In the past, most states required the teaching of literary and informational texts, though they were not very specific about this imperative. The National Assessment has long used a roughly equal mix of literary and informational texts in their testing, a feature replicated by many state tests. During the past decade, elementary reading textbooks have been rebalancing their selections, including more informational text all the time.

          Nevertheless, there has long been an imbalance in the coverage of literary and informational texts in American classrooms. My advisor, Dick Venezky, was writing about this in the 1970s, and even earlier Nila Banton Smith documented how much we have protected children from various kinds of texts durig various eras of American educational history.  

          Reading teachers as a group tend to love prose fiction and they want everyone else to love, too. Not surprisingly the international comparisons have found that U.S. kids do better with literary texts than informational ones (not the pattern among our trading partners). That’s imbalance is troubling because informational text includes the reading of science, history, mathematics, business, health, finance, engineering, journalism, anthropology, political science, economics, and environmental sciences.

          Why so much hubbub about common core encouraging greater attention to informational text? Initially, I think it was due to honest confusion.

           The standards said that 50% of elementary reading should be informational and by high school this grows to 70%. But does that pertain only to the English Language Arts? How precise do we need to be in accomplishing that division of coverage? And how do we count it?

           Let’s take these questions one at a time. The first question is extremely important to high school English departments, where, not surprisingly, there has been great concern about this requirement. They need to understand that these requirements govern not just the ELA class, but students’ entire school reading experience. Thus, how much informational text students need to read in any class is somewhat dependent on what they are doing in their other classes. There would be much less informational text burden in ELA if kids are reading in their other classes.  In most schools, an English class makes up about 15-20% of the students’ instructional day, say one of six periods… they will have to read a lot of literature in an English class to ensure that 30% of their reading time is literary. Bring on the poetry, short stories, novellas, plays, etc.

          Another thing that teachers should not be worrying about is whether the mix is actually 55% or 72%. These numbers are approximations, meant more to give a general idea of emphasis rather than a strict prescription. Personally, I would vary from these depending on how the kids were doing.

           Finally, the counting problem is something I have wanted to write more about since last I broached the subject. I explained the problems with counting words, pages, or selections. Sue Pimentel, one of the authors of common core, wrote to me (I will soon print some parts of our communication on this) indicating that this division is expressed in terms of time. Thus, we are speaking less about a program or a set of materials, and more about student experience.

          Yesterday, the Huffington Post reported on a critique of this aspect of the common core by Sandra Stotsky. Sandra has been upset about this issue and believes that the common core will lead us straight to hell because it will disrupt the literature curriculum. This is important, according to her, because students learn to think when reading prose fiction.  http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/12/questionable-quality-of-the-common-core-english-language-arts-standards 

          Today, Sue Pimentel provides a well-reasoned response to Stotsky’s commentary showing that there is still a major emphasis on literature in English classes within common core. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-pimentel/the-role-of-fiction-in-th_b_2279782.html

          Although I appreciate Sue’s attempt to clarify this matter, I doubt it will do much good. Sandra’s opposition is not due to a lack of understanding of the standards, but to “willful ignorance” or the willingness to ignore any facts that may stand in the way of her arguments.

          She knows, for example, that the 50% and 70% guidelines have to do with students’ school days rather than their English classes alone. I’ve explained that to her myself, and she has acknowledged it. Nevertheless, she writes as if this guidance is only for the English teacher and as if students should only be reading in the English class (which certainly contradicts the fine work she herself has done on the value of civic literacy).

          Stotsky herself believes that English teachers should guide student analysis of rhetoric (in speeches, essays, and criticism), but indicates that it doesn’t matter how much of the informational text is made up of such texts. In other words, she is all for the use of informational text in the English classroom, but she doesn’t provide any guidance as to how much of this might make sense.

  One of the problems is that Stotsky embraces an idea that has long been rejected by psychologists. She believes that students develop the ability to think analytically from the reading and discussion of literature, much as educators a century ago believed that it arose from the study of Latin. Edward Thorndike slayed that dragon by showing that teaching something specific like Latin does not change us cognitively in general ways. Enabling someone to analyze Latin grammar doesn’t improve their ability to analyze other kinds of ideas (in fact, getting learning to transfer continues to be a staggering problem in teaching).

          The problem with willful ignorance is that it attempts to win the argument by confusing the subject. When I was on the National Reading Panel there were critics who claimed that our report said  phonics was the most important aspect of reading instruction or that we were trying to reduce the emphasis on reading comprehension and vocabulary. The problem is not just that these criticisms were wrong, but that those who leveled such claims often knew they were wrong. They wanted to stir up opposition by spreading already-disproved claims.

          In any even, I, too, am committed to the teaching of literature (one of my daughters even majored in English at Kenyon no less)… but while literature is valuable, so is history, economics, political science, biology, chemistry, physics, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. There is no empirical evidence showing that reading texts drawn from any of these fields of study will enhance your general thinking ability—but they all teach you how to think about certain aspects of the world. 

           And isn’t that the point? The truly educated man or woman is not knowledgeable of Twain and Shakespeare while being ignorant of Darwin and Einstein. Students need to develop power over ideas—and those ideas should not be drawn from a narrow pool.

  In the past, perhaps, that different states had different educational goals militated against any kind of joint response to students' educational needs. Now, with common standards in place, states could more powerfully pool their talent and resources to enhance their response. The only areas this has been happening so far have been in the writing of the standards themselves and in the development of new tests--both of which were "easy" for the states because these efforts were paid for and orchestrated by someone other than the state departments of education. Now we need this kind of sharing in areas like professional development for teachers and principals, curriculum materials selection, public information, and so on... but nary a joint initiative in sight. Instead, leaders seem foggy about the impending changes or dedicated to business as usual.

  As literacy supervisor for our district of 450+ teachers, I am responsible for our teachers' professional learning regarding anything literacy. It is quite a responsibility with the implementation of the CCSS, and though I have been in education for over 20 years, this is my first year in this position. I am currently planning professional development for our teachers regarding Standard 10 (text complexity) and would love to get your thoughts on my next steps. 

Please remember that the common core does not raise reading difficulty for beginning readers (K-1), so that part won't be very different. I don't think reading comprehension instruction will look that different than it does now either, but I could imagine teachers reading more challenging books to these beginners than is usual these days (I read chapter books to first-graders when I taught); you can ask beginners some pretty probing text-dependent questions of such material and that should help to get them ready for those aspects of the common core.

People are always asking for common core resources, and today some colleagues put me onto the following sites. I haven't viewed all of the information at these, but there is pretty good stuff on various common core issues like challenging text and close reading. I'm sure you will find these useful.

 http://commoncore.americaachieves.org/

 https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos?categories=subjects_english-language-arts

________________________________________________________________________

  Also, I took part, with Maureen McLaughlin, in a written webinar today for Education Week (with (Sarah D. Sparks). They have posted the transcript, and that might have some value to you, too.

