Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 24: Fase reading
Lesson structures

FASE Reading, or, as it was formerly known, Control the Game, is a system for student read-alouds that maximizes the value and viability of this crucial activity, allowing you to build students’ fluency in and enjoyment of reading. It has always been in the top tier of techniques in the book in terms of importance, but society is undergoing rapid and dramatic changes, the most significant of which involve the omnipresence of technology, and these have elevated even further the importance—I might even say urgency—of an intentional approach to reading in the classroom that includes the use of FASE Reading. This is, in my mind, one of the handful of most important techniques in the book.

What does FASE mean? It's an acronym, and even though I'm not crazy about acronyms, the previous name was obscure,¹⁹ and this technique needed a new name that communicated something important about the technique. The previous name communicated important things about the technique mostly to me and me alone.

The new name, FASE, is intended to remind teachers about four things they should try to reinforce when students read aloud. It also sounds a bit like “phase” and this can be a reminder that it often happens in a cycle of a few minutes that yields to other activities and then is used again later. A phase—like FASE Reading—is often temporary but recurring.

F is for fluency. Fluency is hugely important for readers at all levels. We want to use FASE Reading as an opportunity to build it. This is because, as Student Achievement Partners note in a recent white paper, “Research shows dysfluency causes as much as 40% of the variance in students who pass [state] tests versus those who fail. This is true for every testing grade.”²⁰ You don't have to like tests to get the point: Comprehension and understanding require fluency. You must read not just individual words but strings of words at the speed of sight²¹—with automaticity that is, so that your full working memory is free to think about the text. One of the least contemplated, obvious things about reading is that it has to happen fast—“at the speed of sight,” as Mark Seidenberg puts it—for it to work. We have to be able to make sense of it as soon as we perceive it. If you're asking a student about the author's craft or what exactly the experiment says about the role of ATP and they can't process the words and syntax at the speed of sight, you're likely to be disappointed. When you have to slow down to read, when the task of reading and making basic sense of the words requires conscious thinking, your working memory is allocated to figuring out the words, what they mean, and how they fit together, not to comprehending. Perhaps this is why the students who got fluency instruction—both those in regular classrooms and those who were struggling readers—“simply read better” than those who did not get regular work on fluency, writes Timothy Shanahan, who is among the nation's foremost researchers on reading. “For many students oral reading fluency practice continues to help in the consolidation of decoding skills [and] … helps to support prosody development which is more directly implicated in reading comprehension.”²²

Reading aloud is critical to building fluency. It is the only reliable way to assess it and it provides students with the opportunity to practice the meaning making we express when we read aloud. To read something aloud is to interpret it and make arguments about it: In what tone should it be read? Which word gets emphasized? Think for a moment of how critical it is to know what the implicit voice of a text sounds like, not just for novels but for scientific research and historiography; now think of how often your students have heard those things read aloud. With FASE reading there’s constant modeling of how a text should sound but the model comes from fellow students. I will return to this when we discuss the social aspects of reading.

Reading aloud is the best way to practice fluency and it's beneficial for all learners, but once they have finished the elementary grades students no longer get opportunities to read aloud and build fluency. This gap is ten times more important now when—and this will be another motif of this book—reading as we know it is locked in a death struggle with the cell phone, a battle it is losing badly. It's not just that students read less and less—the data are devastating—it's that they read less and less well. They are more distracted; in states of constant half-attention,²³ their eyes flitting down the page looking for the next new thing. So it's not just that we build fluency and reading skills that translate into silent reading as well, it's that it is one of the few ways we can cause students to read for sustained, undistracted periods of time.

A is for accountability. “The only way we can ever 100% know that a child is actually reading is if they are reading aloud,” Jo Facer writes in Simplicity Rules. And it's the only way we can know how they are reading. Your class reading aloud is not just fluency practice, it's not just an exercise in creating community (which I'll come to in a moment), it's a constant data stream on the reading level of your students on the key texts of your classroom. Nothing could be more data driven.

