Teacher question:
There are lots of “lists” of evidence-based elementary core curriculums, but not so much for core ELA programs aimed at adolescents. Our district is exploring a textbook adoption and are getting pushback from some teachers who just want to teach novels. What are the “look fors” that we should be thinking about as we review middle school and high school curriculum?
Shanahan responds:
I don’t know of any such lists that describe criteria for a sound ELA program aimed at middle schools and high schools. Perhaps a reader will respond to this entry with one.
Over the past couple of decades, there have been standards and advisory pieces developed by the Carnegie Corporation, Common Core, College Board, and other agencies and individual scholars (many of these are included in the reference list below). These suggest features that a sound secondary English Language Arts program would be expected to include.
None of these guides focuses on teaching with novels, per se, and even a cursory examination of those would make it clear that novel reading alone would be insufficient. That doesn’t mean novel reading could not or should not have a place in these upper grade programs – just that there are many learning requirements that would not be addressable through novel study alone.
The following list includes “look fors” abstracted from these authoritative sources. The items are not in any kind of prioritized order. Perhaps some are more important than others, but they all matter. As you’ll see, several of the items focus more on the texts to be read than on the teaching that is to be provided. That makes sense. Reading comprehension is not a skill per se. Proficient comprehension depends upon understanding how different texts work, knowledge of the world, competence with language, and so on. As such, the texts that we ask kids to read are central to reading comprehension development – it is those texts that expose kids to genre features, information about our world, and language demands.
- A secondary ELA program should provide explicit instruction in both reading and writing.
In my experience, in classes focused solely or mainly on novel reading, writing is allotted a minor role. If there’s one thing all these sources agree on, it’s that analytical writing should be allotted substantial attention in the ELA curriculum.
The Common Core (National Governors Association, 2010) and all state standards in the U.S. (whether derived from the Common Core or not) require academic writing instruction for secondary students. This is true of England’s national educational standards too (Department of Education, 2014), and is advocated by the College Board (e.g., M. Liben, 2023).
Essentially, students need to learn to write analytically from sources – arguments, rhetorical analyses of texts, research papers, and so on.
That means that the English curriculum – whether purchased commercially or teacher-constructed locally – need go further than identifying a set of texts to be read and questions to be answered (though that isn’t a bad starting point). The ELA curriculum should provide substantial supports in teaching these kinds of academic writing, and any program should offer lots of help with that.
2. ELA programs should include opportunities for students to engage in the reading of a wide range of texts along with appropriate instruction aimed at building proficiency for these different kinds of reading challenges.
State standards universally require that students become proficient readers of both literature and informational text. Literature includes novels, novellas, short stories, plays, and poems. Informational texts, on the other hand, include memoir/biography, essays, criticism, speeches, letters, editorials, journalistic writing, and expository non-fiction.
Standards usually go beyond that divide, specifying that secondary ELA students need to learn to read a variety of literary genres and subgenres (e.g., adventure, myths, science fiction, historical fiction, allegories, parodies, satire, realistic fiction, graphic novels).
The extent of such requirements reveals why novel reading alone would be insufficient. It would be impossible for kids to get multiple opportunities to take on that range of texts, if their instructional reading was limited to novels.
There are other kinds of variety worth considering as well – though that point is less often acknowledged in these authoritative documents.
For instance, I’d argue for texts that that require students to take on various points of view. I think this is a key to critical reading development. Teens should learn to consider who tells a story (e.g., first person, second person, third person), as well as to whether that point of view is limited or omniscient, and whether the narrator is reliable or not, and how authors convey a persona. Likewise, when reading informational text, students should learn to analyze an author’s rhetorical moves (e.g., use of ethos, logos, pathos).
That doesn’t mean there’s no room for novels in an ELA curriculum. A teacher very well may teach “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Great Gatsby,” or other wonderfully worthwhile texts. These kinds of books are great reads, they expose kids to essential aspects of literary reading that they must master, reading them can offer a sense of accomplishment, and they are valuable cultural touchstones worth knowing.
Of course, our library of shorter works includes literary hallmarks as well (e.g., The Tell Tale Heart, The Lottery, Death of Salesman, Our Town, We Real Cool, The Road Not Taken), as does literary nonfiction of various lengths (e.g., The Fire Next Time, Gettysburg Address, I Have a Dream).
Some educational standards stress the value of exposing students to both American and British literature as well as to literature drawn from various time periods (e.g., 19th and 20th centuries). Sometimes they may include specific authors students should experience, Shakespeare being the most common example of this kind of requirement.
No question about it, any quality ELA program will expose students to a wide variety of texts – with multiple examples to allow for the development of real proficiency with them.
