One of my favorite questions to ask academic coaching clients is this:
“Let's say your teacher assigns you to read pages 322 through 356. Where do you start?”
Usually, they look at me like there's something wrong with me.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if I were to video-record you starting that assignment, what would I see you do?”
Almost invariably, they tell me they'd open the book to page 322 and start reading the first sentence.
“WRONG!” I announce dramatically.
Then I quickly reassure them: “Not wrong to read that way! But it's not your only option.”
That's what most people do! Open to the assigned page, start reading, and keep going until you reach the end.
“But tell me something,” I ask. “How quickly do you start losing interest or spacing out?”
“Pretty quickly,” they usually admit.
And that's when I get to share some good news: There are other ways to approach a reading assignment that might help their brains stay engaged.
“Want to learn how?”
I love this moment because we're not just introducing a new reading strategy. We're challenging an assumption the student may have carried around for years: that reading means starting at the beginning and continuing, sentence by sentence, until you're finished.
But here's something I've been thinking about lately.
If we want students to approach reading differently, how much experience do we have with those different approaches?
Knowing which strategies to recommend isn't the same as knowing how to help a student experience why they're useful.
Wait. How Did You Miss That?!
In his book Outsmart Your Brain, cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham describes an interesting problem with the way we read.
Researchers have found that readers are generally pretty good at noticing certain problems in a text. An unfamiliar word? That might stop us. A sentence with wonky grammar? We may notice that, too.
But what happens when two sentences contradict each other?
We're surprisingly likely to miss it.
Willingham describes a demonstration involving a paragraph about the Manhattan Project. The first sentence says it was an enormous undertaking. Later, the paragraph says the project was relatively small. Those statements contradict each other, but 40% of the high school students in the example failed to notice.
The problem isn't that they couldn't read the sentences. They could.
The problem is that understanding one sentence at a time isn't the same as understanding how the sentences fit together.
And textbooks make that especially tricky.
A story often gives us a sequence of events to follow. A textbook may ask us to track categories, comparisons, causes, and arguments—and connect ideas introduced several pages apart.
Willingham's point is that readers need to do more than understand each sentence in isolation. They need to connect ideas across the text (Willingham, 2023).
So when a student tells me they've read every page but can't explain what the chapter was about, I don't necessarily think the solution is to tell them to concentrate harder.
I think we need to teach them what to do while they're reading.
And that brings us to a challenge for educators: What does teaching that actually look like?
Would You Give Me $2,000 to Plan Your Vacation?
Here's another question I like to ask students.
“Imagine you're going on vacation, and you have $2,000 to spend. I'm going to offer you two options.
“Option one: Give me your money, and I'll plan a trip for you.
“Option two: Give me your money, and I'll plan the trip. We're going to make three stops. First, we'll spend some time at the beach. Then we'll visit a big city and go to a cultural event. And finally, we'll head into the forest for a hike.
“Which vacation would you rather sign up for?”
It's not that the second trip is guaranteed to be better. Maybe my mystery vacation is spectacular!
But most people would rather have at least some idea of where they're going.
Now they can anticipate the beach. They can wonder what city they'll visit. They have some landmarks to look forward to, and they can recognize when they've reached them.
I tell students that I think our brains appreciate having an itinerary when we read, too.
Not every detail. That would defeat the purpose of reading!
Just enough of a map that we aren't wandering through 35 pages wondering where on earth we're headed.
And there's research to back up the importance of understanding how texts are organized. A review of 45 studies found that when students were explicitly taught to recognize the structure of informational texts, they got better at understanding what they read (Hebert et al., 2016).
Now, that research isn't specifically about my vacation analogy. But the analogy gives me a way to help students understand why having a sense of a text's structure might be useful.
And that's an important distinction.
Telling students to preview a chapter is not the same as helping them understand why they'd want to.
One member of the Anti-Boring Learning Lab already knew that previewing a textbook was important and had taught students to do it. But she appreciated the vacation analogy because it gave her a fun (dare we say “anti-boring”?) way to explain the purpose behind the strategy.
Sometimes educators don't need another strategy to add to their students' lists. They need better ways to help students understand why a strategy is worth trying—and opportunities to experience what it can do.
That's a big part of what we work on in the Lab: not just knowing which strategies are supported by learning science, but learning the art of teaching them so students will actually use them.
What Do Experienced Readers Do Differently?
Less experienced readers and more experienced readers don't necessarily approach the same text in the same way.
In an influential study, researchers asked readers to think aloud as they worked through a complex college-level text. Less experienced readers tended to focus on what the text said, while more experienced readers also considered what the author was doing: Why was the author making this argument? Who were they trying to persuade? How did the different ideas fit together? (Haas & Flower, 1988).
It's a small study, but the distinction is fascinating. Experienced readers aren't necessarily just better at understanding individual sentences. They're doing additional thinking as they read.
Here's what I find interesting from a teaching perspective:
We can tell students to “look for the main idea” or “think about the author's purpose.” But those instructions can sound awfully abstract if students haven't experienced what it feels like to approach a text that way.
How do you demonstrate the difference between simply collecting information and trying to understand an author's argument?
How do you help students notice what changes when they approach a text with a particular purpose?
These are things we can explain. But they're also things we can practice.
And I'm increasingly convinced that educators benefit from practicing them ourselves before trying to teach them.