Making sure students are reading is a big deal—bigger now than five or ten years ago. Yes, I can hear some teachers saying, we should socialize students to read at home as much as we can. But note also that relying on reading happening at home is in part regressive—the strong readers are likely to get more of it—and we increasingly can't be sure that many students read steadily outside of school. We are all addicts to a device engineered to absorb our full attention. Our students are in its thrall the minute they leave school.²⁴ “Any and all systems I have ever come up with [to ensure independent reading at home] have been gamed by students … If you want to ensure pupils are reading, your only bet is to make them do it with you, as a whole class. That's why things like whole class reading of a suitable novel … for 20 to 30 minutes a day are so beneficial. If children have read that much for that long, they will have a massive advantage over their peers,” Facer writes.

S is for social. This is the hidden gift of FASE Reading. Shared experiences, especially ones with emotional weight or where significant ideas emerge, draw people into communities and give them a sense of belonging. This is what you are doing when you read together—building community and belonging and, not coincidentally, this is in part the role stories and texts have played in our society for longer than there have been schools. Stories and experiences were shared not just among groups but in groups as a way to draw people together. It is fitting that this aspect of reading may be our best bet now to elevate its stature above the lonelier forms of communication available through screens.

In Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, Zaretta Hammond makes a compelling case for the importance of community in the classroom. We are the most individualist society on earth, she notes. Finding ways to balance ardent individualism with a communal approach is part of culturally responsive teaching—a key way to make the classroom more accessible to students from less individualistic cultures, she argues. At the same time it pushes us to see the benefits of greater emphasis on community and belonging conferred upon some other cultures that value it more highly.

The way we read sometimes reflects that ardent individualism, especially in moments where everyone chooses their own book and reads it on their own. There's a common argument that students will only love reading if it involves individual choice and while some choice is nice,²⁵ everyone always choosing their own thing means giving up what is collective—the shared text we can all talk about because we've all read it and shared the experience of reading it together. One of the benefits of a collective task like reading together is that it builds belonging, the strongest incentive for humans there is. Ironically, reading and experiencing together often yields more enjoyment than does a setting where everyone gets choice. The moment when your class laughs or gasps aloud in the midst of a shared reading, a bond is made. The experience of reading together is as powerful to the brain as events experienced together and thus the shared connection it creates can help forge a lasting and valuable sense of community and belonging. If we want the experience of reading to be powerful and unique—social, shared, and pleasurable, more powerful than the smartphone—the key is to read communally and to emphasize that by reading aloud together.

E is for expressive. To read aloud well is to make meaning audible, to breathe life into a text. It's powerful when a teacher does this and it's even more meaningful when students do. It is a statement—peer to peer—that the text is worth bringing to life. To hear your peers take pride in their reading skills and show they value reading creates the sort of positive social norm that is most likely to shift reading behaviors. When students read aloud expressively, and when, as they do in the best classrooms, they implicitly compete to show who can read most expressively—they are not only bringing what you are reading to life, they are making the case for the book. Gabby Woolf does an exemplary job of this in the video Gabby Woolf: Keystone. Her class is reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, which is full of archaic and unfamiliar syntax. To successfully bring it to life is to show that you understand the book. So as she begins, first modeling herself before she calls on students to FASE Read, she challenges students to bring out their maximum degree of expressiveness. “In the spirit of being sensationalist, we want to read it as … Stevenson would want his readers to imagine it.” She encourages her pupils to volunteer “with your highly expressive reading” and notes, “I know several of you who would make a very good job of that.” And indeed the subsequent reading by her students is rich in expression and meaning made audible.

The Challenges of Reading Aloud

There is joy and pleasure in reading aloud but there are also challenges, and these are also worth addressing because in many ways the purpose of FASE Reading is to address those challenges²⁶—it's a classic case of technique making strategy viable. If you have the technique that allows you to overcome a few challenges, the benefits of a powerful strategy become feasible.

So what are the challenges? The reasons can be grouped in two primary buckets: leverage concerns and self-esteem concerns.

