Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives: How Students’ Reading Achievement Has Been Held Back and What We Can Do About It

by Timothy Shanahan

Genres: Nonfiction, Education

232 pages, Paperback

Published September 9, 2025

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I completed this as a professional book study. From it, I learned that most levels are made up without any real formula. There might be patterns as we go up the levels. In actuality, there is no real difference for one level to the next. I remember when a colleague literally yelled at me because I let the child take home the classic “Where the Wild Things Are.” It was two levels above his instruction level. You would have thought I had been giving him poison. Truth be told, it was a book he chose because he had heard it read aloud and he wanted to try to read it. Book choice is a powerful influence on motivation. That doesn’t mean I have a kindergartener read Harry Potter. It just means that sometimes restrictions lock students into lower levels of reading. Those children seldom get opportunities to get into grade level reading. The “Matthew Effect” from the Biblical book of Matthew has been cited where the rich get richer (in reading) and the poor get poorer (in reading). There is no magic wand to pull up low levels of reading readers but keeping them stuck in low level texts, below their grade level, will not help them achieve either.

[David Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his newest book, Leveled Reading Leveled Lives, distinguished professor of reading Timothy Shanahan offers the following thesis: teachers must teach kids to read not with instructional level texts as has basically been the standard for decades, if not centuries, but with grade level texts and a healthy dose of scaffolding and good instruction.

He provides a brief history of education in America to elucidate how well-meaning educators have gotten so off track over time. In some cases, like in the earlier days of the country, the answer was simply poor teacher training where many teachers might have been only slightly more literate than their students. Later on, it became the fear of frustrating students who might shut down, rebel, or, in more extreme cases, become violent criminals if they were asked to read something outside of their abilities.

There have also been plenty of misunderstandings in regard to the studies on reading. Superficial interpretations of these studies tend to lend themselves to strong support for instructional level teaching. And I can kind of see why this is the case. While Shanahan mostly does a good job unpacking the myriad of studies he includes in the book, some of them–the ones on keeping kids’ motivated, for instance–have such nuanced and mixed results, it’s hard to say what to make of them. I can see how teachers would gloss over these and fall back on what felt right in the classroom.

In terms of practical advice, Shanahan also does a mostly serviceable job. Teaching doesn’t allow for a one-size-fits-all approach, so the best Shanahan can do is advocate for the kinds of activities that produce the best results–preteaching vocab but allowing students to use context clues to figure out some of the words, paraphrasing, breaking down complex sentences, highlighting narrative cohesion, focusing on text structure, front loading contextual info–and allow teachers to find the best ways to implement these in the classroom. And that’s just what he does.

Still, by the end of the book, I couldn’t help but feel like it hadn’t told me much I didn’t already know. Sure, I have now seen some of the empirical evidence for using more challenging texts, but, otherwise, I feel like I just took a refresher course on what I learned years ago in college.

[Natasha Hiltz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a well-researched, thoughtful work that challenges common assumptions about reading instruction. Shanahan offers educators meaningful insights and important questions about how we teach reading, encouraging more intentional, evidence-based practices that truly support student growth.