Students who don’t read are a problem, so teachers adapt the organization of lessons

When Alden Jones taught his first in-person college class during the pandemic, something surprising happened. “I’m teaching the same class I’ve been teaching for 10 years, using the same book and asking the same questions, and my students were speechless,” says Jones, who teaches literature and creative writing at Emerson College, a private liberal arts school in Boston. “Then I would ask simpler questions, silently. So I thought, ‘Okay, I know it’s not me and I know it’s not the book, so it must be you.’ What’s going on here?”

The possible reasons were complicated, she recalls. Teenage fashion. Partly because of the “shock” of COVID-19; partly, as one student told her, because of a heightened fear of peer judgment or making a mistake. Or, Jones adds, perhaps “this mentality of why should I think when I could have the answer on my phone?”

But another big question hangs over this story, and over much of Jones’s thinking about teaching in recent years: Are students struggling more with reading than they used to? And if so, what should teachers do to help them?

In recent years, Jones has increasingly adapted her teaching style and curriculum to address what she sees as a decline in students’ reading skills. Her approach involves “constant dialogue” with her classes, she says. That approach involves some sacrifices, but Jones says those are ultimately outweighed by the benefits. “I’d much rather discuss a Julio Cortázar short story that’s incredibly dense but only 10 pages long and know that everyone has read the entire 10 pages so that I can talk about the entire work,” she says. “I’d rather do that than teach a 300-page Cortázar novel that maybe one or two students will read the entire work.”

Jones is far from alone. Some educators who speak with Teen Vogue While college professors say they haven’t seen a difference in students’ willingness to read, several college professors disagree, echoing concerns expressed online by their peers about declining reading stamina and efficiency among today’s undergraduates. Adam Kotsko, a faculty member at the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, a private institution in Naperville, Illinois, wrote about the topic for Slate. He tells Teen Vogue that for years he assigned about 25 to 35 pages of reading per session in beginner-level courses, but “now it seems like if I put 20 pages of reading on my syllabus, I start to get tense.”

As students return to campus this fall, some humanities professors are wondering whether their students’ learning needs will be different than those of their counterparts 20, 10 or even five years ago. That’s why they’re taking a closer look at some of their teaching practices.

One likely reason for this recent trend is no secret: While some states are moving quickly to ban cellphones in schools, more than 70 percent of high school teachers consider cellphones, which distract students, to be a “major problem” in the classroom, according to a Pew Research Center survey. John Edwin Mason, a history professor at the University of Virginia who has taught in the United States since 1990, explains: Teen Vogue “Students are less willing to read, and they’re certainly less willing to read academic writing,” he says. Digital technology and social media have had an impact on attention spans, he says, adding, “I feel it myself.”