Leverage Concerns

Some educators react to suggestions that they include more oral reading in class with a question along these lines: “Why would you allow a single student to read aloud during class time? What are the other kids doing?” The implication is, I guess: nothing. Having a lone student reading aloud to an otherwise passive classroom can indeed be a poor use of time. And of course it's possible that the reader's peers could be checked out and gazing out the window. But in a well-designed lesson, they would be reading, too, and this is both valuable and relatively easy to accomplish.

I use the term “leverage” to refer to how much reading the rest of the class is doing when one student is reading aloud. If twenty-seven students are staring into space or listening passively, the leverage is low. But if one student is reading actively and twenty-seven students are listening carefully and reading along with her, as actively engaged in the text as if they were reading independently, then the leverage is much higher. It's also worth reflecting on the ease with which a group of people can discuss a text meaningfully when they have just experienced it together. There are no reminders: remember the scene where this or that happened? The memory of the scene is vivid in students' minds when you say, “Let's pause here and discuss.” So a second answer to the question “What are the other students doing?” is: They are preparing to discuss. Concerns about the passivity of nonreaders are legitimate, but they're fairly easily managed by specific teacher actions, which I'll discuss in a moment.

I've also heard concerns raised that both listening and reading along at the same time will overload students' working memory—that listening will prevent reading along—or vice versa. I'm not sure there's a clear answer to that, though there's a fair amount of recent research showing that the visual and auditory channels are additive in terms of working memory.²⁷ Still, we can't rule out this concern. That said, reading is an immensely complex task that we use to serve a wide range of outcomes in the classroom. Among other things, we want students to learn decoding and fluency and vocabulary through reading. We want them to acquire knowledge through reading and be able to acquire knowledge through further reading of complex texts in particular. We want them to persist in reading, make a habit of it, and value it all their lives. It's unrealistic to think that any single approach is going to optimize that many diverse outcomes. Reading remains to me the first among equals—the most important among all the valuable things we teach in school—and my guidance would be to have students read a lot in class, to have them read in ways that make a text feel valuable—buy-in, a colleague of mine says, is an outcome, not a precondition for any activity—and use a variety of ways of reading so that you get the benefit of multiple approaches.

In designing our Reading Reconsidered Curriculum, my team included three forms of reading in each lesson: Teacher Read Aloud, FASE Reading, and Accountable Independent Reading (see technique 23). The exact balance we suggest depends on the teacher, the class, and the text. But we suggest healthy doses of all three. (That's not advice I'd limit to the ELA classroom.) The video Eric Snider: The Wind is a great example of a teacher using all three ways of reading in synergy: Eric reads aloud, allows his students to read for a stretch—they crush it with the complex text, by the way—and then sends them off to (accountable) independent reading. If there's a weakness to any of those forms of reading, he balances them by using the others and still reaps the unique benefits of each approach.

Self-Esteem Concerns

Some educators have also suggested that students should not be asked to read aloud in class because they might struggle—this might shame or embarrass them, and possibly cause them to dislike reading. Essentially, the argument is that if students are weak readers, we should withhold from them one of the best tools for improving reading skills because it might cause them discomfort. Learning to be comfortable struggling is, in my mind, a much more manageable and temporary challenge than being a weak reader. Teachers, and the cultures they build, are fully capable of making it safe to struggle and take risks. It's yet another reason why building a vibrant, positive culture—not just avoiding a negative culture—is so critical in the classroom.

And fortunately everyone's reading is imperfect! So one critical step is to make this simple fact more evident. Balancing teacher read-alouds with student read-alouds is a great way to do this. If you read aloud you will surely make your share of stumbles and bobbles. I know I do. Not trying to hide them but instead making them seem normal is powerful. You could say “Whoops, let me start that sentence over,” or “Whoops, that's ’flawed,’ not ’flamed.’” Or you could say very little and just carry on as if it were the most normal thing in the world and let the data settle in on the class over time: Even the teacher stumbles. Having lots of students read also affords lots of opportunities for lots of students to stumble a bit, go back, reread, figure out a word—all of it public and in full view, even among the best readers. This normalizes an obvious aspect of reading that is otherwise hidden to students. The key is not to make weaker students feel like they should not stumble but to help them see that everyone does.