This entry was originally published on November 21, 2012.

It was re-issued on July 28, 2017. This was a widely read and discussed entry and teachers continue to ask me questions about what supports are appropriate for English Learners. I'm sure to write more on this topic soon, so thought this would be a timely re-release. 

I received this recent question from a teacher in Tennessee:

  I have had many questions from my ESL teachers regarding the role of front-loading with ELLs.  We have been reading and learning about the importance of minimizing front-loading in the general education classroom, per Common Core recommendations.  However, we still feel that ELLs benefit from front-loading.  Can you please give us some insight on the role of frontloading for ELLs, either in or out of the general education setting?  Also, we would greatly appreciate some advice on where to look for scaffolding models to use with ELLs to help them access the complex text that the Common Core State Standards demand. 

Shanahan response: 

Frontloading or pre-reading preparation can definitely put English Learners on a more even footing with their native English peers. Sometimes a text presupposes knowledge that children from another culture don’t have, and providing this ahead of time can give them heightened access to the text. An author might describe something that would be culturally unfamiliar (e.g., Thanksgiving Dinner) or even emotionally uncomfortable in terms of family structure (e.g., divorce) or child behavior (what is considered respectful can vary across cultures—should a child look an adult in the eyes or not?).

  Nothing wrong with bringing kids up to speed ahead of time on such gaps so they can make sense of what they read.

  Unfortunately, what many teachers mean by “front loading” is that the teacher will tell what the text says before the kids get a chance to read it. If the information that you plan to provide is in the text then you are not helping the student read it, you are helping him not to (if a student already knows what it says, then why bother to try).

  It is sort of like translating too quickly… if someone keeps telling you what was said in your home language, there wouldn’t be much purpose for learning the new language. At some point, the training wheels have to come off. You may fall down more often without them, but you will be riding the bicycle. (The first principle of bicycling: Riders fall.)

  Your question makes it sound like the job of the teacher is to protect students from falling down; you and front-loading are the training wheels. But what if a teacher is more like a bicycle helmet? Then your job isn’t to prevent them from falling down, but to make sure they don’t get hurt.

In the past, we tended to read a text once in classrooms, so the reading had to be maximally productive. We had to make sure the kids got the information. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise. The premium was on the information and teachers were just making sure students at least heard the information.

  In contrast, the idea being stressed these days is that students SHOULD read the text more than once. What you don’t get the first time, you might get the second. Instead of front-loading the first reading, you could try front-loading the second or third—after the kids have had a chance to pedal the bike themselves—even if that pedaling isn’t perfectly successful.

If students ask a question about what they don’t understand, by all means, answer. But don’t always assume that they won’t get it… give them a chance to fall… Who knows, they might just surprise you.

  Be the helmet—not the training wheels.

Teacher question:

      As supervisor of reading and language arts K-5, I've stressed the importance of small group instruction during the literacy block as a means to differentiate and to work explicitly with all students. Teachers recognize the importance of flexible grouping but many attempt have divided their class into 5-6 groups and as a result, meet very infrequently with the groups or for only 10-12 minutes at a time. The instructional block for grades 3-5 tends toward whole group instruction with little time for small group. I've suggested that teachers attempt no more than 3 groups so that students receive the appropriate amount of instruction and at the same time, teachers obtain a better understanding of student progress etc... We've also been transitioning away from rigid instructional levels and moving toward scaffolded instructional support using grade level text. 
      Am I being unreasonable? Some teachers insist that we "show them the research." Could you point me toward specific research on small group instruction as well as time spent 'face to face' with the teacher?

I think the purpose of the Daily Five is to provide teachers with a curriculum framework that guides them to spend time on a certain set of activities. Many teachers embrace it because it gives them a way to make sure a variety of things take place in their classrooms each day. Teaching is a complex job and frameworks that help simplify choices can be very useful.

Although the Daily Five plan bears a superficial resemblance to what I used in the Chicago Public Schools, it differs from my approach in at least one big way: it focuses on teaching activities rather than on learning outcomes. “Reading to someone” or “listening to someone read” are fine activities, so I don’t oppose them, and yet, there are enough pressures on teachers to submerge themselves in the activities at the expense of the outcomes.

The Daily Five ensures that certain activities are included, but this can be a real distraction from making choices that support student learning. I’d much rather have a teacher, wanting to expand students’ vocabularies, who decides to read a book to them to facilitate this learning, than one who is going to read to the kids and can either seek a purpose for it or not.

There are lots of ways to a goal, and I deeply respect the teacher who has a clear conception of what she is trying to accomplish and the choices that entails. Starting with the activity instead of the outcome, however, allows someone to look like a teacher without having to be one.

That’s a big difference, and I think the common core separates itself from the Daily Five even more. The common core state standards emphasize goals –not activities, and they provide a specific delineation of the specific levels of demand or complexity or quality that has to be evident in performances of these standards. Nothing like that in the Daily Five.

Obviously, one could combine the Daily Five and CCSS. “I’ll use the Daily Five to guide my lesson planning and I’ll aim those lessons at the goals specified by the Common Core.” Lessons are always a bit of dance between goals and activities—and, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter where you start out as long as the two are closely and effectively connected in the implementation.

The Daily Five establishes a very low standard for teaching by emphasizing activities over outcomes, and by not specifying quality or difficulty levels for student performances. Teachers can successfully fulfill the Daily Five specifications without necessarily reaching, or even addressing, the standards.  

Perhaps, teachers could animate the Daily Five framework with goals and proficiency standards from the common core. I think any of the activities could be stretched or shaped to somehow address the core standards. And, yet, I wonder if it’s worth the extra time this represents. What does it add?  

There is an incredible yearning for specific information on the implementation of the common core standards. Everyone it seems is hurrying out common core materials, some of which are helpful, and some of which would best be kept in the drawer reserved for help that we can’t use.

  A not-so-positive addition is the Aspen Institute’s recently issued “Primer on Close Reading.”

  This one I cannot recommend. The problem is that Aspen’s basic conception of close reading is flawed and its practical recommendations seem aimed at preserving the status quo in weak classrooms.

Recently, I received a note from an educator trying to develop “power standards” for the common core. Power standards is a concept developed by Doug Reeves and Larry Ainsworth. Their idea was that school districts needed to identify the most important curriculum standards – the ones students really needed to learn—and then to prioritize those standards to ensure maximum learning.

Most state standards have been long lists of semi-random, undifferentiated skills, usually quite uneven in grain-size. So this approach made sense.

The common core standards, however, are relatively brief (“fewer, bigger, better”) and one standard is really no more important than another.  As such these standards work better in their totality than as individual items. The common core standards are the power standards.

