5 Ways to Build Reading Stamina in Grades 6-12
NUMBER 3 IN OUR COUNTDOWN OF THE TOP 10 EPISODES OF THE FIRST 1,000. This one originally aired January 31, 2022 and has been heard 27,058 times — the third most-listened-to episode in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast.
Lisa Hollihan Allen is a K-12 reading specialist and literacy interventionist, and she came on to talk about the thing nobody puts on a lesson plan: reading stamina. Not decoding. Not comprehension. The plain ability to keep reading.
Her framing is the one that sticks. Most students have word recognition well before middle school, she says — and a lot of them still cannot sustain attention on a page. So they fake read. They look at the book, the eyes move, and nothing happens, and because it all goes on inside their heads it is almost impossible to catch during independent reading time.
She gives five moves, drawn from her own classroom and from the work of Penny Kittle, Laura Robb, and NCTE: give them protected time, give them choice, get them conferencing and talking about books, advertise great reads so they can see themselves and see past themselves, and then challenge them to stretch — longer books, harder books, new genres.
And she is blunt about frustration. "I think sometimes as teachers, especially with older kids, especially older, struggling readers, we want to avoid frustration at all costs. And I don't know that that's doing them any favors." Her alternative is not to remove the hard thing. It is to teach a student to notice they are frustrated and to keep going anyway — because reading stamina, as she puts it, is brain stamina. It is the same muscle they need in science and social studies.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- What reading stamina actually is — NCTE defines it as sustaining mental effort without scaffolds or adult support
- Fake reading: why it is so hard to catch, and what it costs
- The five moves — time, choice, conferencing, vision, challenge
- Why self-selected reading drives engagement and vocabulary at the same time
- How to let a student stretch past their "level" when motivation is doing the work
- The exact language to use with a frustrated reader, and why removing frustration backfires
- Why a reading specialist calls herself the reading coach, not the reading teacher
Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e992