But of course some readers struggle more than others and it is precisely those students who struggle most who also benefit most from the practice. Planning, preparation, and culture building can address the challenges of this. Later I'll share with you a moment in Jessica Bracey's classroom where she demonstrates some excellent solutions. But first, this advice from Jo Facer: She writes that, initially, it is best to “select short, simple sentences before you teach your lesson, and underline or highlight these on your own copy. That way you will know the ’safe sentences’ to get your struggling readers to succeed with.” Over time this will allow them to meet with success and build their confidence, she notes.

One observation implicit in this comment is the idea that people change—not only their skills but also their perceptions. You cannot control whether a student is nervous at first. But you can control environmental variables sufficiently to change that feeling in time.

There are of course other ways to manage the experience so that students gradually get better at reading by reading aloud. I'll return to those in a moment. But for now I want to also point out that denying all students the opportunity to read aloud because some students might at first be nervous is wrong. All students deserve the right to connect with reading as a positive experience and teachers must ensure that all students develop mastery of the skill.

How to Lead FASE Reading

How then do you unlock the benefits of student oral reading and mitigate its downsides? How do you ensure leverage and attentiveness and prepare for strugglers? When you lead FASE Reading, you ask students to read aloud, one by one, in an unpredictable pattern, usually for short durations, at least at first. By “asking” I mean most often assigning readers—Cold Calling. We want volunteers but we want universality and accountability, as well. Everyone has to read—and hopefully come to love reading. “The weakest readers need the most practice at reading, but are also the ones who tend to volunteer least to read aloud, as well as the ones who opt not to read privately after school hours. To serve our weakest readers, it simply must be the expectation that every child can be asked to read aloud at any time,” Jo Facer writes. Here are some details on those elements.

Keep Durations Unpredictable

If you designate a student to read in class and say, “Read the next paragraph for me, Vivian,” everyone in the class knows no one else will be asked to read until Vivian finishes the paragraph. Stating the duration for which a student will read causes other students to follow along a little less. Instead, when you ask a student to read, don't specify how long you want her to read for. Saying, “Start reading for me please, Vivian” or “Pick up, please, Vivian” makes other students more likely to read along, since they don't know when a new reader will be asked to pick up.

In addition, keeping durations unpredictable allows you to address a struggling reader in a safe and noninvasive manner. If Vivian struggles with the paragraph you've assigned her, it means either a long, slow slog to the end, possibly exhausting for Vivian and reducing leverage with other students, or it's you suddenly cutting her short of what you promised: “OK, I'm going to stop you there, Vivian. Jelani, would you please read some?,” which carries an implicit judgment. If you don't specify the length of the read initially, however, you can adapt in the interest of both the student who's reading and the rest of the class. Vivian can read two sentences really well and then stop before she struggles too much, making the experience positive, then you can move to a dynamic reader who will push the story along for the rest of the class. Or, if Vivian is doing well, you can let her keep going. All of this happens invisibly when you avoid telling students how long they'll read.

Keep Durations Short

Reading short segments can often allow students to invest energy in expressive reading and sustain the energy required for fluent, even dramatic reading. It's better to read really well for three or four sentences and stop than to read well for two and drone through six more. Moving quickly among primary readers can yield higher-quality oral reading and make the lesson more engaging. The momentum of quick, unpredictable, and relatively frequent changes of reader makes reading feel quick and energetic rather than tedious and slow.

Knowing that segments tend to be short and may end at any time also reinforces for secondary readers that they will likely soon get a chance themselves to read, and this keeps them from tuning out.

As students develop as readers, your definition of “short” will, of course, change. Maybe the average read is two or three sentences at first, but as students get better as readers and become more able to attend carefully, as they come to love reading and lose themselves more in the text, you will naturally extend the average length of a read. Sometimes you and the class will lose yourselves in a passage, and Vivian will just keep going. The key idea is that using shorter reads can bring engagement and energy to student oral reading—perhaps at the beginning of a passage, perhaps if things slow down, perhaps all the time. When and how often is up to you.

