Beyond Engagement: Designing Narrative Inquiry for Deep Reading in School Libraries
What if reading engagement isn’t the destination, but the starting point?
Every educator wants students to engage with reading. But engagement alone isn’t enough. The deeper challenge is designing reading experiences that sustain curiosity, provoke thinking, and encourage students to return to the text again and again.
My lightning talk, Beyond Engagement: Designing Narrative Inquiry for Deep Reading in School Libraries, explores how narrative inquiry can become a powerful catalyst for deep reading, evidence-informed reasoning and collaborative thinking. Drawing on classroom implementation, educational research and practical school library experience, I’ll share how narrative inquiry can provide an authentic context for students to interrogate sources, weigh competing interpretations, challenge assumptions, revise their thinking and construct increasingly sophisticated understandings together.
What surprised me most during this work was not simply that students were reading more deeply. It was watching them willingly reread texts, debate competing interpretations, seek out additional sources and reconsider earlier conclusions as new information came to light. These are the habits of powerful readers, and they’re also the habits of powerful thinkers.
School libraries are uniquely positioned to cultivate these habits. When reading, inquiry and visible thinking are intentionally designed to work together, libraries become more than places that promote books; they become environments where curiosity is nurtured, intellectual confidence grows and collaborative meaning-making flourishes.
This session is for teacher librarians, educators and school leaders who are interested in creating reading experiences that move beyond engagement towards lasting intellectual growth. I hope participants leave with practical ideas, fresh questions and a renewed sense of what school libraries can make possible when we intentionally design the conditions for deep reading, and lasting intellectual engagement.