3. Another important aspect of textual diversity provides for broad cultural inclusion.
The reason I’m separating out this requirement from the previous one, is that I’m not convinced that this is a “literacy learning” issue, per se, though it’s worth noting that many brilliant colleagues disagree with me on that (e.g., Squire, 2023)
My hesitation is due to the dearth of empirical evidence that things work quite like that… with kids learning more when given the opportunity to read texts by authors who share their gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
My uncertainty as to potency of such literature in terms of improving reading achievement should not be interpreted as an opposition to including texts that reflect a wide range of cultural diversity. Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe kids should read texts written by a wide range of authors from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.
I’ll long remember a seventh-grade African American boy that I taught. He was so surprised and pleased to discover that a black man (Walter Dean Myers) could write so well. It’s possible that such literary experiences could lead kids to read more or to be more amenable to sound literacy instruction, but I need explicit evidence before accepting that idea.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that most states have these kinds of diversity requirements and these, too, should be reflected in any ELA curriculum, no matter the source.
4. The texts students are asked to read must be sufficiently demanding.
The linguistic and conceptual demands of texts can vary a great deal. If students are to gain sufficient proficiency in reading by their high school graduation, they must learn to handle challenging texts. Historically, textbooks are arrayed so that students confront increasingly challenging texts as they progress from grade to grade. The end point – the highest level or most challenging of the texts on this continuum – was traditionally the arbitrary choice of each publisher.
That changed with the Common Core (National Governors Association, 2010). Since those standards were proposed, most states have adopted specific grade level text standards aimed at ensuring that by graduation, students would be ready for reading of college, the workplace, and the military.
A perusal of the most widely used novels for high school ELA instruction reveals that few of these books present the levels of challenge required by the state’s educational standards.
English teachers have become quite adept at identifying worthwhile texts (in terms of literary merit, cultural value, thematic relevance, etc.) that are relatively easy for their students to read. Books like Of Mice and Men, The Outsiders, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, no matter their literary value, place minimal linguistic demands on students. That’s a problem because learning to deal with such demands is what promotes higher reading achievement (Shanahan, 2025).
The texts used to teach high school reading should reflect the Lexile levels required by the states – whether the texts are provided in a textbook or are identified by local teachers.
- An ELA program should include substantial lessons in vocabulary, morphology, applied syntax, cohesion, text structure, and should provide text reading fluency support.
If students are to learn to read challenging texts well, they will require instruction in how to surmount the challenges these texts pose (D. Liben, 2023). Instruction should help students to read and understand words, to read texts fluently, to make sense of complex sentences, to track and relate ideas across demanding texts, to make use of text structure, and so on.
These abilities should be nurtured in both reading and writing. For vocabulary that means recognizing the meanings and emotional valences of a growing number of words, while gaining greater purchase over diction in writing. As for sentences, students need to make sense of multi-phrasal and clausal sentences while reading, while learning to construct varied sentences in their writing. And so on.
Quite often in novels-only curricula, such explicit instruction is minimal or forgone altogether.
- The ELA program should provide motivational support.
Teens are not like younger children. They’re biologically programmed to strive for autonomy and independence (e.g., Branje, de Moor, Spitzer, & Becht, 2021). Telling them what to do – what to learn – tends to have limited effectiveness. They need opportunities to exercise choices, and convincing reasons for participating.
A sound ELA curriculum will offer a high-quality array of texts focused on content likely to be of interest to teens, along with choices and alternatives and opportunities to engage in assignments and projects that allow them to explore issues pertinent to their development of identity, their desires to connect to peers, and their growing concerns for social justice.
7. The secondary school curriculum should address issues of disciplinary literacy.
Research shows that by middle and high school literacy demands become more disciplinary in nature (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). What this means is that the texts, purposes for reading, and approaches used to create and make sense of those texts begin to diverge based on discipline. We read and write history, science, and literature differently and students need to develop the insights and abilities to meet those varied demands.
Personally, my preference is for social studies teachers to teach kids to read history, science teachers to do so for science text, and English teachers to focus their attention on literature, including literary non-fiction. To me, it makes sense for those who do those kinds of reading to initiate kids into them (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2023). However, not everyone agrees with me on that. Some experts argue for the ELA program to prepare kids to meet the special demands of reading and writing disciplinary text (Lee & Spratley, 2010).
Clearly, ELA teachers are responsible for preparing kids to deal with literature. Whether they should also take charge of science and history reading is a local decision.
Nevertheless, the secondary curriculum needs to address disciplinary literacy. If ELA classes bear this burden, then the ELA curriculum must include disciplinary literacy lessons for literature, science, and history.