Finally, keeping durations short enables you to take better advantage of a crucial form of data: every time you switch readers, you gather data about your leverage. When you say, “Pick up please, Charles,” and Charles jumps in with the next sentence without missing a beat, you know that Charles was reading alongside the previous reader on his own. If not, you know otherwise. Ideally, you want this sort of seamless transition every time you switch readers, and frequent switching allows you to gather and manage transitions more often and more broadly. The more data you have, the more information and tools you will have to help you ensure leverage.

Keep the Identity of the Next Reader Unpredictable

If you move quickly from one primary reader to another, students focus more closely on following along. This is doubly true if they don't know who the next reader will be. A teacher who announces that she'll go around the room in a predictable fashion gives away this part of her leverage. Students can tune out until their turn is near. Retaining your ability to choose the next reader also allows you to match students to passages more effectively. If you want to use Jo Facer's idea of preselecting sentences that developing readers can be more successful with, you'll need to be able to Cold Call readers and you'll need to select randomly.

Unpredictability makes for both better leverage and better reading, so when you call on students to read, it's great to call on some students who volunteer—the moment when they wave their hands in the air, desperate for their chance to read is a huge win for any teacher—just make sure not to call exclusively on volunteers. A significant proportion, most often a majority, of readers should include those who haven't raised their hands. This will maximize leverage and normalize full and universal participation. The message should be that reading is a pleasure and that a good teacher doesn't let just a few students hog all the fun.

Reduce Transaction Costs

A transaction cost is the amount of resources it takes to execute an exchange, be it economic, verbal, or otherwise. When it comes to transitioning between readers, small differences in transaction costs can have a large effect, so it's critical to reduce them. A transition from one reader to the next that takes much more than a second steals reading time and risks interrupting the continuity of what students are reading, thus affecting how well students follow and comprehend the text.

Make it your goal to transition from one primary reader to another quickly and with a minimum of words—ideally, in a consistent way. “Susan, pick up,” is a much more efficient transition than, “Thank you, Stephen. Nicely read. Susan will you begin reading, please?” The first transaction is more than three times as fast as the second, maximizing the amount of time students spend reading. A couple seconds of difference may seem trivial, but if you transition fifty times per class, those seconds very quickly translate into minutes and hours of lost reading time over the course of the year. Just as important, reducing your transaction cost when switching readers causes less interruption to the text, allowing students to concentrate and keep the narrative thread vibrant, alive, and unbroken. If you make a habit of minimizing transaction cost, you can more easily switch at almost any natural pause in the text, giving you even more control over when to choose a new primary reader. Can you occasionally drop in a “lovely” or a “thank you”? Of course. Though perhaps even better would be to express it with body language or a quiet and appreciative comment while a student was still reading.

Let me show you how those things look in two classrooms: Jill Murray's and Maggie Johnson's.

We'll start with Jill, whose video Jill Murray: Quartering Act my team loves because it is from a Social Studies class. FASE Reading should happen everywhere. Some aspects of reading are likely domain specific in a way we rarely consider: A nonfiction text about a historical event sounds different from a novel. A scientific text has its own unique conventions and rhythms. Students in Jill's class are developing an ear not just for reading but for historical text.

And of course we love it because of how the students react when she announces FASE Reading (she calls it by its then-common name “Control the Game”). The kids cheer! I promise we did not pay them to do that! But it suggests the powerful sense of joy and belonging fostered by shared reading. FASE Reading is a pleasure, they are telling us.

Jill starts by modeling. She's saying (implicitly): Here is what a historical text sounds like read aloud. And just as powerfully: Here is how I'll expect you to sound when you read aloud. She's norm setting. Notice how she doesn't race. Commonly students will try to show their skill by reading fast. She wants them to show their skill through expression—by making meaning audible—not speed. You can hear, too, that the text is challenging! But Jill's students persist with relish. They see one another openly embracing challenge—no one's reading is perfect, but everyone is OK with that. And of course as they work toward fluency at this level of complexity, Jill is gathering critical data. She is also teaching them to sustain focus and effort when the going gets hard. All those things—the persistence, the expression—will translate into their independent reading, as well.

