Well, choice, empowerment, respect for kids, meeting them where they are as readers. We have to understand that learners in general, no matter their abilities often seek the same things. We want autonomy. We want empowerment. Brian Cambourne, researcher in Australia who spent his career looking at engagement theory says that learners who lose choices become disempowered.
And we need choices that are meaningful choices that are relevant to the children. So, a student who is a developing reader may be reading several years below grade level, but that doesn’t mean that their access to text, their access to conversations should be limited to low-level guided readers and talking with the teacher at the small group table. They need meaningful reasons to become literate and have those opportunities to connect with other readers in the classroom to have rich, meaningful, authentic texts to read.
Our students who are also avid readers, underground readers who may feel a disconnect between school and their real reading lives need to – we need to value that and recognize that these are students who already have many of the literacy skills we are trying to instill in all of our students and that they need an opportunity to see how far they can go to be enriched, to be stretched, and to not be held back because they’re defined in a box of what the school requirements might look like for reading.
