Marva Collins' Way of Teaching Reading: Roles of Perceived Utility, Goals, and Interests

    Every educator and parent may face the same fundamental challenge: how can we transform a reluctant and unmotivated learner into an active, self-driven one? For example, how to turn a student who has been discouraged by his/her previous unpleasant reading experience into a reader who enjoys the reading process? After reading Marva Collins' stories of teaching in her book Marva Collins' Way, I found that the secret may lie in students' perceived utility, goals, and interests. In this post, I will adopt theories in perceived utility, achievement goals, and interest development to explore how Marva Collins, as a successful and important educator, unlocked her students' boundless potential in developing reading proficiency. 

Establishing Utility

    Before a child can love reading, they must understand its value. Marva Collins was a master at communicating what psychologists call instrumentality or utility, which refers to a powerful belief that a current task is directly useful for achieving a highly desired future goal. She embedded this concept into the very ethos of her classroom. For her students, many of whom had been labeled as problematic by the system, she framed reading not as a school subject, but as the ultimate tool for personal power and independence. She explicitly told her students that if they could read, they could learn any subject, understand a contract, navigate any city, and command a higher salary in their future. This wasn't an abstract promise; it was a practical value. By establishing this high utility, she gave her students a valid, powerful, and future-oriented rationale to persevere through the difficult initial work of learning to read.

Cultivating Mastery-Approach Goals

    After stating a compelling why for reading in her classroom, Marva Collins then focused on the how of learning by shaping her students' achievement goals, in other words, her students' underlying purpose they had for engaging in reading. In motivation theory, the healthiest and most resilient goal is a mastery-approach goal, where the focus is purely on learning, improving, and mastering the skill for its own sake, rather than on outperforming others (i.e., performance goals).

    Marva Collins started her teaching in reading with a fundamental phonics-based approach. The initial focus wasn't on who was the fastest or best reader in the class. Instead, success was measured in personal victories. She praised every student when they correctly sounded out a new word, understood a phonetic rule, or finally spelled a previously elusive term. She celebrated every small win of her students, building a culture where the primary goal was to be better today than you were yesterday. This mastery-oriented environment was crucial for students' consistent efforts in learning. It prevented students from developing a fear of looking stupid (i.e., performance-avoidance goals). Instead, it directed their energy and attention into the joyful, intrinsic pursuit of competence, making the journey of learning to read as rewarding as the destination.

Developing Individual Interest

    Knowing why to read and how to improve is powerful, but Marva Collins’s most magical skill was her ability to develop her students' genuine interests in reading literature. The process of interest development can be summarized in four phases: 1)trigger situational interest, 2)maintain situational interest, 3)individual interest emerges, and 4) individual interest develops. 

    Every time before handing out a book (some books she provided to her elementary school students to read include The Jungle, Pride and Prejudice, O. Henry's tales, Mysterious Island), she would give a vivid introduction as a trigger of students' interests. She didn't just summarize the plot; she embodied the characters and posed inviting questions, which act like a brilliant "trailer" for classic literature. She then maintained students' situational interest by making the reading process itself a shared, engaging adventure. She asked her students to read aloud and connect themes to their lives, transforming a momentary hook into sustained reading and thinking engagement over days and weeks.

 

    As students gradually established their reading habits, Marva Collins no longer assigned books to students, and she allowed them to select which classic book to read next. This act acknowledged students' ownership in their learning and provided opportunities for students to grow their personal interest in reading. Furthermore, Marva Collins helped her students form a deep and enduring passion for reading. She required practice of having students share and defend their analyses of the books they read, which invited students to actively engage with the text. This process solidified their knowledge and their identity as true readers, ensuring they would continue to seek out great books after they left her classroom and embrace reading as a way to succeed in their lives.

    Marva Collins’s legacy teaches us that creating a reader is not a speedy process. It requires the practical foundation of utility, the supportive framework of mastery goals, and the patient, passionate cultivation of interest. She showed that with the right motivational environment, any child can not only learn to decode words but can also appreciate the joy of reading and learning.