Now let's look at Maggie's class: In the video Maggie Johnson: Grew Serious, her eighth graders are reading To Kill a Mockingbird. It's a challenging text but look how they rise to the occasion. Maggie goes first. Her reading is a model of expressive reading. Arshe is next. He begins reading ably but Maggie encourages a bit more expression: “You can give me a little bit more than that,” she says. Call it gentle encouragement, permission to be expressive. This is important. Reading is social and we want a memorable experience with the text and for students to create as much meaning as possible through their reading. We want students to see one another doing that.

Notice the faint smile on Arshe's face as he rereads. He reads beautifully. Suddenly the story does come to life a little more. Maggie laughs and gently puts a hand on his shoulder to show her appreciation.

Arshe keeps reading. It's a complex text (Lexile 870) but with encouragement he's not only thriving, he's bringing a little more expression to his reading. Another appreciative chuckle from Maggie and then it's Brianna's turn. She's perhaps a bit more halting. Again Maggie is gathering data here on how well everyone can read the text. She asks Brianna to reread a sentence to ensure correct decoding, but she does so easily and with an appreciative laugh like the one she had for Arshe's reading. Brianna gets the point: you're doing fine; keep reading. And she does. Suddenly she's cantering along and crushing it on some very challenging syntax.

Maggie steps in next. She's able to read a bit faster. There are probably kids in the room who want to move the story along. Her bridging helps keep the momentum and their attention. Notice that she's chosen an especially critical passage to read herself and notice how slow and thoughtful her model is. Then she passes the reading to Mel and then to Ronnie, who responds to her request to use expressive reading to depict an irritated Atticus.

This is the only time she's taken a volunteer—the rest of the time she's selected the reader. But here she wants real energy, top-of-the-line expressiveness, and Ronnie does a beautiful job.

It's worth noting that you are seeing effect as much as cause here. Maggie's students read this difficult text so well and with such pleasure and appreciation because they FASE Read so often and because the norm of expressive reading is so well established! In Maggie's classroom, expressive, joyful reading is what you do. It's also worth noting that this is an eighth-grade classroom. Sadly, few students this age get the pleasure and benefit of the kind of reading Maggie's class is doing—perhaps because teachers mistakenly think it's not beneficial for older students and perhaps because some teachers think they won't like it or won't do it. I hope the pleasure Maggie's students take in their reading gives teachers license and encouragement to read aloud with older students!

Now that you've got the idea, here are a few more key elements of the technique.

Use Bridging to Maintain Continuity

Using FASE Reading combines two types of reading—student oral reading and teacher oral reading. As the teacher, you are naturally the best reader in the room. In reading aloud, you model the sorts of expressive reading you want from students—joyful, scholarly, what have you. You may choose to step in yourself and read especially important or tricky passages—your reading of them can bring the nuance of the text to life and help expedite comprehension. You can also use segments to resuscitate momentum after a particularly slow or struggling reader by stepping in for a few sentences, keeping the thread of the narrative alive and engaging for other students.

In bridging, a teacher takes a turn in the FASE Reading rotation, reading a short segment of text—a bridge—between student readers. In a typical sequence of bridging, a teacher might ask Trayvon to read for a few sentences, then Martina and then Hilary, and then read for a stretch herself. She might have planned in advance a part she thought she should read, or she might read to model expressive reading and bring the story to life a bit. She might read because Hilary really struggled, and the teacher didn't want the slow pace to cause other readers to disengage. She might step in more or less frequently.

Sometimes teachers will start the reading themselves to set the tone, occasionally even doing so transparently: “I'll start reading, then I'll ask some of you to pick up. Be ready!” Obviously, teacher reading needn't always bridge. When you do so is obviously discretionary, and part of the art of reading well. Harder texts often demand more bridging—to create more opportunities to model, and to balance the necessarily high rate of slower student readers.