Coping with Common Core 

What is going on here is something marriage counselors see all the time. A husband or wife in a second marriage often try to refight the battles of the first marriage. Bad idea. The circumstances have changed. The status quo is no more. The new hubby isn’t responsible for what the Ex did or failed to do. It is time to move on with a fresh slate.

We’re all in a second marriage with standards.

This new partner deserves a tabula rasa. The coping behaviors that made sense the first time around no longer make sense. (If you stopped inviting your sister to your parties because your former husband got drunk in social situations, it may be time to update your invite list). The point isn't that these coping behaviors didn't have utility before -- they did, that was why you developed them -- but your situation has changed and those responses, as wise as they might have been, no longer should have a place in your life's routine.

Which Coping Mechanisms to Drop

What does that mean in terms of the standards? Probably many things, but here are a few that I have run into:

1.  Don't provide grade-level standards for each teacher, but give them the entire set of standards K-12. These standards have coherence, and teachers cannot understand them a grade level at a time.

2.  Don't develop pacing guides for the reading, writing, or oral language standards. Pacing guides made sense when standards were a bunch of individual skills, but these fit together better into coherent sets that need to be applied in combination during reading (or writing or speaking or listening).

3.  Don't divide the reading, writing, or oral language standards by report card marking. See item 2 above.

4.  Don't disconnect the reading standards from texts. You won’t improve kids’ chances of success in identifying the key ideas by having students read lots of disconnected paragraphs to answer “key ideas questions.” Instead, students need to apply such skills or engage in such behaviors, with text that is sufficiently complex and challenging.   

5.  Don’t reduce common core standards to power standards. Consider doing the opposite. A great in-service would be for teachers to unpack standards to identify the subskills and knowledge inherent in each. Understanding each standard in this way allows teachers to be more responsive to students’ learning needs.

6.  Don't have teachers staple their standards into their lesson plan books. Instead, have them staple them into their brains. These grade-level standards are brief and well organized enough that teachers can carry these around in their heads instead of in their book bags--meaning that they can take advantage of teachable moments that may arise.

Each of these coping mechanisms made sense before, but they don't fit our new partner and ought to be dropped from our repertoires.

Oh, and don't go to sleep angry.

As most of you know, the common core state standards (CCSS) make a big deal about informational text. Unlike typical state standards, CCSS treats the reading of informational text as being as important as reading literary text. That is a wonderful shift and one that could bear real benefits for children.

            When I was working on my doctorate, I had to conduct a historical study for one of my classes. I went to the Library of Congress and calculated readabilities for books that had been used to teach reading in the U.S. (or in the colonies that became the U.S.). I started with the Protestant Tutor and the New England Primer, the first books used for reading instruction here. From there I examined Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller and its related volumes and the early editions of McGuffey’s Readers.

            Though the authors of those have left no record of how those books were created, it is evident that they had sound intuitions as to what makes text challenging. Even in the relatively brief single volume Tutor and Primer, the materials got progressively more difficult from beginning to end. These earliest books ramped up in difficulty very quickly (you read the alphabet on one-page, simple syllables on the next, which was followed by a relatively easy read, but then challenge levels would jump markedly).

            By the time we get to the three-volume Webster, the readability levels adjust more slowly from book to book with the speller (the first volume) being by far the easiest, and the final book (packed with political speeches and the like) being all but unreadable (kind of like political speeches today).     

            By the 1920s, psychologists began searching for measurement tools that would allow them to describe the readability or comprehensibility of texts. In other words, they wanted to turn these intelligent intuitions about text difficulty into tools that anyone could use. That work has proceeded by fits and starts over the past century, and has resulted in the development of a plethora of readability measurements.

            Readability research has usually focused on the reading comprehension outcome. Thus, they have readers do something with a bunch of texts (e.g., answer questions, do maze/cloze tasks) and then they try to predict these performance levels by counting easy to measure characteristics of the texts (words and sentences). The idea is to use easily measured or counted text features and to then place the texts on a scale from easy to hard that agrees with how readers did with the texts.

            Educators stretched this idea of readability to one of learnability. Instead of trying to predict how well readers would understand a text, educators wanted to use readability to predict how well students would learn from such texts. Thus, the idea of “instructional level”: if you teach students with books that appropriately matched their reading levels, the idea was that students would learn more. If you placed them in materials that were relatively easier or harder, there would be less learning. This theory has not held up very well when empirically tested. Students seem to be able to learn from a pretty wide range of text difficulties, depending on the amount of teacher support.

            The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) did not buy into the instructional level idea. Instead of accepting the claim that students needed to be taught at “their levels,” the CCSS recognizes that students will never reach the needed levels by the end of high school unless harder texts were used for teaching; not only harder in terms of students’ instructional levels, but harder also in terms of which texts are assigned to which grade levels. Thus, for Grades 2-12, CCSS assigned higher Lexile levels to each grade than in the past (the so-called stretch bands).

            Lexiles is a recent scheme for measuring readability. Initially, it was the only readability measure accepted by the Common Core. That is no longer the case. CCSS now provides text guidance for how to match books to grade level using several formulas. This change does not take us back to using easier texts for each grade level. Nor does it back down from encouraging teachers to work with students at levels higher than their so-called instructional levels. It does mean that it will be easier for schools to identify appropriate texts using and of six different approaches—many of which are already widely used by schools.

            Of course, there are many other schemes that could have been included by CCSS (there are at least a couple of hundred readability formulas). Why aren’t they included? Will they be going forward?

            From looking at what was included, it appears to me that CCSS omitted two kinds of measures. First, they omitted those schemes that have not used often (few publishers still use Dale-Chall or the Fry Graph to specify text difficulties, so there would be little benefit in connecting them to the CCSS plan). Second, they omitted widely used measures that were not derived from empirical study (Reading Recovery levels, Fountas & Pinnell levels, etc.). Such levels are not necessarily wrong—remember educators have intuitively identified text challenge levels for hundreds of years.

            These schemes are especially interesting for the earliest reading levels (CCSS provides no guidance for K and 1). For the time being, it makes sense to continue to use such approaches for sorting out the difficulty of beginning reading texts, but then to switch to approaches that have been tested empirically in grades 2 through 12. [There is very interesting research underway on beginning reading texts involving Freddie Hiebert and the Lexile people. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future we will have stronger sources of information on beginning texts].    

            Here is the new chart for identifying text difficulties for different grade levels:

                  Recently, I've been fielding questions about guided reading (à la Fountas and Pinnell) and the Common Core; mainly about the differences in how they place students in texts. Before going there, let me point out that there is a lot of common ground between guided reading and Common Core, including a focus on high-quality text, the emphasis on connections between reading and writing, the concern for high-level questions and discussion, the idea that students learn from reading, and so on. Nary a hint of conflict between the two approaches on any of those issues.

