My formal educational training has primarily been geared toward teaching college students. I have extensive training in teaching different populations of college students: traditional, non-traditional, first-generation, advanced, remedial. But a lot of what I have learned about learning has been in the context of adult and teen learners.

So when I started homeschooling, I also started looking into early childhood and elementary teaching philosophies to make sure that what I knew about teaching was being channeled into an appropriate application for my young children. Much of what we know about teaching adults is also applicable to teaching younger children, but there are some places where having an understanding of child development stages and expectations makes a difference.

It was in this research where I started frequently seeing the phrases “learning to read” and “reading to learn” paired together. They would often be written in a sentence like this: “Pre-k through second grade is about learning to read and third grade and beyond is about reading to learn.”

Okay. I thought to myself. I guess that makes sense.

But now I have had a deeper chance to reflect on it, and no. That does not make sense. That doesn’t make one bit of sense, and I am frustrated that I was duped by it even momentarily.

Learning to Read and College

Last week, I was back in front of college freshman for their first semester of what is essentially English 101. Most people consider this to be a writing class, and that’s true. We do write . . . a lot. But it’s also a reading class.

Without going too deeply into the history of reading and writing at the collegiate level, I’m going to gloss over some highlights. This wrong-headed concept that students are no longer “learning to read” after about second grade has caused there to be a bit of a stigma around direct reading instruction at higher levels. There are not typically credit-bearing college classes in reading. You will also not find reading classes in most high schools. Sure, there are literature classes, and these involve reading, but the learning objectives usually center on the material being read, not the process of reading it.

When students are enrolled in a “reading” class in college, it is typically a developmental level class, which means that they are there because standardized testing showed some deficiency in their skills. In other words, you only have to take a reading class as a college student if you are behind.

My college freshmen can list dozens of writing strategies. They are familiar with them, and they see them as tools they’re supposed to be learning to use. When I ask them about reading strategies, though, the room falls silent. They haven’t formally talked about them for years.

The clear message to students is that reading is something you should have already mastered. What that means in practice is that many of them get to classes like mine, get assigned challenging reading material from academic texts, struggle to successfully decode and process it, and think that there is something wrong with them. They don’t seek help or ask questions about reading strategies because, after all, reading is something that elementary students learn, and they’re in college.

The Reading-Writing Connection

One of my areas of research has been in integrated reading and writing (IRW), the buzzword surrounding some college-level reform efforts to reconnect reading and writing instruction for developmental students. Basically, teachers know that students who struggle to read are going to struggle to write because writing well is entering a conversation, and you can’t adequately enter a conversation when you don’t know how to listen to what is already being said.

Teaching the two in isolation results in decontextualized habits that don’t translate well to real-world experiences. It would be like me trying to teach you how to swim by sitting you next to a pool and showing you a bunch of strokes on dry land. You might intellectually grasp the mechanical concepts, but once you jump in the pool, it’s a whole different world.

I’ve taken professional development and sat through countless workshops about IRW, but I always leave frustrated because what is being presented as some new method of integrating separate fields is really just the single field that I’ve been studying my entire adult life: rhetoric.

Reading and writing were already connected. We tore them apart in order to get easier-to-digest standardized testing results. That we are now recognizing (in some areas) the error of doing so doesn’t change the fact that there is already a field of study that addresses them both, together, in context.

You are ALWAYS Learning to Read

Thinking of learning to read as an early stage that comes before reading to learn is a mistake.

You are always learning to read. Every time you are presented with a difficult text (and that can be a book or an article, but it can also be a movie, a song, or a piece of art), you have to refine and build on your decoding skills. Always. Forever.

I have a Ph.D. in English, and I am still learning to read. There are still texts that challenge me, cause me to revise my reading strategies, and feel like a beginner again. And this is a good thing. Encountering challenge means that I am still growing and learning, something that I hope to do for my entire life.

Recognizing this and making it transparent to learners is crucial. We cannot let students think that they are somehow inadequate or behind just because they have to revise their reading strategies and learn new ones as they progress through their education.