- A sound ELA program should have a clear overall structure.
Research shows that instruction is most effective when teachers and students have a clear understanding of the purposes of the instruction (Hattie, 2009). Random lessons tend not to be particularly effective. If a program has a clear structure that makes it easy to understand why certain texts are grouped together or how the writing instruction connects to the reading instruction, learning is more likely to occur.
Structure requires both horizontal and vertical connections. Horizontal connections are those among the skills, abilities, and activities that will be addressed during the lessons tied to a single text, while vertical connections are those that are sequenced across the texts in a unit, a school year, and across the grades.
For instance, if students are reading a short story, the instruction may target key vocabulary words, certain kinds of sentence complexity, and a specific skill of literary interpretation (e.g., how to identify the theme of a story). It would also prepare students to engage successfully in a relevant form of writing – such as a summary or a critical review of that text. Lessons should have a coherent organization that is easy to follow and pedagogically powerful.
It also matters what is to follow in subsequent lessons. What will the next text selection have to do with this one? Will the connections be in terms of the content or the literary features or both? How will the vocabulary teaching build upon and preserve earlier vocabulary learning?
These issues matter across a unit and the school year, but they also need to be considered across the multiple years the program will be used.
When each teacher selects novels and determines the instruction to go with them, there tends to be a lot of overlap and repetition, and some important issues may be missed. Requiring that the ELA program have comprehensiveness, continuity, and sufficient review and repetition is wise stewardship.
There may be other issues of concern than these, but I think this will be is a good starting place. There are many items in this reference list that were not cited specifically. The reason for that is that many of these would need to be cited multiple times throughout this paper – there is a great deal of redundancy in the guidance provided by the leaders in this field. That’s a strength, not a weakness. I think the complete reference list should be useful.
References
Alvermann, D., & Moore, D. (1991). Secondary school reading. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P. D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (vol. 2, pp. 951– 983). New York: Longman.Secondary school reading. Handbook of reading research.
Biancarosa, C., & Snow, C. E. (2006). Reading next—A vision for action and research in middle and high school literacy: A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York (2nd ed.).Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.
Branje S., de Moor E. L., Spitzer J., Becht A. I. (2021). Dynamics of identity development in adolescence: a decade in review. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 31, 908–927. https:/doi.org:10.1111/jora.12678.
Carnegie Corporation of New York. (2002, September 26). Intermediate and adolescent Literacy: The state of research and practice. New York: Author.
Carnegie Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy. (2010). Time to act: An agenda for advancing adolescent literacy for college and career success. New York, NY: Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Center on Instruction. (2007). Academic literacy instruction for adolescents. Tallahassee, FL: Florida Center for Reading Research, Florida State University.
Department of Education. (2014). English programmes of study: Key stage 4. London, England: Author.
Graham, S., & Perin D. (2007). Writing Next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning. New York: Routledge.
International Reading Association. (1999b). Summary of "Adolescent literacy, a position statement for the Commission on Adolescent Literacy of the International Reading Association." Available: http://www.ira.org/advocacy/policies/adol_lit.html
Kamil, M. L. (2003). Adolescents and literacy – Reading for the 21st century. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.
Lee, C., & Spratley, A. (2010). Reading in the disciplines: The challenges of adolescent literacy. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Liben, D. (2023). The importance of vocabulary and knowledge in comprehension. In J. Patterson (Ed.), The digital SAT suite and classroom practice: English Language Arts/Literacy (pp. 57-74). New York: College Board.
Liben, M. (2023). Close reading, textual evidence, and source analysis. In J. Patterson (Ed.), The digital SAT suite and classroom practice: English Language Arts/Literacy (pp. 36-56). New York: College Board.
National Association of State Boards of Education. (2006). The state response to the crisis in adolescent literacy. Washington, DC: Author.
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards. Washington, DC: Author.
National School Boards Association. The next chapter: A school board guide to improving adolescent literacy. Alexandria, VA: Author.
Salinger, T., & Bacevich, A. (2006). Lessons & recommendations from the Alabama Reading Initiative: Sustaining focus on secondary reading. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Shanahan, C., & Shanahan, T. (2023). Disciplinary literacy. In J. Patterson (Ed.), The digital SAT suite and classroom practice: English Language Arts/Literacy (pp. 94-128). New York: College Board.
Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled reading, leveled lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40–59. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.78.1.v62444321p602101
Squire, J. (2023). Culturally responsive approaches to the teaching of literature in secondary English classrooms. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Sturtevant, E. G. (2003). The literacy coach: A key to improving teaching and learning in secondary school. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.
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