Want to help students become more strategic readers?
Our free Science of Studying guide offers research-informed strategies to help students learn and study more effectively.
Explore the Free Guide →Wait. Are Educators Reading This Way, Too?
Inside the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, I have a video series called How to Read a 400-Page Book in 2 Hours.
Of course, that title is meant to be a tad “clickbaity.” More realistically, the goal isn't to understand every word of a 400-page book in two hours. It's to learn how to navigate a long text strategically, figure out where to focus your attention, and decide what deserves a closer read.
It's designed to help educators rethink how they approach complicated nonfiction texts so they can teach those skills to students.
Some of the most interesting comments below the videos came from educators reflecting on their own reading habits.
One Lab member wrote:
“It's incredibly helpful to be given permission to skim and scan where necessary! There are so many books I HAVEN'T read because I learned somewhere in my lifetime that I have to read books from beginning to end, not skipping any words.”
That word permission really stands out to me.
Because the belief that you must read every word, in order, from beginning to end can be surprisingly persistent—even among experienced educators.
Experimenting with these approaches ourselves can help us recognize assumptions we didn't know we had. It can also give us something concrete to demonstrate—not just another instruction to give.
Willingham recommends that instructors demonstrate how to approach difficult texts rather than assuming students can apply a strategy just because they've heard it explained (Willingham, 2023).
Which raises an interesting question: How do we model a process that we haven't necessarily practiced ourselves?
Beyond the Highlighter: Come Practice With Me!
Well, that's exactly what we're going to tackle in my upcoming Beyond the Highlighter masterclass (November 2026).
Instead of spending the whole time talking about reading strategies, we're going to get our hands on some actual texts and practice together.
Here's what we'll be working on:
Skimming with purpose. How can we help students get the lay of the land, identify what matters, and decide where they need to slow down and read closely?
Finding and summarizing key ideas. How do we teach students to distinguish main ideas from supporting details, track what matters, and summarize complicated material without getting lost?
Charting a Book on One Page. We'll try out my visual approach to organizing the ideas in a nonfiction text into a one-page summary.
Teaching the strategies, not just using them. How do we point out options to students in real time, demonstrate why a strategy is worth trying, and help students practice until they can use it independently?
Partnering with AI without outsourcing the learning. We'll explore how AI can support skimming and summarizing while keeping students responsible for the thinking.
We'll also consider how to adapt these approaches for different students, including neurodivergent learners. We might experiment with the format, the amount of text, the pace, or the level of guidance. The goal isn't to give every student the same procedure. It's to help them find approaches that work for their brains and their assignments.
The part I'm especially interested in is the teaching. It's one thing to know that previewing or summarizing can be useful. It's another to sit beside a student, notice where they're getting stuck, and introduce an alternative in a way that makes them want to try it.
That's the Anti-Boring approach: combining the science of learning with the practical art of helping students actually use what we're teaching.
So if you're an academic coach, tutor, or educator who wants to get better at teaching students how to tackle tricky texts, come practice with me!
A Few More Questions About Strategic Reading
Phew! You already read a whole blog post, and now we're giving you MORE questions?! What gives?! You've already gotten all the new content—we promise. But Q&As make it easier for skimmers to find what they need and for AI to understand and share our work. So this section is for the humans and the robots.
Is it wrong for students to read a textbook from beginning to end?
Not necessarily! My dramatic “WRONG!” is a playful way of helping students question their default habits, not a declaration that linear reading is forbidden. The point is that students should have more than one way to approach a complicated text—and know when each approach makes sense. That's a central idea in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab's study-skills training.
Does research show that teaching reading strategies improves comprehension?
Yes, although results depend on the strategies, students, and outcomes being measured. Research on text-structure instruction, for example, has found benefits for understanding informational texts. At the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, we're interested in both that research and the practical craft of teaching students to use strategies independently.
Is strategic reading the same thing as speed-reading?
No. Strategic reading means making purposeful decisions about how to approach a text. It doesn't mean racing through unfamiliar material and pretending you've understood it. The Anti-Boring Learning Lab's approach is about helping readers become more thoughtful and flexible, not simply faster.
Can students with ADHD or dyslexia benefit from strategic reading instruction?
Potentially, yes, but the strategies need to fit the learner. An academic coach might adapt the amount of text, the reading format, the pace, or the level of support. In the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, we emphasize flexible approaches rather than expecting every neurodivergent student to follow the same procedure.
What if I'm an educator or academic coach who never learned these strategies myself?
You're in good company! Lab members have described discovering new ways to approach their own reading as adults. That's one reason the Anti-Boring Learning Lab's Beyond the Highlighter masterclass includes hands-on practice: educators can experience the strategies themselves before teaching them to students.
Works Cited
Haas, C., & Flower, L. (1988). Rhetorical reading strategies and the construction of meaning. College Composition and Communication, 39(2), 167–183. https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc198811161
Hebert, M., Bohaty, J. J., Nelson, J. R., & Brown, J. (2016). The effects of text structure instruction on expository reading comprehension: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(5), 609–629. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000082
Willingham, D. T. (2023). How to read difficult books: A guide for high school and college students. American Educator. https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2023/willingham
Willingham, D. T. (2023). Outsmart your brain: Why learning is hard and how you can make it easy. Gallery Books.