What’s love, but a sweet old-fashioned notion? Kristen McQuillan’s Substack debut reminds us that Motivation Matters, and reading proficiency is the gateway drug to love of reading.

I love this column, and all of its broader themes.

I have just one point of exception: I don't think we can endorse Shanahan's take on books. If we honor the research about volume of reading and its importance to growing reading skills and vocabulary (which Kristen rightly surfaces), we quickly confront a practical reality: teachers can't realistically deliver a high volume of reading in a curriculum full of passages. They just can't. It's an operational hurdle: The 'switching costs' of ping-ponging between passages is too high (in teacher talk time, in cognitive load).

Heck, Wonders itself (the program Shanahan authored) illustrates the issue. Wonders Grade 6 has a total of 463 pages of content in the whole curriculum. The average passage is just 7.3 pages and the longest passage is 15 pages. How does anyone fall in love when the excerpt is truncated after 15 pages? Sixth graders should be reading longer stretches and >463 pages, and I will die on that hill.

Fine, someone can learn to read at some very basic level of proficiency via passages, if we allow basic (4th grade-ish) reading skills to be the bar. But a Wonders-size diet of passages won't nurture the advanced skills we all want for upper grade success.

Further, passage-only literacy cannot build reading stamina, and I am certain research will bear this out. Because apparently we need research to prove the obvious nowadays. (Le Sigh.) Fortunately, Congress is talking about a Do-Over for the NRP, so maybe we can get that research! More on that in my latest: karenvaites.org/p/the-s…

I have a ton of respect for Tim, and his writing is all over my own work. But I'm certain he's wrong about this, and I think it's OK to say that plainly. Important, even.

Back to Kristen’s brilliance… I was proudly one of her first subscribers, and I hope you join me. I’m sure this won’t be the last post to push the conversation.