom, we have an independent reading bundle that includes a reading check-in form with options for fiction and nonfiction, an end-of-novel activity, and visually engaging posters with quotations about reading. Don’t forget about our collection of First Chapter Friday Nearpods: a free resource designed to engage your students and make your teaching life just a little bit easier!