                  Not so with student-book placements; on that, there is a substantial divide. Guided reading says to go easy, and common core says challenge them. Easy, according to F and P, means placing kids in books that they can read with better than 95% accuracy and with high reading comprehension (and they make no distinction between beginners and more adept readers in this regard). For Common Core, making it challenging means placing students, second grade up, in books that would be in the frustration range according to F and P; books that students would read with markedly lower fluency and comprehension on a first read.

                  How can these schemes be so different?                

                  Fountas and Pinnell advocate for a system of text placement that has been widely and long accepted in the field of reading (I've previously written about the sources of those ideas). F and P add to that a philosophical position that maintains students learn best by figuring things out themselves from reading, rather than from the explicit instruction a teacher might provide. In their plan, much of the teacher’s work is devoted to accomplishing an appropriate placement of students in texts, and they strive to minimize the distance between what text demands and what students can do currently so that students can scale these small challenges without much teacher input.

                  Anything in the text that the students can't handle themselves can be reduced even more, in the F and P scheme, by providing substantial background information about the text, picture walks and the like. Over time, by reading texts that are supposed to gradually get harder, students learn to read by reading books that they understand and enjoy. F and P are candid that book placement does not always work out and that, under such circumstances, teachers may have to provide mini-lessons or other supports. Nevertheless, they stress the importance of minimizing the need for such supports. As good a job as they do in demonstrating how to get students to the correctly leveled texts, they provide surprisingly little info about how and when to advance students to higher levels; students may languish at a level since there is no well-worked out plan for ensuring progress (and I see that a lot in classrooms--children who spend inordinate amounts of time stuck at "their level").  

                  By contrast, Common Core sets text levels on the basis of where we have to get students to by the time they end school. Consequently, they set higher levels for each grade (grades 2-12) than we did in the past, and it discourages the kind of out-of-level teaching that is so characteristic of guided reading plans. The reason for this is that many kids now leave high school reading below the levels needed in college, in the workplace, and in the military. This means that most state educational standards require that teachers teach kids to read texts of particular levels of difficulty--rather than at the students' supposed levels.

                  These more challenging text placements presume that teachers will provide extensive scaffolding, explanation, support, and teaching to enable success. Since the Common Core is not, by and large, invested in any particular instructional methods (the push for close reading is a notable exception), it can require text levels based on learning goals and the very real need of students to reach particular levels before they graduate, rather than trimming text levels to fit pedagogical philosophy.  

                  I think most advocates of Common Core would say, “The issue is not how much teaching teachers have to do, but how much students can learn in the time we are working with them. If teaching students with more challenging texts leads to greater amounts of learning, then we accept the burden of having to teach more.” Fountas and Pinnell, too, want kids to learn, but their philosophy is that this learning works best when kids negotiate the reading system on their own, and that justifies, for them, the idea of not demanding too much of kids in terms of text difficulty. For F and P how you learn is as important as what you learn.  

                  F and P’s version of guided reading has been around for almost 20 years, but there are other versions of the idea that go back much further--to the 1940s. One would assume that there must be a lot of research evidence supporting guided reading, given how long it has been espoused. One would be wrong in the assumption. Studies don't actually support the idea of teaching kids with books at their levels; the leveling idea is one that was just made up, and then when it was finally tested, it was found to fall short of the goal. 

                  Many teachers might respond: “Studies or no studies, I know guided reading works because I have taught with it and my students make good progress.”                 

                  There is absolutely no question that students can learn with guided reading (that they have learned with it, and that they will continue to learn with it). I was taught to read 60 years ago by what most teachers would call guided reading. It is widely used in American schools and has been for generations. But there is an issue of opportunity cost here; would students learn more if we did it differently; if we taught students with more challenging texts? Teachers, of course, can never gauge the success of the alternatives that were not tried.

                  Studies, quoted in previous blogs, show that students can make learning progress while matched to a variety of text levels, though they tend to do best when matched with more challenging texts than the guided reading advocates have recommended. Thus, placing students in easy text CAN allow learning to happen, but placing students in more challenging texts and then making sure they can successfully read those texts (through rereading, analysis of information, etc.) can lead to even greater success.

                  At the end of the day, for guided reading advocates, the disagreement is philosophical rather than empirical—for them, it is about the desirability of a particular approach to teaching. They believe that it is better for kids to figure things out with minimal teacher support, so they necessarily must limit the degree of challenge that students face; too much book difficulty would only lead to failure and frustration in that kind of scheme. However, if, on the other hand, your desire is for kids to read well enough to function independently and successfully in society, then it will be necessary to teach kids to do things they can't already do. In that case, intentionally limiting text difficulty would reduce students' opportunity to learn--a no-no, of course, if greater learning is the goal.

                  In general, I think the Common Core approach is the right one – it puts greater emphasis on teaching and long-range learning goals than on text placement. And, yet, we are depending on educators –including me – who received more preparation in how to place students in relatively easy books, than to teach them to read harder ones. The success of the Common Core (and public education) depends not just on the requirement for more challenging texts, buying new texts or relabeling what's in the book room is the easy part. Success will be accomplished only if teachers will have the resolve, patience, and foresight to provide the sufficient and appropriate scaffolding needed to allow the students to figure out the meaning of challenging texts without being told what they say.

Originally posted July 31, 2012; re-posted September 7, 2017.

Although I posted these comments 5 years ago, these questions continue to come up frequently at my presentations, particularly with regard to how large a gap can we scaffold with older students. Theoretically, the answer is that there is no reading gap that can’t be scaffolded, but there are practicalities that impose such limits in regular classroom life.

I recently received the following letter and thought you might be interested in my responses:

“I found your August 21, 2011, blog post on "Rejecting Instructional Level Theory" eye-opening and helpful.  I'm a high school English teacher and instructional coach specializing in adolescent literacy remediation, so I've worked with leveled text a lot.  If you have a moment, I'd love to hear your thoughts on a couple of follow-up questions:”

1. Are the implications of your findings different for adolescents needing remediation?

It depends on how low the students are and how much scaffolding is available. If you stick a 9^th grader who reads at a second-grade level in a freshmen biology class and assume learning is going to happen because the book is hard, then kids are going to fail. On the other hand, same student, same book, but put that student in with a teacher who spends a lot of time guiding, supporting, encouraging, teaching to help the youngster close the gap… then you’d be surprised at how much learning can happen. The trick is to balance the difficulty (for the student) of the text and the amount of support the teacher can provide (I don’t believe she can provide much if there are 25 other kids there who are reading at 5^th-10^th grade level in a 40-minute class).

