Escape Velocity: How Narrative Immersion Can Revolutionize Reading Education

by James Flanagan

There is a superior approach to reading instruction. All students, but particularly students from low-income households, need immediate access to well-written, high-interest books from diverse perspectives and authors. Students need a high-volume of daily prosodic modeling and reading practice, and they need agency in determining the course of their study. I call this systematic approach to meeting these needs in the classroom narrative immersion .

Narrative immersion creates the right atmosphere for students to have autotelic reading experiences every day, and counters the dark pull of social media with face-to-face social literacy. When we align reading instruction with students’ emotional and learning needs we not only have more engaged, motivated, and happier students; but additionally, we achieve highly significant growth in vocabulary and comprehension.

The combination of joy, intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and freedom needs to be a daily experience for all of our children, and when we strive for it with intense, deliberate practice, we can achieve stunning results. Narrative immersion is a classroom structure that any teacher or school is capable of implementing, and the classroom structure every child deserves.

172 pages, Paperback

Published June 30, 2021

Reviews

[Brian Shevory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Escape velocity is usually a part of physics, defined as the speed an object needs to overcome the gravitational forces keeping it down and propelling it into the atmosphere, overcoming the limitations tying it down to its original environment and seeking out new space, adventures and opportunities. The title, then, is fitting for James Flanagan’s book examining a novel approach to teaching reading in Middle School. While the book primarily focuses on examples from Mr. Flanagan’s classroom, it’s important to consider that these approaches can be applied to other grade levels, whether in Elementary or High School. Full disclosure, I’ve known Mr. Flanagan for a long time, and we frequently talked about teaching reading and helping our students succeed beyond the classroom. While we’ve shared books and articles that have influenced our pedagogy, Mr. Flanagan has gone a step further with this excellent book, and achieved the rare feat of publishing an educational book that straddles both the theory and practitioner worlds, appealing to both scholars and teachers.
Escape Velocity takes Mr. Flanagan’s years of teaching and examines the evolution of his practice to share his insights into engaging students in reading and helping them become passion readers (as opposed to function readers, who read only for the function of reading). Flanagan explores the way narrative fiction allows for this kind of immersion into worlds and ideas and engages students in learning. This book not only takes us through Flanagan’s daily routine with his students, but it also provides testimonials from his students (and some parents) about their experiences with narrative immersion, what they gained from reading and how this has shaped their perspectives and engagement in school. Flanagan’s book extends beyond most books about reading and explores ideas and makes connections with areas like philosophy, history, art, poetry, and science. It was exciting and interesting to see how reading is much more than test scores or lexile levels, but rather a means to understand the world and help determine one’s own place in it. Flanagan makes a strong argument for the ways in which reading serves as an important tool to help us empathize with others and understand problems and issues in the world. The book is not merely an anecdotal review of his experiences; Flanagan does provide data to demonstrate the improvement of his students’ reading levels. However, what’s more powerful is the interviews he provides with past and present students who share their experiences with reading and what they have gained as a result of this narrative immersion. These powerful testimonials were one of the main highlights of this wonderful book.
While Mr. Flanagan and I have discussed our teaching and specifically the ways that he has tirelessly worked to engage his students and develop their passion for reading, it was exciting to read about it, understand some of the background and methods he uses, and most significantly, hear from this students about how this novel approach to reading instruction affected them both in their learning and their development as young adults/citizens. It was also exciting to see how Mr. Flanagan’s classes explore ideas outside the typical scope of English/Language Arts in Middle School. Whether it was examining the mythology of Ancient Greece or analyzing poetry, Mr. Flanagan has prepared his students to move beyond the classroom and propel themselves into being empathetic and engaged young adults who will surely contribute to the greater good of society.