Reimagining Reading Programs: Cultivating Competency over Compliance

Every educator wants to nurture "lifelong readers". This often means developing students who not only can read but choose to read in and out of the classroom. Yet, somewhere between assigned passages and comprehension quizzes, many reading programs (and the way many school districts insist they be implemented) lose sight of that goal. They cultivate completion and correctness, but not curiosity. They teach the content... not the person.

1. The Complexity of Compliance

Compliance is not a villain; it’s a reality.Every classroom depends on a shared understanding of boundaries and expectations. Students comply with routines that protect collective safety, promote fairness, and create stability. This kind of compliance—grounded in respect and community—is essential for learning to occur at all.

But compliance becomes problematic when it shifts from cooperation for community to conditioning for performance.

Too often, reading programs treat students not as developing thinkers but as behavioral subjects—responding to stimuli in the form of assignments, stickers, points, and grades. This is a form of training, not teaching, and this distinction is worth a moment of reflection.

It’s not that compliance shouldn’t exist; it’s that its purpose has been misdirected. Educators and institutions have the authority (and the privilege!) to decide whether compliance will serve health and harmony or habit and hierarchy.

At its best, compliance can be understood as an act in accordance with a wish or command, and this wish could potentially foster a commitment to an understanding that one’s effort contributes to a shared or collective good. At its worst, compliance reinforces control: the belief that learning is something done to students for their good.

The goal here is not to entirely reject compliance but to understand how it is used, whether intentionally or not, in its worst ways and how it can, with intention, be used in its best ways.

2. The Missing Dimension: Motivation

Children arrive at school already motivated to learn about each other and the world around them. Their curiosity is innate and collective. They want to share discoveries, not just make them.

Yet the moment reading becomes a checklist of leveled texts and scored quizzes, that natural joy of meaning-making is replaced by the fatigue of performance.

And yes, reading programs do work! Effectiveness is not what’s missing. What’s missing is the dimension of why students are learning what they’re learning. For many teachers, that why might be something akin to preparing students for success, tying the meaning of success to an ability to read at steadily increasing complexity of texts. For many of those teachers, getting each student to love reading is, logically, not entirely in their control. These teachers likely view this endeavour (encourage students to become lifelong readers) as an impossible task and, through this lens, fall back on their contracted responsibilities to teach these concepts and skills regardless of student interest and motivation on their district's schedule for expected learning as a result of scheduled "effective teaching".

And this is where we find this missing dimension and can reflect on its impact on education.

Traditional programs measure readiness (what a student can read) but rarely measure motivation (what a student wants to read or why they want to understand). This is, arguably, not a measurable dynamic when we consider the very personal nature of motivation. But when motivation is ignored, learning quickly becomes a task of compliance. Students do what’s asked but feel no connection to why it matters. That’s when rewards for completion shift the classroom from one of curiosity to one of correctness.

And teachers are validated when they say (often) that there’s not enough time for all this and that, if we wait for motivation, students won’t learn at the necessary rate of grade-level increases of text complexity and comprehension depth.

Can we cultivate motivation?

Cultivating motivation isn’t about waiting; it’s about designing for it. It’s not unstructured freedom... it’s structured purpose. When students understand why they’re learning and how their growth connects to something larger than a grade, they often don’t need external rewards to engage. Their curiosity becomes the structure. Their sense of purpose becomes the pacing guide.

The most difficult part of this process is how students, for those who acknowledge how progressive learning across grade levels benefits them as people and as a community, will choose reading passages and reflective tasks that don't look like what a specific reading program might have chosen or assigned.

This is where things get interesting. Once motivation becomes part of the design, the next question isn’t about what students read, but how they make sense of it together.

3. Metacognition: The Bridge from Motivation to Mastery

Most comprehension programs focus on output such as summaries, quizzes, and question sets, which are measurable results that validate accountability systems. But they often skip this inner dimension of metacognition, the process of developing a student’s capacity to think about how they think.

Metacognition invites students to step back and observe their own minds at work. It transforms reading from something performed for others into something understood for oneself and then shared with peers, not as a means of external validation, but as a celebration of understanding.

Skeptical teachers might say: “That sounds great in theory, but my students aren’t mature enough yet. They can barely focus on the text, let alone reflect on how they’re thinking about it.” And they’re right to question it because many already do ask students to reflect. Most reading programs include after-reading prompts like “What strategy did you use?” or “How did you figure out the main idea?”

The problem isn’t the presence of reflection as mch as the framing of it. These prompts are often treated as end-of-lesson checks rather than habits of mind to be cultivated in the moment. They assess outcomes of thinking, not the process of thought itself. Students respond with what they believe the teacher wants to hear rather than noticing their own cognition as it unfolds.