2. Is "accessible text" still important for fluency-building?

Same issue. Kids don’t seem to develop fluency skills from reading easy texts (no data showing this, but lots of claims about it, of course), but they do develop fluency skills from reading harder texts (look at Steve Stahl's data on this, for instance). It is when students struggle with a book and reread it, etc. that fluency develops. The idea that lots of easy reading builds fluency is an unproven concept.

3. What about sheer volume? Isn't one of the benefits of selecting texts that students can read without significant teacher support that allows them to read many more words per day (week, month, year) because they can read faster and can read at home?  This was what initially drove me away from the model of spending three months spoon-feeding Macbeth to my low-skilled 11th graders and toward the use of literature circles, independent reading, and shared reading of more accessible, contemporary classics--although I knew I was giving something up in that switch and tried to make space for both.

That makes so much sense, and yet, surveys tell us (as do teachers) that even with the easier materials, adolescents aren’t reading much. The idea that kids will do more of something if it is easy is also an unproven concept. When a teacher is working with kids, hard (text) is a good idea, but varied might be even better (some hard, some relatively easy, but a real agenda of trying to ramp up what the student can handle). When kids are reading on their own, then their interests are going to dictate what is hard (in fact, we have known for a long time that if kids are really interested in a topic they usually know something about it and can handle harder texts than might normally be expected). I'm all for kids reading a lot, including in class, but time with a teacher, like an athlete's time with a coach has to be spent building strength, endurance, and stamina--which requires the reading of a mix of challenging and somewhat easier materials. As ACT found, a steady diet of easy reading in school is not doing adolescents any favors. 

 I recently received the following letter and thought you might be interested in my responses:

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted June 22, 2012 and was re-posted on May 24, 2016. Earlier this week I posted a blog distinguishing comprehension skills and comprehension strategies. More to be written on these issues this weekend. However, when the Common Core State Standards did not include comprehension strategies this blog entry provided my reaction to that omission. It is still timely and I'll have more to say about this as well. 

I’ve been fielding a lot of complaints recently about the lack of comprehension strategies in the common core state standards. And, in fact, no reading comprehension strategies are included in the common core.

Teacher question:

What do you feel is "best practice" for middle school ELA instruction? Our district has a 6/7 middle school, and the subjects of reading and language arts are taught separately. The middle school principal will speak to how this is "best practice".

Blast from the Past: Re-issued March 22, 2021 and August 3, 2017. First published June 18, 2012; Of all of my blog entries, this one has been read, cited, and distributed most often. Obviously a lot of people have found it to be useful, so I have reposted it for those who might not have seen it before. However, I had another reason this time. These days the term "close reading" is increasingly being used by teachers as a synonym for reading comprehension. Teaching reading comprehension and teaching close reading overlap in important ways but they definitely are not the same thing. No, close reading is not the new cool name for reading comprehension. Check this entry out to find out what close reading is really about. Next week I'll post a new entry -- this one also on close reading (and whether it is supported by research).

The Common Core State Standards are encouraging teachers to engage students in close reading. Much of the focus of discussions of close reading have emphasized what teachers should not do (in terms of pre-reading, or types of questions). I am being asked with increasing frequency what close reading is. 

RELATED: Is Comprehension Better with Digital Text?

Teacher Question 1: 

The IRA Governmental Relations Committee invited Don Deshler and I to speak at the recent International Reading Association conference in Chicago. The topic that we were given had to do with educational poverty and children in need (such as the children served in Title I schools). 

  They wouldn’t be allowed within miles of a school on testing days, and they would only be given general information about the results (e.g., “your class was in the bottom quintile of fourth grades in reading”). Telling a teacher the kinds of test questions or about the formatting would be punished severely, too.

  In that fantasy, teachers would be expected to try to improve student reading scores by… well, by teaching kids to read without regard to how it might be measured later. I have even mused that it would be neat if the test format changed annually to even discourage teachers from thinking about teaching to a test format.

  In some ways, because of common core, my fantasy is coming true (maybe Heidi K. isn’t far behind?).

  Principals and teachers aren’t sure what these tests look like right now. The whole system has been reset, and the only sensible solution is… teaching.

  And, yet, I am seeing states that are holding back on rolling out the common core until they can see the test formats.

  Last week, Cyndie (my wife – yes, she knows all about Heidi and me – surprisingly, she doesn’t seem nervous about it) was contacted by a state department of education trying to see if she had any inside dope on the PARCC test.

  This is crazy. We finally have a chance to raise achievement and these test-chasing bozos are working hard to put us back in the ditch. There is no reason to believe that you will make appreciable or reliable gains teaching kids to reply to certain kinds of test questions or to particular test formats (you can look it up). The people who push such plans know very little about education (can they show you the studies of their “successful” test-teaching approaches?). I am very pleased with the unsettled situation in which teachers and principals don’t know how the children’s reading is going to be evaluated; it is a great opportunity for teachers and kids to show what they can really do.

  Currently, I am a principal investigator on the National Title I Evaluation. In that role, I have had to watch lots of classroom video over the past couple of months. These lessons are for preschool through Grade 3. Sadly, the previews to text are so thorough – painstaking and painful – that the only possible thing that students could be learning from them is that reading is unnecessary. I have watched 20-minute set ups for 5-minute reads. The blood is so sucked by these Dracula-like pre-reading sessions that the texts become lifeless. Why read if you already know everything that the text can possibly say?

  Such lessons do not make me a big fan of pre-reading, so I have increasingly been won over by those who want to throw kids into the pool and get on with it. However, the common core will require that we use challenging texts and many students will struggle. Various supports, scaffolds, and motivation will be needed to allow students to read hard texts successfully. Furthermore, we need to remember that these are teaching sessions; it does not make sense to treat every text in the same way. There are times when teachers will want to focus student attention on certain aspects of a text, to try to strengthen particular reading muscles; revealing some text information ahead of time may guide that kind of heightened focus.

  What counts as pre-reading? Let’s limit the discussion of pre-reading to explorations of relevant “prior knowledge,” purpose setting, contextualizing the text, previews of the information in the text, and any advice for the reader (“pay special attention to” or “ignore”). I would not include in pre-reading supports aimed at building decoding skills, fluency, grammar, or vocabulary. Such supports are beneficial and will be especially needed with common core, but preparation in these skills rarely ruins a book for the readers. Guidelines will be needed for those, too, but I will post such advice separately in a future blog entry.

  There is a wealth of research showing the benefits of pre-reading. For example, providing students with information relevant to a text or making students aware of already-known relevant information improves their comprehension. The idea of providing students with or reminding them of relevant knowledge is not a bad approach, but it has run amok in America’s classrooms. I think in far too many cases, the “background” or “prior knowledge” step has become just a preview of what’s in the text—so the kids are seeing this information the second time on their first reading, or (just as bad) this information is only tangentially related to the text and therefore is useless in helping students meet the challenge of the text.

