Why Stamina Matters in Reading

Margaret Troyer, Ed.D

November 11, 2026

During the recent EdWeek panel Strategies to Create a Culture of Reading in Schools,one word kept coming up over and over again: stamina!

Reporter Sarah Schwartz asked seventh-grade teacher Jaime Johnson and me why it’s important for kids to read whole books, not just short passages. And the first reason that came to my mind was that reading whole books requires and builds stamina. But Jaime answered first - and the first reason she gave was stamina.

So why is it so important to focus on stamina?

Stamina may be an unrecognized barrier to reading success. Stamina does not appear in Scarborough’s reading rope, and may not always be considered as a part of the science of reading. So teachers may not realize what a big deal stamina is. If you ask students who are not accustomed to reading independently to sit and read a whole chapter, they will not have the stamina to be successful. And it’s easy for the teacher to respond to that by getting angry that students aren’t putting in the effort, or by deciding that silent independent reading doesn’t work and reverting to short passages or to reading aloud to kids. Instead, teachers need to recognize that just like word recognition, stamina is a skill that needs to be built.

So how can we build students’ reading stamina?

Second, we need to give them a reason to persist. It helps to give students who struggle with stamina engaging texts that they want to read. We need to give them a purpose for reading, and we need to give them the opportunity to talk with their peers about what they have read. Second grade teacher Amanda Ketzer pointed out that it’s the social aspect of social media that is engaging for kids. Making reading a social experience gives kids a reason to read.

First, we have to meet them where they are. In STARI, we ask students to read very small chunks. At the beginning of the school year, maybe kids can only read a paragraph before they need to stop and talk about it. The size of the chunks gradually increases across the school year - from a paragraph, to two paragraphs, to a page, to two pages, to a whole chapter. We need to allow them to experience success, and then build on that success to push them to read for a little longer, and then a little longer.

It’s critically important to build reading stamina so that kids can persist in reading the often boring passages they have to read on standardized tests, and the longer, challenging textbooks they will have to read in high school. Kids may be coming to school with less reading stamina than ever before, but it’s possible, and essential, to build their stamina, rather than working around their low stamina by assigning shorter texts.