In any course that assigns texts to read, a concern for new instructors is how much reading is “too much.” The answer to this question isn’t universal—it varies substantially by school, course, and even the ebb-and-flow of student trends. It’s not surprising, then, assigned reading produces some of the most heated arguments among educators at conferences and online.
This article will help you determine what assigned readings might look like in your course using five key questions. These aren’t the only questions you should ever ask about texts in your class, but they’re a great foundation for solving one problem.
Q1: What’s the purpose of the reading?
Much of the internal conversation about reading assignments has to do with planning. Fundamentally, it’s about our syllabus calendar and how a text fits into a particular module or lesson. This ties into a key question about course planning more generally: what do you value?
Is the assigned reading:
- Setting up a theoretical/foundational context in a way that can’t be done in class?
- Providing an example of a broader concept you discussed in class?
- Covering material that you don’t have time to cover in class?
How you frame the remainder of the lesson around that reading should reflect the text’s value. For example, if the assigned reading covers material that you didn’t have time for in class, but then you never do anything else with that material, what does that say about the value of the reading to students?
The idea isn’t to ask only, “is twenty-five pages too long for students to read?” You should additionally ask yourself:
- Am I giving students an appropriate amount of time to read this in addition to other required readings?
- Am I reflecting the importance of this reading in other aspects of my course with follow-up, assessments, reflections, etc.?
- Is this reading in a format that’s accessible for all learners in my class?
- Does this text overlap with other materials in my course in a meaningful way?
In this way, the focus is less on the number of pages and more on the quality of learning that comes from those pages.
Q2: How many times do students need to read it?
When assigning anything over ten pages, ask yourself how many times students will need to read it.
Some of the reading assignments in my course are followed by simple, informal reflections that focus more on the student’s thought process than on grammar. For those writings, students will likely read through the text once, maybe twice. I really want to focus on their initial reaction to the text.
For the final paper in my course, students must read a historical monograph. These are scholarly works that some students initially struggle to comprehend. I expect that they’ll read some of the chapters more than once. Assuming a sixteen-week course, students select the monograph at the start of the second week. I schedule regular check-ins over the semester so students can ask questions and receive clarification. For the breakdown of what this looks like with a more traditional research paper or project, take a look at Scaffolding a Research Project with JSTOR.
If you anticipate that students will need to read material more than once, consider:
- Providing additional reading time (assigning it earlier than necessary)
- Limiting the page numbers to a number appropriate for your learning group
- Supplementing difficult passages with reader notes or annotated texts from JSTOR Daily’s Annotations series.
New instructors may have no idea how difficult certain passages are for their students. That’s totally fine! A good point of praxis is to check in with students about their reading and get a general sense of how they’re doing. Reading check-ins also provide a means of building critical relationships and supply feedback to help plan for the future.
Q3: Who are your students?
The danger of taking advice from other instructors is that everyone’s students are different. Every instructor’s situation is also different. Some instructors teach three honors classes of senior-level students each semester, some teach five first-year surveys, and some teach a mix of everything. Take every piece of advice you receive with a grain of salt—including mine.
How much reading, podcast-listening, video-watching, or whatever else you ask students to do throughout the semester will depend on:
- What they’re ready for
- What you feel like reading and watching
If you teach survey courses at a community college like I do, you’ll likely have a mix of students from diverse backgrounds. I have students who work full-time, students with small kids, students with aging parents, students who sometimes leave in the middle of the semester for active military service, and so much more. If you teach at a high school or a university, your students are likely equally diverse.
Understanding your campus demographics will go a long way in helping you determine what’s appropriate for your classroom in terms of reading amount, format, and timing. No matter what you choose to assign or when, you need to read or watch it first. Don’t assign something to your students that you haven’t put eyes on.
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Q4: What will the impact be when they don’t read it?
Inevitably, there will be a day when your students don’t do the assigned reading. It might not be all of them, but it will be some of them.
When I was an undergrad, one of my favorite professors started our class by asking which of us had an answer to a question about the reading from the night before. We all looked at him with a mixture of confusion and terror—because none of us had done the reading. He was clearly angry. Immediately, the computers came out (in the time before that was normal) and everyone started checking the class page for what we thought we’d clearly missed. Finally, a brave soul in the back of the room raised their hand to tell the professor he’d forgotten to send out the reading. After checking his own screen, our professor’s face turned from anger to clear embarrassment.
The most important part of this story, other than our professor’s very kind apology, was how he proceeded with our class. He had assigned that reading on that day for a reason. His hope was that we would have a fruitful discussion about it. Instead of moving on, he pulled it up on the screen and walked us through his version, which also helped us see how he annotated the text. It was a wonderful learning experience as a student in the course but also as a student learning how to become a teacher.
As an instructor, I’ve experienced several days where students don’t do the reading. It’s frustrating, so I understand how my professor initially felt on that day. How I handle it depends on the reading and how many people haven’t done it. Here are some of the solutions I’ve landed on:
- If it’s clear that students need more time, I move on to the next lesson and reschedule
- If it’s clear that students are stuck/don’t understand the reading, I pair them into small groups to break it apart
- If it’s clear that one or two students didn’t do the reading, I have a private discussion with those students
A Note on Discussions: One good way to increase engagement on discussion days is to ask students to submit a reflection on the reading, usually due at the start of the class period. The reflection isn’t anything formal, but it ensures that students have questions prepared and have done some pre-work for a fruitful talk.
Q5: What will the impact be if you cut the reading?
Things happen to derail our plans all the time. Weather disasters throw calendars into chaos, we forget to renew an electronic resource with the library, links suddenly disappear. When you plan to use a text, you should also plan for the contingency of cutting it.
When we evaluate assigned readings by the value they bring to student learning, these kinds of disruptions become a lot easier to manage. For example, if I value Langston Hughes’s poem “Life is Fine” because it’s about resilience, I can substitute a different poem, such as Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning.”
If your reading is tied to a URL, save a PDF backup in case the site crashes or the link becomes inaccessible; you won’t have to panic pivot from an assigned reading thanks to the technology. Another great planning tool is the JSTOR Daily Syllabi series. Each syllabus is crafted from easily accessed JSTOR Daily articles, allowing instructors to move quickly from one article to another within a specific theme. If the discussion or activity based on the selected article isn’t going where you anticipated, it’s easy to pull another to read together and, hopefully, get back on track. Using a JSTOR Daily syllabus also allows instructors to differentiate the reading and learning experience without having to manually find groupings of readings.
In any case, it’s worth considering what the impact to your lesson will be if you need to cut the assigned reading out entirely. This brings us back to the first question: what’s the purpose of the reading? Evaluate the value the text brings to your class to create the contingency plan you’ll need if it is suddenly unavailable.
As with all pedagogical practices, the way educators think about, assign, and assess reading in the classroom changes over time. This is both normal and encouraged. Instructors should do what works best for themselves and their students. These five questions serve as a starting point to help assess the usefulness of a text for the classroom or if it may be time to explore something new.
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