Spot-Check, a.k.a. Oral Cloze

I learned Oral Cloze from watching Roberto de Leòn teach reading to third-grade boys at Excellence Charter School for Boys in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In one example, Roberto kicked off his reading of Phantom of the Opera by leaving a word out at the end of his first sentence: “Carlotta had the …,” he read, signaling to students with his shift in tone of voice that they should fill in the blank. On the day in question, only a handful of his boys chimed in “leading role” exactly on cue. So Rob started over: “Ooh, some boys weren't quite with us. Let's try that again. ’Carlotta had the …,’” and all his boys chimed in with “leading role,” demonstrating that they were now following along. This quick device, which Roberto uses throughout his lessons, allows him to assess leverage quickly and simply.

Use a Placeholder

As you move between reading and questioning students about what they read, it can be helpful to use quick, consistent prompts to ensure that students recognize the transition and react quickly. I call this prompt a placeholder, because it ensures that students retain their place in the text and enables a quick and immediate transition back to reading after discussion. “Hold your place. Track me,” announces Patrick Pastore, modeling for his sixth graders how to point to the spot where they left off reading Esperanza Rising, close their books partway, and engage his eyes to show they are ready to discuss. After a brief discussion of why Esperanza and Miguel react differently to a train ride, he instructs, “Pick up reading, please, Melanie.” In less than two seconds, she and her classmates are back into the book at almost no transaction cost.

Similarly, Roberto de Leòn might intone, “Finger in your book; close your book,” as he prepares his students to discuss Phantom of the Opera—and also prepares them to end that discussion and return to the book efficiently.

In the video Jessica Bracey: Circle of Gold, you can see Jessica, then at North Star Academy in Newark, New Jersey, executing a lesson with an effective segment of FASE Reading embedded in it.

You'll notice how engaged Jessica's students are as she keeps durations short and unpredictable, moving the reading around the room to involve lots of students. You'll also notice that even though she calls on a number of students to read, every single one picks up on cue—solid evidence that they're all reading along with her. But then again the best evidence of all comes after about a minute and a half. Jessica mixes in an opportunity for volunteers. “Please continue for me …” she begins, and hands shoot into the air. Students love reading when it comes to life this way; their hands show how much they feel a sense of belonging. They want to be a part of the experience.

You'll also notice a wide range of reading skills. There are outstanding readers who model expressive, engaged reading, and there are also some who struggle. Even so, those who struggle aren't afraid to read, even when it's tricky for them. There's a constantly supportive culture. And Jessica reacts to the stream of data that students reading aloud provide her to help them. She asks them to embed meaning into their expression or to reread words they didn't get the first time. Finally, you'll notice that the girl who reads first in the video also reads again later. Not only is it the ultimate in unpredictable reader selection—just because you've read once doesn't mean the game is over in Jessica's class—but this is a girl who's still developing her fluency skills. She gets double practice! And she's happy to read.

This is no small thing. These students are fifth graders. The various stages in their development as readers are passing quickly. Compare lots and lots of joyful practice for a developing reader to the alternative: the encroaching feeling for such a reader that reading is a source of embarrassment, something she will never be good at, something he wants to avoid. This can be, and is, a self-fulfilling prophecy for thousands of students.

A final note. Earlier I noted that one of the things I liked about the name FASE Reading is that a phase is a stage in a series of events. FASE Reading ideally is combined with and embedded in other classroom activities, such as five minutes of FASE Reading to bring the text to life and then a bout of writing about a text that seems vivid. Or ten minutes of silent reading with the text voice and setting brought to life. Or a discussion of the book we all just read. Imagine how much richer the discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird will be in Maggie's class after her students have heard the story come to life through Maggie's and Arshe's and Ronnie's readings. There's a lot more depth to respond to. Imagine also how much more likely they will be to pick up the book and read it that night for homework when it made them laugh together as a group that afternoon in school.