Do You Have Any Pet Peeves About Reading? Here Are My Top Ten 

Tim Shanahan

Blast from the Past: This blog was first posted on October 9 and 16, 2021, and was reposted on June 6, 2026. The original was issued in two parts over two weeks. Those pieces have been combined here. That, along with some minor text revisions and updates, is the only change. It is not that we have made no progress over the past five years – that would be unfair — but these issues are still annoying. This version includes a link to the 30 and 84 comments elicited by their first appearance.

Pet peeves are, by their very nature, complaints. I assume no one wants to hear a lot of whining these days. If they did, they’d be on X or in Congress.

Nevertheless, like lots of people in reading education, I get annoyed by the tenor of our disputes and the sluggishness of our progress. Accordingly, here are 10 of my gripes.  

Pet peeve #1: Balanced literacy proponents who don’t tell what’s being balanced or whose idea of balance is woefully unbalanced.

Many school districts still brag about their “balanced literacy” programs. Balance, according to my dictionary, is a condition in which “different elements are equal or in the correct proportions.” That to me means that a balanced literacy program is one in which the elements of literacy get equal amounts of instruction. Or, that the time devoted to each is in correct proportion.

What elements are balanced in balanced literacy?

According to one guide, there must be three balances: one between reading and writing instruction, another between teacher-directed and student-directed activities, and a third between skills-based and meaning-based approaches (Frey, et al., 2005).

If that’s the case, then few of these so-called balanced literacy programs are accomplishing balance.

Many schools, for instance, offer 90 minutes of daily reading instruction and 30 of writing. That obviously fails to strike that reading-writing balance.  

The idea of balancing teacher- and student-directed activities is of some concern given the research on the issue. Carol Connor and her colleagues found that students tend to need more of one than the other. Learning is more likely to accrue from explicit teaching than from discovery learning or independent practice (e.g., Foorman, et al., 2006; Gallagher, Barber, Beck, & Buehl, 2019). Rupley, Blair, & Nichols, 2009), and this is especially true for struggling students (Connor, Morrison, & Katch, 2004; Connor, Morrison, & Petrella, 2004). This balance seems like a good way to hold back some kids, particularly the most disadvantaged. That can’t be good.

Then there’s that third kind of balance, skills-based and meaning-based teaching. Half the instructional time would be devoted to phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, handwriting, and text reading fluency, with the rest going to guided reading, shared reading, independent reading, writing, oral language and the like.

With two hours of ELA, kids would get an hour of skills and an hour of meaning/language. That kind of balance makes sense, but I’ve never seen that much skills in any of the balanced literacy schools I’ve visited. Despite the balanced label, skills tend to get short shrift in those classrooms.

I hunted up some more recent descriptions of “balanced literacy” online. One site says a balanced program “strikes a balance between both whole language and phonics.” I’m not sure what they mean by whole language, but an hour of daily phonics instruction would be excessive (NICHD, 2001).

That same site claims there are 5 components of balanced literacy: read aloud, guided reading, shared reading, independent reading, and word study. Kids in a class that balanced those would be unlikely to become very good readers; there is just too little skills time.

Another site said that the balance is between “explicit skill instruction and by the use of authentic texts,” while another called for a balance among reading workshop, writing workshop, and word work.

I gave up at that point.

It should be obvious that “balanced literacy” isn’t really a thing. It’s a shell game. No one agrees on the essential components or even on what balance means, it’s just another feel-good term, socially appealing, but without any real meaning. Advertisers like such terms because they “counter consumers’ negative emotions” while requiring nothing (Labroo & Rucker, 2009). The term may be reassuring to parents, but it camouflages the fact that key aspects of literacy programs will receive inordinate amounts of attention at the expense of other essentials that would greatly benefit their children’s progress.

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