“Made for all’ Reading Programs kill Motivation

It had always seemed strange to me that schools are charged with killing the natural curiosity of school age children. When they are so naturally curious, how can this be? Surely there must be ways to encourage fluency in the skills they will need through their interests and, once able, encourage them to appreciate increasingly challenging text. And surely the path to such motivation for reading and writing increasingly complex text is not in ‘cookie cutter’ reading programs that take the teacher out of the teaching. In her essay, “Success Guaranteed Literacy Programs,” Lynn Astarita Gatto argues that there is no such thing. In this article, she details her flexible approach towards engaging, project-based instruction, a successful approach that makes “literacy a practice, something that gets done, not skills to be learned for use at a later date” (Gatto 2007). She searches for and discovers the means to get the balls of intrinsic motivation rolling at just the right gradient to allow for clever facilitation and to keep them rolling in common and constructive directions while so many educators are trying to force all of their balls to roll uphill. It may be appropriate for me to apologize for that analogy, so perhaps I can do so in detailing a bit of Gatto's approach.

In her essay, Gatto cites a project through which students, in an effort to learn about butterflies, create a butterfly vivarium. In planning this unit, she collects the materials they will need to answer the questions that will inevitably arise. They do, and her students engage in ‘dialogic instruction, where the children can express their opinions and disagree with others, self-select the turn-taking during conversation, initiate topics of conversation, offer ideas for activities and discuss and question concepts” (Gutierrez, 1993). Gatto's project immediately got her class buzzing with excitement and questions that she recorded with the express intent of incorporating into the unit. She allowed this interest to guide her choice of additional reading materials, extension activities as well as the lessons she needed to teach to support her students’ authentic efforts. When opportunities arose for her to bring culturally diverse students aboard, she did so. She brought readings in Spanish and had letters intended for the Mexican government translated by bilingual sixth graders. This not only motivated the native Spanish speakers, but sent the message that such interaction was purposeful. Gatto also allowed "students to construct purposes." Students were constantly taking ownership of their project, coming up with questions such as how they will present and manage the vivarium once it is open to the public as well as answers. As her students were obviously inspired by the works of Jacob Lawrence, Gatto made connections to her students lives, found more of the artist's books and led a trip to a museum where students could view his paintings. Gatto's work with spelling dictionaries illustrates how she builds "into explicit instruction into reading frameworks" (Gatto, 2007).

Having won awards and received continued recogntion for her work in motivating students to become truly engaged fluent readers and writers, her argument against Success Guaranteed Reading Programs is all the more powerful. “The mandated reading program just does not provide this kind of motivation or meaningful connection to content for reading” (Gatto, 2007).

I’m sold on the idea. I know from working with my son to encourage reading that once his fluency grew, I simply needed to pay attention to his interests and then keep a steady supply and the right environment (just before bedtime is a great one), and his ability grew at a faster rate than any capsulated reading program could hope to achieve.

However, Lynn Gatto wrote that, while frugal, she needed to spend her own money to secure appropriate materials. She explored libraries and more. Having only recently gotten a job teaching 11th and 12th grade English Language Arts, I must admit that applying the concept as openly as Lynn seems like a recipe for chaos. The availability of materials is a problem and so is my ability to prepare myself to facilitate the reading and connections of a very large number of interrelated works. So I ask, what, at the Secondary level, are the baby steps to a program like Ms. Gatto’s?


Gatto, LA. (2007). Success guaranteed literacy programs - i don't buy it!. In J Larson

(Ed.), Literacy as Snake Oil (pp. 73-90). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.