On the level

Elementary librarians (like me) and maybe even the middle school practioners spend lots of time tryin to decipher what the reading people are up to--and one of the trickiest bits involves book leveling.  Kate Todd presented a librarians guide to leveled reading and explained the difference between quantative leveling (such as lexile levels) that use a formula based on word length, sentence length to determine reading difficulty, and qualitative leveling (such as Fuontas and Pinnell) that use additional features of the book to determine reading difficulty.  Notes for this are here.

Todd then presented some potential benefits of leveling books--helping students to find books they can read independently, providing the motivation of a successful reading experience.  However, she pointed out that librarians, appropriately, have some concerns about using book leveling in the library.  In fact ALA and AASL have issued statements cautioning librarians about some issues with book leveling, such as revealing confidential information about students (telling students they can only take a book at their reading levels shows each student who can and cannot read well), having children limited in their book selection and censoring what they select, and skewing the reasons for reading to be about rewards (e.g., Accelerated Reader) and not about the intrinsic value of reading.  LOTS of discussion ensued with many concerns raised about leveling in the library...an interesting topic to pursue in our own practice with our own reading teachers.