Our White Paper: The Inside Story

When we were given a grant to examine the best practices for promoting literacy engagement we jumped at the chance to learn what we do well and what we could do better and to share that knowledge with the literacy community.  As it turns out, Behind the Book’s programs have been aligned with those best practices from the very beginning. And we confirmed a truth we have long believed: kids become engaged readers when they are offered books that are exciting to them, written by authors that look like them and when they are given agency and space to express their stories. 

We started this process by asking ourselves, “What helps get students excited about reading? What doesn’t?” We quickly realized we’d have to ask and answer a lot more questions in order to get back, nine months later, to where we started. But that’s the nature of inquiry. 

In retrospect, we probably should have known that answering the questions would be complicated. Fortunately, we found exactly the right partners to help us in our journey toward these answers: Dr. Roberta Lenger Kang, CPET’s Director, and G. Faith Little, Senior Program Manager of The Center for the Professional Education of Teachers (CPET) at Columbia University.  They did the heavy research and writing but it was very much a collaborative experience. 

Along the way we had to unpack and understand a lot about the very notion of literacy engagement. We also had to debunk some myths and avoid falling into the traps of certain assumptions. It wasn’t exactly a perilous journey, but it did provoke a lot of reflection and conversation, and we are delighted to share with you the results of what we learned with a larger audience. 

Here are a few of those myths we looked at anew: 

• If a student can read and engage with texts well enough to perform well on an assessment covering the material in that text, does that qualify as evidence of literacy engagement?  

• If a classroom has a set of books or students have access to a library, does that access qualify as sufficient for developing an interest in reading? 

• If a teacher is given a curriculum that has been created, reviewed, and approved by experts in education, does that mean she necessarily has the tools she needs for a successful literacy engagement program? 

We learned that getting to the “what” and the “how” of introducing students to works they will value—where value means the worth an individual assigns to a thing, not some predetermined judgement of good or bad—means interrogating and rejecting a lot of “traditional” models of education and instead radically revisioning the “classroom” to put students first. 

We recommend that you start your journey with our one-sheeters, which are just six pages in total. If you want the detailed research behind these six pages, please dive into the whole shebang: it’s organized into three main parts each covering not just the potential pitfalls of a solution, but also promising practices and how to consider the idea in context. In short, if you’re interested in developing 

Behind the Book has chosen to make this research freely available, and has built the beginnings of a hub for those interested in developing their own programs or expanding/supporting the work we do. You can access that hub here, and we look forward to hearing from you about what resources you need and how Behind the Book can help.

by Casey Cornelius

More of Casey’s writing is on her personal blog, here.