On Leveled Libraries

Thought I would update you on some revisions to our classroom library in the seventh grade. We are moving away from having every "letter level" labeled in the library toward more general ranges. These ranges loosely correlate to the F&P grade-level bands.

We are using colors as well, instead of letters or numbers. They are as follows:

• Blue = QRS (and in some cases lower than Q / roughly 4th grade level)
• Green = TUV (roughly 5th grade level)
• Maroon = WX (roughly 6th grade level)
• Yellow = Y (as well as some previously-identified Zs leveled that way mostly because of "mature content" and not because of text complexity) / roughly 7th grade level)
• Z's will stay labeled as Z's and will still be separated out.

Most books now have a colored sticker on the front to indicate which band they belong to.

There are several benefits to this method:

1) It removes, albeit slightly, some of the stigma associated with choosing a book from a discrete leveled bin (and the pretense that books can be scientifically assigned to an exactly accurate 'level').

2) It simplifies the task of deciding how to level books that have not been officially leveled by F&P---allowing us to determine a more general band.

3) It allows students to quickly determine a general level when choosing from a genre-based bin by looking at the colored stickers.

This from Lucy Calkins, the purveyor and purporter of all things leveled:

We've leveled many, but purposely not all, of the books in every classroom library. The fact that we have leveled these books does not mean that teachers should necessarily convey all of these levels to children. We expect teachers will often make these levels visible on less than half their books (through the use of colored tabs), giving readers the responsibility of choosing appropriate books for themselves by judging unmarked books against the template of leveled books...

We do not imagine a classroom library that is divided into levels as discrete as the levels established by Reading Recovery or by Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas... These levels were designed for either one-to-one tutorials or intensive, small-group guided reading sessions, and in both of these situations a vigilant teacher is present to constantly shepherd children along toward more challenging books.

If a classroom library is divided into micro-levels and each child's independent reading life is slotted into a micro-level, some children might languish at a particular level, and many youngsters might not receive the opportunities to read across a healthy range of somewhat-easier and somewhat-harder books. Most worrisome of all, because we imagine children working often with reading partners who "like to read the same kinds of books as you do," classroom libraries that contain ten micro-levels (instead of say, five more general levels) could inadvertently convey the message that many children as well as many books were off-limits as partners to particular readers...

...Of course leveling books is and always will be a subjective and flawed process; and therefore teachers everywhere should deviate from assigned levels, ours and others, when confident of their rationale, or when particularly knowledgeable about a reader.

Some ideas are worth highlighting here and are important when explaining our rationale for our classroom libraries and independent reading program

• The notion that every child should be aware of his or her exact level and only read books at that level (which is the system in many schools) is not endorsed by the very founders of this style of reading workshop.
• Teacher discretion is valuable and important.
• This does not mean we should not assess students' levels or have leveled ranges in our classroom.

I also want to point out that I think leveling and instruction associated with leveling is different for middle school than elementary school. It is especially different when dealing with students who have significant reading disabilities. Calkins seems most concerned about students "languishing" with lower level books. It seems at our school we are more concerned with students continually choosing books that are not "somewhat-harder" but much too hard. In other words, we sort of have the opposite problem. I think once students hit seventh grade it is much more challenging to encourage those students still reading at a third or fourth grade level to read Amber Brown or Encyclopedia Brown while classmates next to them read Divergent or a steamy Sarah Dessen novel.

I am curious to see who much growth we see in the TC assessments this spring and the implications of what we find for revising our program next year.