Beyond “I Don’t Like to Read”: What We Learned About Teen Reading Motivation
Published October 2026
Every secondary teacher has heard it: “I don’t like to read.”
In our September webinar, Beyond “I Don't Like to Read”: Building a Classroom of Readers Through Love-Powered Effort, Zinc’s Laurie Flynn joined middle school teacher Brenda Aston and high school teacher Nathan Busse to explore what might be underneath that statement—and how educators can help students move beyond compliance toward genuine motivation.
The conversation centered on a simple idea: Students need both the tools to succeed as readers and the support to persist when reading gets difficult.
Here are three ideas we’re still thinking about:
1. Motivation can’t rest entirely on grades, rewards, or adult approval.
Grades, feedback, and expectations matter. But they can’t carry the full weight of motivation.
If we want students to become independent readers and learners, they need opportunities to discover their own reasons to persist—to experience curiosity, growth, and the satisfaction that can come from putting real effort into something.
2. Productive struggle can become its own source of motivation.
When a student sticks with a difficult passage, goes back to the text, and finally makes sense of something, the payoff isn’t only getting the answer right.
Their effort has changed what they’re capable of doing.
Those small wins matter. Making them visible can help students begin to see struggle not as evidence that they’re “bad at reading,” but as a normal part of becoming a stronger reader.
3. Teachers create the conditions—but students bring the effort.
Teachers can offer meaningful choices and challenges, talk explicitly about effort, celebrate growth, and give students concrete tools for working through difficulty.
But we don’t have to carry the impossible burden of making every text irresistible.
As the teachers in our webinar discussed, students already show us that they’re capable of tremendous effort when something matters to them. Our job is to help create more opportunities for them to recognize—and take ownership of—that capacity.
Watch the conversation
Want to hear more? Watch the full recording of Beyond “I Don't Like to Read”: Building a Classroom of Readers Through Love-Powered Effort for classroom examples, discussion of the motivation pyramid, and ideas contributed by educators from around the country.
Want to dig deeper?
Explore the strategies we discussed in our free, three-part Foundations of Adolescent Literacy professional learning series. The self-paced modules take about an hour total and offer practical ways to support stronger secondary readers.
Not using Zinc yet? Complete all three modules, then request free Zinc Explorer licenses for you and your students at the end of Module 3.
FROM YOUR CLASSROOM
What does genuine reading motivation look like when you see it in your classroom? How do you create the conditions that make that effort possible?
↓ Share your experience below.