Building Great Readers Through Habits

Great Readers Display Habits

How is it that we get to the level of a great reader? That’s the million-dollar question. We already touched on one point, gaining more precision in our teaching. In addition, our work with students suggests that we should focus on the habits that great readers use. Of course, these habits are comprised of a number of strategies, values, and beliefs. It’s the goal that is different. We don’t want to focus our students on strategies alone, but rather we want to focus on their enduring understanding. Based on our experiences, which include years of teaching, several research studies, graduate degrees, and reading hundreds of books and articles, we have identified seven habits that we have found useful in creating readers who are enthusiastic, engaged, and confident. Below are seven common habits: 

• Great Readers See Themselves as Readers
• Great Readers Make Sense of Text
• Great Readers Use What They Know
• Great Readers Understand How Stories Work
• Great Readers Read to Learn
• Great Readers Monitor and Organize What They Read
• Great Readers Are Critical

We chose to focus on habits because Johnston (2004) cautioned us about telling students “this is what a good reader does,” referring to specific strategies for specific chunks of texts, knowing that students might interpret this to mean that they are bad if they don’t engage in that specific behavior for that specific piece of text. That’s not to say that we don’t help students understand what great readers do. Habits allow us to engage in inquiry with students—“Is this habit helpful?”—rather than tell them what they should do and when.

Importantly, these habits can’t be simply taught in a few weeks. They require years of practice and attention to develop. As teachers, we must nourish these habits so they grow. Ideally, every year, starting in kindergarten, we need to model and teach our students these habits.