  The lessons in which the teacher just tells her students the information from the text as a prior knowledge review are readily observable. Those previews that emphasize information that is irrelevant to figuring out the text may require some examples. I would include the previews that I’ve seen for The Old Man and the Sea. Kids struggle to appreciate that book, but I promise you no matter how much pre-reading information is offered about deep sea fishing or Joe DiMaggio, students will continue to struggle since that pre-reading information fails to address what is actually hard about that Hemingway classic.

  Some texts may require no review of background knowledge, since the texts are reasonably complete, self-contained, and accessible. We might appreciate a particular aspect of such a text more with certain information provided, but, even without such information, we could still understand it quite well. Some texts are hard because they presuppose that a reader will have access to certain information or experiences, which is why I wonder about The Old Man and the Sea—few kids have the emotional experience to appreciate the old man’s regrets and resignation—which is why they can often retell the book, and still shrug, “so what?” I wonder if there would ever be enough time in middle school to sufficiently fulfill Hemingway’s very adult presuppositions; so, perhaps, that lovely book is a poor choice form middle school despite the tantalizingly-easy Lexile ratings. But, if it were to be used, then the type of background information to provide/elicit should be much more emotional, psychological, and inside-the-head.

  So what guidelines make sense for pre-reading? Let’s try these:

  1. The candle has to be worth the game. The amount of pre-reading should be brief and brevity should be determined in proportion to the amount and duration of the reading. If the text is a major undertaking (perhaps the students are reading a novella over the next 4-weeks), then devoting a half hour or more to pre-reading may not be overdoing it depending on the text. However, most texts are briefer than that and they are unlikely to require more than 1 week of lessons… in such cases, 5-6 minutes may be a lot. Definitely the amount of pre-reading time should be, proportionately, small when compared to the actual amount of reading. (In these examples, pre-reading sucks up less than 3% of the reading time—a tiny expenditure, if well done).

  2. Let the author do the talking. There are exceptions to this guideline (see below), but basically teachers should try not to reveal information that students could gain simply by reading the text. Repetition may help learning, but if the text is just a repetition of what the teacher has already said, then students are missing out on the basic learning experience that reading provides. Repetition through discussion after the reading is a different breed of animal, that doesn’t spoil the quest that reading represents.

  3. Pre-reading should provide a sufficient amount of information to give students reason to read, perhaps arousing their curiosity or sense of suspense. Look at these brief previews from a recent New Yorker magazine (the New Yorker usually provides the title of the article, a one sentence tease, and a one sentence caption of a photograph or drawing—thus, two sentences are the entire preview):

 Profile: You Belong With Me by Lizzie Widdicombe

"Taylor Swift’s teen angst-empire."

"Swift hooked a previously unrecognized audience: teen-age girls who listen to country music."

The Obama Memos by Ryan Lizza

"The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency."

"Hundreds of pages of internal White House memos show Obama grappling with the unpleasant choices of government."

The Secret Sharer by Jane Mayer

"Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?"

"Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency, faces some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen."

  These masterful introductory blurbs tell essential facts about the articles, they provide a reason to read, arouse interest—and do so very economically. Each one of these previews is helpful in that it reveals the topic (though more a topic sentence than a topic), it would allow one to determine whether or not to read the text, and it would give the reader an anticipation set to start making sense of the text immediately. Imagine coming across great works of literature by accident and knowing none of the background; I wonder how many of us would have kept going with Moby Dick beyond chapter 2 or Ulysses beyond the first few sentences?

  4. When you do reveal text information, be strategic. There are times when I may want to reveal something about a text ahead of time—not to ruin the reading experience, but to allow for greater focus on some aspect of reading that my students need to develop. For the same reason, there will be times, albeit more rarely, when I may want to hold back information commonly available to a reader prior to reading.

  An example of this strategic reveal can be taken right from television… Colombo. Here is a traditional murder mystery, except it isn’t traditional at all. The show revealed who the murderer was in the first minutes of the show. Even the densest viewer would know who did it, who they did it to, when they did it, where they did it, how they did it, and why they did it. Crazy kind of mystery, except that strategic reveal shifts the viewer/reader’s attention away from trying to solve the crime to trying to anticipate how Columbo will solve it. Having this information so early, focuses your attention on the clues differently and, consequently, you end up with a different relationship with the protagonist—you’re no longer competing against him, but are collaborating with him instead—neat trick.

  If I take David Coleman’s now-famous Birmingham Jail lesson and I want the major emphasis of the reading to focus on King’s authorial choices, I might give the students background information about how King provoked his own arrest in this case and in many others, explaining his provocation strategy and the kind of response it was intended to provoke in his opponents and his audience. I might have the students read the letter not to figure out what it says, but to find examples of statements aimed at two audiences (to provoke unreasonable anger from one audience, while eliciting empathy from everyone else).

  You could say that I am short-circuiting the reading experience by jumping right to that issue, but I cannot teach every text the same way and I have to recognize that sometimes a text will only be used to get at some particular aspects of learning. David is correct that if a teacher is going to devote 8 days to this text in an English class, reading it multiple times with minimal outside information is a brilliant choice as it would focus student attention on how to scale such a challenging and worthwhile text. On the other hand, if this is one of six items in my social studies text set on civil rights, students will not only read it fewer times, but the lesson may require that they read both King’s letter and the letter that elicited it, and maybe even viewing the video of Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses. In the English class this might seem like a cheat—I’ve given the students background that they may be able to infer, while in the history class the idea might be to better understand King the tactician, so weighing his response choices may be the better way to go.

  Obviously, my point is that there is not a single pre-reading approach that is appropriate. There could be many such approaches, each of which could be intellectually sound and pedagogically valuable. An evaluation of the quality of such pre-reading approaches would require knowledge of the text, a grasp of the purpose of the lesson, and an understanding of what students can already do.

  David Coleman, and his colleague, Sue Pimentel, fear that such strategic focus can take over the whole reading experience for students (with the teacher or textbook always pre-ordaining some narrow or partial approach to reading). They rightfully are concerned that if every, or even most, readings are carried out in such a focused manner that students will never gain the power to scale, under their own power, the intellectual peaks of a text; that the student will always be dependent upon a Sherpa (the teacher) and special climbing equipment (the textbook apparatus) that will no longer be available when the school day ends. If you always conduct pre-reading in the same way, you are probably weakening rather than strengthening the reader.

  5. Pre-reading can conceal rather than reveal. I have an activity I call, “Inventing the Author.” Students read a text with all authorship information stripped away. Their job in this lesson is to read the text, and only using information provided by the text to construct a biography of the author: Is it a man or a woman? Black or white? Young or old? Democrat or Republican? Somebody with whom you’d like to have dinner? How would this author feel about the Afghan war or global warming?

