When Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the winners of the 2017 Library of Congress Literacy Awards on Sept. 1 at the National Book Festival, among the 15 international organizations receiving a prize of $5,000 for best practices in literacy was the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), a K-8 demonstration school founded in 1990 by educator Nancie Atwell, the winner of the 2015 Global Teacher Prize. Originated by philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, the awards honor groups working to promote reading worldwide and doing exemplary, innovative, replicable work. The Library of Congress award recognizes CTL’s reading workshop, an approach grounded in voluminous, independent, book reading.

Numerous research studies confirm the diverse, lasting benefits of self-selected reading.  Independent book readers score highest on standardized reading tests.  They also develop larger vocabularies, write more effectively, perform better in math and science, and spell more accurately.  As adults, book readers vote more often, volunteer more, demonstrate greater empathy, and even live longer.  Yet independent reading remains a low-priority activity in many classrooms.

Students at the Center for Teaching and Learning choose their own books, read them at school and home, and soar as readers, with remarkable gains in accuracy, stamina, reading habits, and love of literature.  The annual average for middle school students is forty titles each; in the primary grades, where picture books reign, individual children read and love hundreds of books every year.

CTL practices that support independent reading include daily time set aside for book reading; teacher check-ins with each student; mini-lessons about authors and illustrators, genres, literary elements, and decoding strategies; individualized assessment; bookbags to transport titles home and back; a newsletter about how parents can help; summer book loans and bookbags; and curated classroom libraries with 50-150 volumes per student.

Reading makes readers. The Library of Congress honors CTL’s reading workshops — voluminous, happy experiences with self-selected stories — as “a way to teach and learn reading for a lifetime.”