How do we support college reading? Much has been written about “the reading problem” in higher education. Earlier this month, in the January 12 “Daily Briefing” Chronicle of Higher Ed reporter Beckie Supiano captured some insights about what works from a panel on this topic at the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting in Chicago.
If you don’t have access to the Chronicle, she notes:
“Here are a few ideas for helping students become better readers that my fellow presenters offered:
Social rewards: The winning argument for getting high-school students off of their phones at school is having them interact, said Daniel Rhoades, who teaches social studies at Glenbrook South High School, in the Chicago suburbs. Rhoades uses small-group discussions with participation points, in-class writing with fast feedback, and games like quiz bowl to encourage students to do the reading — and he makes sure that his assessments build on these exercises.
Personal, practical benefits: Nika Hogan, a professor of English at Pasadena City College who has written about teaching reading in college, starts by having students do a few exercises about who they are and why they’re at college. She emphasizes that reading is a way of solving problems and that doing it well is empowering in real-world settings.
Productive struggle: College can make academic struggle feel like a private burden, said Laura McEnaney, an emerita professor of history at Whittier College and the consulting editor for #AHRSyllabus, the section of the American Historical Review that focuses on teaching. But professors can reframe it as a collective challenge, she said, and give students tools to work together to make sense of readings that are more difficult than what they’ve encountered before. History students often work together on primary texts, she said, but there’s no reason they can’t do so with scholarly texts. Her mantra: “We read alone, we understand together.”
Everything in this summary resonates with the threshold concepts we identified in Breakthroughs in College Reading:
Reading is social and personal
Reading is active problem solving
Students must be allowed to make sense of texts
And of course, most importantly, when everything is working as it should—meaning that students have found the motivation, courage, and tenacity to share their thinking—we have so much to learn from them. Reading apprenticeships are reciprocal.If you are trying to figure out how to support your college students as active readers and active learners, consider joining the college Reading Apprenticeship community of practice, and know that you are not alone!
Written by Nika Hogan our Reading Apprenticeship College Coordinator ([email protected])
Post Date
January 27, 2026