  Again, each “fact” that is created has to have text evidence behind it. I’ve used this with kids as young as 7. We rarely read text without some information about the author, but if you want to get at issues of persona, voice, tone, or authority, giving students less information can be provocative and useful in forcing attention to these features.

  David cautions that such a lesson may point students too far out of a text, because they obviously must rely on their understanding of people and not just on the text information. I look to the research on critical reading and see that it develops in response to children’s growing awareness of human intentions and their understanding of how people behave towards each other. Good reading requires an awareness that texts are created by intentional human beings and I find that such lessons help kids to bring their knowledge of the world to the text, in very appropriate ways.

  6. Not all pre-reading has to take place before reading. Okay, obviously I’m cheating a bit here. I’m playing with the fact that we can read text in parts. Let’s say we have a 10-page story, and we read each page separately, stopping along the way to discuss the journey up to that point. Those pauses might look back (summarizing, talking about what the author has revealed so far), or they might look forward (hypothesizing, predicting, girding for the next part of the reading). Thus, “pre-reading” could take place after a considerable amount of reading has already been accomplished.

  Why is that important? That a lesson might include several small pre-reads rather than a single big one allows the teacher to be wisely responsive in pre-reading choices. Back to Birmingham Jail: David Coleman distributes the text to students and has them read the first two paragraphs without discussion or teacher presentation (in other words, with no pre-reading). After a few minutes, he asks who King was writing to and why he is writing this letter. The students struggle to answer those questions and rather than just telling them, David might have them re-read; but for this second reading there was a bit of pre-reading preparation—that is, the students now have a specific purpose for reading. The answers are better on the second attempt, but their vagueness may reveal that the students don’t know much about King or what he did. At that point, David might choose to provide a few biographical facts that are not in the text, as that might help the readers appreciate the value of taking on King’s arguments.

  You might cluck, “I would have done that from the beginning—I know my students.” And, you might have done so wisely. Perhaps. But the point is that having the students doing the reading without training wheels, so to speak, was not only respectful, but it gave them a chance to flex their reading muscles. In this example, it didn’t work out, but worse things can happen than falling off your bike when you are learning to ride.

  The example should make it clear that no matter how smart we may be, we will not always anticipate correctly, but that such errors are correctible. Anticipation is only one arrow in the teacher’s quiver; responsiveness is another. I surmise that the teacher who always anticipates that students will require lots of pre-reading background preparation is a teacher who is likely to be weak in responsiveness. Pre-reading for the first segment has to be anticipatory, but the pre-reading provided as the reading proceeds has to be responsive to the changing landscape. (Thus — a point made forcefully to me by David Coleman — forging connections of text with background knowledge is essential, and yet, these connections do not always have to be made in advance of the reading).

  As with the other guidelines offered here, this one has some cautions too. You might like the idea of no pre-reading preparation to start, only offering needed information along the way. And, why not? The image of a teacher so thoughtfully guiding students, never giving away too much, always being there in the nick of time with just the right amount of info is a heroic image. But if you always were to rely on this approach, you may be less likely to stretch students out, that is increasing the amount of text between the aid stations (and, if you don’t anticipate any gaps and simply turn the students loose on a long piece without any pre-reading supports, then the time cost of frustration and re-reading go up).

  7. Teachers have to read the text first. To make any of these choices, the teacher has to know the text. This might seem obvious, but way too often teachers forego reading the text ahead of time, relying on a teacher’s guide to carry them along. (This approach is one of the reasons some of our colleagues oppose core program materials; they think it fosters this kind of laziness). In fact, even with a really good textbook, the teacher has to (a) read the selection, (b) decide what the purpose of the reading lesson is, (c) think about what the students bring to the text, and (d) decide what pre-reading information to provide and when to provide it to accomplish the purpose. This process might be made easier by a good core program, but adjustments, choices, and responsiveness are always necessary. (This planning process would be even better if undertaken by a group of teachers rather than each one in solitary.)

  So, briefer, more strategic and more responsive pre-reads should be the hallmarks of common core reading lessons.

  Why is this such a big deal? The background reviews and purpose setting of pre-reading are truly mainstays of American reading education, and many teachers wonder whether kids are going to be able to make sense of text without these supports. It’s times like these when many teachers start grousing about whether these experts have ever taught school (they have).

  I disagree with the idea of banning pre-reading preparation, and I’ll continue to tell my students and my publishers to stay with the practice, but I fully appreciate why David and Sue would want to eradicate it. (I myself have occasionally thought about punching out a teacher during picture walk.) Prereading is often so badly implemented that it could not possibly have any good result. However, rather than ban a beneficial practice badly used, I will argue for a sound implementation. (In fact, I received emails from David and Sue just last week admitting that they have been, perhaps, too vociferous in their opposition to what could be a good approach, and we will continue a conversation towards giving my supportive counsel to teachers on this point in the future).

  The idea of pre-reading has a long history in American education. In the first third of the Twentieth Century, the reading of literature in the academy was rife with author study; the idea being that one couldn’t read and appreciate fine works without a rich awareness of the author’s biography. This approach dominated high school and college classrooms and the publishing industry itself (the inclusion of extensive forewords, introductory chapters, and other similar apparatus were the norm). The New Critics bridled at this “read everything but the text itself” approach (which eventually imposed its own over-bearing rules for reading—like the requirement of avoiding the “intentional fallacy,” as if author’s don’t have intentions that can be considered interpretively by readers).

  In elementary classrooms, pre-reading became a touchstone upon the publication of the teacher’s guide in basal readers. Previous to the 1930s, teachers were pretty much on their own when it came to lesson support, but the basal reader teacher’s edition changed all that. The directed reading activity (DRA), typically introduced the child to some background information, pre-taught the hard vocabulary, and provided a specific reason for reading the first page(s) of the selection. Of course, this scheme that started with basal readers in the 1930s, is now the normative practice recommended in pretty much all textbooks for teaching anything at any grade level. (In many programs, the pre-reading steps were referred to as background and motivation).

  In the 1960s, winds of change (sort of) began to blow with Russell Stauffer’s ideas on prediction and anticipation as the basis of pre-reading. His directed reading-thinking approach (DRTA) didn’t so much overturn the DRA as redirecting. Instead of the teacher providing relevant background information and a reason to read, she would now guide the students to preview the material and make predictions (the predictions being the new purposes or motivation—read to find out if you were right).

  The by then shop-worn practice gained an important boost in the 1970s and 80s with the research on schema theory which showed how important “prior knowledge” (that is the information that someone has prior to reading). The idea was that the more relevant knowledge you had, the better you would understand and remember the new information (P. David Pearson’s “building bridges between the new and the known”). Schema theory and prior knowledge research provided intellectual support for pre-reading instruction; research showed that previews could improve recall, inferencing, disambiguation, and put readers in a better position to recognize problems in a text.