True metacognition must be taught, modeled, and named. It’s not absorbed by proximity to reflection questions or through promised reward for compliance. It’s developed through repeated opportunities to notice thinking as it happens, relevant to what a person is seeking to accomplish. When a teacher pauses mid-thought to say out loud, “I need to reread that sentence because my brain didn’t make sense of it the first time,” they’re not just teaching a reading strategy, they’re modeling what awareness looks and sounds like. It's not a planned lesson, it's an interaction. It's who they are. They are a metacognitive teacher. For many students, this level of concrete modeling is essential. They are still developing the capacity for abstract reasoning, so they need to see and hear what thinking sounds like before they can do it themselves.

When this reframing of metacognitive modeling and instruction overlaps with student purpose and motivation for reading that aligns with both targeted skills as well as their own goals for reading certain texts, over time, these routines shift reflection from a worksheet response to a shared classroom language. That language builds awareness; awareness builds patience; and patience builds community.

Please note: students who have never experienced this kind of environment or had a teacher model metacognition and create a metacognitive classroom environment may initially reject the idea wholesale as it will not align with their prior understanding of both their role as a student and the purpose of reading (and school).

This awareness not only takes patience but, as a result, builds patience both for oneself and for others. Students begin to see that everyone is learning how to learn, and reflection becomes communal rather than solitary. They notice that what helps one person might not help another and that difference becomes a resource, not a problem. When one student’s explanation helps a peer understand in a way a teacher’s didn’t, and this awareness is celebrated and cultivated as part of learning as a social activity, learning transforms into an act of connection.

This is also where metacognition intersects with social and emotional development. It builds the same muscles as empathy, perspective-taking, and self-regulation. And it’s in these moments when students think about how they think together that reading evolves from an individual performance into a collaborative inquiry.

4. Cultivating Competence through Connection

According to Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory (1985), intrinsic motivation flourishes when three needs are met:

• Autonomy – meaningful choice

• Competence – visible growth

• Relatedness – belonging and purpose

Many reading programs frame competence as an individual achievement, measured by personal progress charts, scores, and levels rather than shared growth. This approach teaches students to see success as something earned alone instead of something developed together. For example, a student might celebrate moving from Level M to N without realizing how discussing the same story with peers could deepen everyone’s understanding and improve their learning as part of collective growth.

True competence develops within a collective context, with students growing together, learning to help one another, and finding joy in shared progress.

In this model, competence is not about ranking ability but about realizing capacity. Students don’t read to outscore peers; they read to contribute, to bring insight, ideas, and discoveries that others may find interesting (or not!) and prioritize their interests as their motivation guides their learning in ways their peers may not have considered.

5. A Developmental Backbone

For students, this shift is developmentally crucial since many in upper elementary and middle school are moving from Piaget’s concrete operations into abstract reasoning, and through Erikson’s Industry vs. Inferiority stage, where they seek validation through meaningful contributions.

When reading instruction centers on compliance, children internalize that their worth depends on performance. When it centers on competence and reflection, they learn that growth is shared, not scored, and that their competence is the product of their intentional efforts rather than an authority's perception of their effort based on products disconnected from their interests and motivations.

When these developmental stages are curated and cultivated, difficulty no longer means failure; it means opportunity. Success no longer means winning; it means contributing. And literacy no longer means decoding words, it means decoding the self and society.

6. A Framework for Growth

A reimagined reading framework balances structure and freedom, individual mastery and communal purpose. It weaves three essential layers together:

Layer	Focus	Guiding Question	Example Practice
Motivation	Why do I want to read?	What connects this to my life or community?	Choice menus tied to personal and collective inquiry
Metacognition	How do I understand what I read?	What strategies or habits help me make meaning?	Reflection journals and think-alouds
Competence	Who am I becoming as a reader and contributor?	How does my learning help me and others grow?	Peer-led discussions, class showcases, and self-goal tracking

This framework honors outcomes without reducing students to them. It holds accountability within a context of belonging.It doesn’t erase compliance—it redeems it, transforming it into cooperation through shared purpose.

Final Thought: The Long View

Lifelong learning doesn’t begin with assignments; it begins with awareness. When students see reading as an expression of curiosity, not compliance, they move toward self-authorship. They learn not only how to read, but why reading matters for themselves, for others, and for the world they are helping to shape.

The teacher’s role, then, is not to deliver comprehension. It is to design conditions for consciousness, meaning that teachers help students see that learning can e both personal and communal and help them to not just reflect on who they are but how they view the world around them.

Because when compliance evolves into commitment, and competence becomes connection, education transcends training as a purpose and becomes a transformation into the cultivation of collective values.

Greg Mullen

October 12, 2025

General Consult

30min

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✏️ Author Note

Greg Mullen is a third-grade teacher and creator of the Self-Directed Schooling model and the Mullen Bioecological Framework for classroom culture and professional development. His work integrates motivational psychology, developmental theory, and design thinking to promote learner autonomy, collective growth, and moral development in K–12 settings.