  The practice gained even more adherents with the advent of “guided reading” (this is where the “picture walk” comes in). Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell have pushed hard for strong pre-reading preparation for young children.

  So, with such a venerable history, why would Coleman and Pimentel (and Shanahan) be so disgusted with the practice? Let me suggest five reasons.

  1. Pre-reading takes too much time away from reading.

I recently watched a primary grade pre-reading that took 20 minutes—the reading itself only took 5. I wish I could say that kind of thing was the exception, but I see many instances of bloated, overly extended pre-reading sessions in classrooms at all grade levels (pre through high).

  2. Boring!

Much of the pre-reading set up that I see is deadly boring. The kids would get a good laugh if they knew that these activities were meant to be “motivation.”

  3. Pre-reading commonly focuses on the wrong information.

There is no question that some texts pre-suppose particular knowledge on the behalf of the reader. A good preview or background session can make sure that kids have such knowledge available so they can engage in a reasonably strong first reading of a text. Unfortunately, teachers and publishers often provide background review focused on information that doesn’t actually need to be reviewed. (My favorite example is having middle school students read “The Old Man and the Sea.” That book is tough for 12-year-olds as they lack the emotional experience of the old man. You can review deep sea fishing, the Florida Keys, and Joe DiMaggio until the cow comes home and it won’t improve their understanding of the old man and his human plight).

  4. Previews can ruin the reading experience.

A good background review can be motivational, creating a useful anticipatory set. Too often, unfortunately, the background reviews that are provided just tell the student what the text says (and sometimes even what it means). For too many kids, the challenge of a reading lesson is trying to remember what the teacher told you the text said/meant all the way to the end of the reading so they can tell the teacher back what she told them in the first place. If the information is in the text, then let the kids read it in the text. Telling them the information ahead does not increase motivation, but instead removes any legitimate reason for reading the text at all.

  5. Previews are rarely purposesful.

What you know before you read a text can have an important shaping influence on where you put your mental attention. A good introduction can give kid valuable support for engaging in a particular kind of reading (and remember we are trying to teach kids how to read effectively, we are not just reading). Too often, the pre-reading activities are generic, repetitive, and fail to provide students with any guidance that would increase their power with text. Somebody has to read the text ahead of time and make a determination of what is hard about it and why it needs to be read. That information should guide the shape and focus of the pre-reading (should we tell students anything about the author or should that be an outcome of the reading? Is it better to know the genre or to try to describe the genre based on this specific instance? etc.).

  Now that you see the problem, in my next blog entry I’ll try to give some positive guidance for pre-reading lessons that I would encourage (and that I think David Coleman and Sue Pimentel could support). No reason, in my opinion, to ban this venerable practice, but there is much reason to try to sharpen and focus it to the benefit of students.

  This kind of scene plays out daily across America. Mothers want their kids to do well in school, and in grade 1 being able to read is "doing well." (It is no accident that so many grocery stores, drug stores, etc. sell such workbooks.)

  Such materials help kids to see the match between letters and sounds and a lot of kids like "playing school." I'd be hard pressed to say that those workbooks teach reading, but they do help give kids some purchase on letters and sounds.

  And then there are ABC refrigerator magnets, letter blocks, posters, Sesame Street, and these days, various electronic games and activities -- the best equipped preschoolers wouldn't be caught dead without their PDA, Blackberry, or I-Phone these days.

  Some of my colleagues discourage parents from buying such materials. I don't. Kids often find them to be kind of fun, and I don't think they do any harm. In fact, I think they help kids to learn some things that need to learn if they are going to be readers and the more opportunities kids get to learn these things the better.

  Which brings me to some new digital materials that parents can use in helping their children to learn to decode--that is to sound out words. The site is called Reading Bear and it is free to anyone who wants to use it.

  It has some pretty good features. Probably the best is that it sounds words out for the children, showing them graphically how the sounds match the letters (try to do that with a workbook). There are lots of electronic flashcards, activities, and quizzes, and the particular exercises change items a lot which can help keep kids interested.

  While I don't think this program will teach your child to read, I think it could help.

  http://www.readingbear.org

  Upon the publication of the study, Cyndie was interviewed about this work and that interview is available to you through the Voice of Literacy, a site I have lauded before in this space. I thought she did great and that you might find this information to be useful. Here is the link. Enjoy.

 http://voiceofliteracy.missouri.edu/view.php?id=552&type=summary&title=Cynthia+Shanahan+Interview&cast_date=November+7%2C+2011&pageBefore=archive

  The study was based on the theory that it would be useful to account for such information when teaching students to read. The idea is that if students were taught to read history in a way that corresponds to how historians read they'd be better equipped to handle such materials. Obviously the first step in that journey is to identify those disciplinary differences, and our work was in that vein.

  Which raises an important point: Disciplinary literacy is distinct from "content area" reading. Disciplinary literacy is more aimed at what we teach (which would include how to read and use information like a scientist), than how we teach (such as how can students read the history book well enough to pass the test). The idea of disciplinary literacy is that students not only have to learn the essential content of a field, but how reading and writing are used in that field. On the other hand, content area reading focuses on imparting reading and study skills that may help students to better understand and remember whatever they read.

  Accordingly, a disciplinary literacy teacher may try to get students to engage in author-centered readings or sourcing (in which students try to identify an author's argument, perspective, evidence)--since that is what historians do when they read; while a content area literacy teacher would push for students to use Cornell notes or KWL, since such techniques can help readers to remember more information from a history text. Disciplinary literacy strives to get students to participate--albeit at a low level--in the reading and discourse of a particular discipline, while content area literacy strives to get students to read and study like good students.

  I know some reading experts who think disciplinary literacy is nuts. Their argument is that kids are not scientists, mathematicians, or historians; they are students. Thus, the agenda of content area reading (to teach students explicitly how to study and learn information well) is an appropriate one and that teachers and students should focus on content area reading.

  Our counter argument is that the development of general reading skills is not an good goal for content area classes at a high school, and that not many teachers are willing to aim for such goals and procedures given that these do not come from their discipline. Identity is very important to human beings. A teacher striving to be a math teacher is dedicated to math goals and is interested in hanging with math teachers. Using instructional methods that bind them closely to the math community (as opposed to the reading community) would be attractive.

  We also recognize that content area reading instruction tends to help the bottom kids only. We think this discourages teachers from adopting content area reading. We suspect that reading procedures more in line with the mores of a discipline may be helpful to even better students.

  I think the argument between those who are proponents of disciplinary literacy and content literacy are valuable. But the confusion between the two concepts is unfortunate (too many educators think that disciplinary literacy is just a new name for content area reading) It can prevent teachers from understanding what the choices really are.

  https://sites.google.com/site/shanahanstuff/parent-information