Everyone knows Grapes of Wrath is harder to read than predicted. But for every book with a hinky readability score many others are placed just right.

  These formulas certainly are not perfect, but they are easy to use and they make more accurate guesses than we can without them.

  So what’s the problem?

  Readability measures do a great job of predicting reading comprehension, but they provide lousy writing guidance.

  Let’s say that you have a text that comes out harder than you’d hoped. You wanted it for fourth-grade, but the Lexiles say it’s better for grade 5.

  Easy to fix, right? Just divide a few sentences in two to reduce average sentence length, and swap out a few of the harder words for easier synonyms, and voila, the Lexiles will be just what you’d hoped for.

  But research shows this kind of mechanical “adjusting” doesn’t actually change the difficulty of the text (though it does mess up the accuracy of the readability rating). This kind of “fix” won’t make the text easier for your fourth-graders, but the grade that you put on the book will be just right. Would you rather feel good or look good?

  With all of the new emphasis on readability levels in Common Core, I fear that test and textbook publishers are going to make sure that their measurements are terrific, even if their texts are not.

  What should happen when a text turns out to be harder or easier than intended, is that the material should be assigned to another grade level or it should really be revised. Real revisions make more than make mechanical adjustments. Such rewrites engage in the author in trying to improve the text’s clarity.

  Such fixes aren’t likely to happen much with reading textbooks, because they tend to be anthologies of texts already published elsewhere. E.B. White and Roald Dahl won’t be approving revisions of their stuff anytime soon, nor will many of the living and breathing authors whose books are anthologized.

  But instructional materials and assessment passages that are written—not selected—specifically to teach or test literacy skills are another thing altogether. Don’t be surprised if many of those kinds of materials turn out to be harder or easier than you thought they’d be.

  There is no sure way to protect against fitting texts to readability formulas. Sometimes mechanical revisions are pretty choppy, and you might catch that. But generally you can’t tell if a text has been manipulated to come out right. The publishers themselves may not know, since such texts are often written to spec by independent contractors.

  Readability formulas are a valuable tool in text selection texts, but they only index text difficulty, they don’t actually measure it (that is, they do not reveal why a text may be hard to understand). Qualitative review of texts and continuous monitoring how well students do with texts in the classroom are important tools for keeping the publishing companies honest on this one. Buyer beware.

Shanahan responds: 

Like you, I’m nervous about the technology of the new tests. We’re in a tech revolution, and yet, I don’t see as much of that technology in schools as is widely presumed. Even schools that have lots of I-Pads or computers often don’t have the bandwidth needed or the onsite tech support. There are definitely home and school disparities when it comes to tech availability.

  Another issue has to do with whether tech is really necessary—in an academic sense—in the testing. Looking at the available prototypes for the tests, I would say yes and no. For example, students have traditionally marked answers on tests and worksheets simply by checking off an item or filling in a bubble grid; nothing particularly academic in those skills. The new assessments will have them doing  “drag-and-drop” and the like instead. Is that really an advance?

  But there are items in which students must access webpages and identify sentences in text, and of course, there is writing and revising with these tools. All of these examples seem, to me, to be authentic academic tasks. There is nothing wrong with drag-and-drop items, but if they weren’t there, the assessments would tell us pretty much the same thing. That’s not true of these other skills. In all of these latter cases, students are asked to negotiate tasks that are common in college and the workplace, and as such kids should be able to handle them.

  I suspect when the feds required that these new tests be tech-based, they thought NCLB would be reauthorized. That might have allowed the federal government to incent school districts to upgrade their technology. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Many schools are now scrambling to upgrade their technology (often these efforts seem aimed only at the test—one hopes they’ll soon figure out that they have to use these for instruction as well).

  In any event, your question is a good one. It is that the technology disadvantage of some kids will affect performance. That could mean that kids who, though they can read well, may score poorly because of unfamiliarity with keyboards, data screens, etc. That might not be misleading, however. Reading in the 21^st century is more than reading a book or magazine; it really does require critical reading of multiple texts available on the Internet; just like writing does usually involve typing on a computer or other device. Monitoring whether our kids can do these tasks successfully is appropriate. The side benefit of that, one hopes, is that schools will move more quickly to making such tools more widely available.  

Shanahan response: 

Great question. There is a lot of evidence showing the importance of grammar in reading comprehension. Studies over the years have shown a clear relationship between syntactic or grammatical sophistication and reading comprehension; that is, as students learn to employ more complex sentences in their oral and written language, their ability to make sense of what they read increases, too.

  Also, readability measures are able to predict how well students will comprehend particular texts on the basis of only two variables: vocabulary sophistication and grammatical complexity. At least for the Lexile formula, grammar is much more heavily weighted than vocabulary. This means that the text factor that is most predictive of comprehensibility is how complicated the sentences are grammatically.

  There are also experimental studies that show that there are ways that grammar can be taught formally that improve reading comprehension. For example, teaching students to combine sentences seems to improve how well students understand what they read. Clearly, it makes sense to guide students to understand how sentences work.

  Studies of metacognition and theories of reading comprehension suggest the importance of students having a language of grammar (knowing the difference between a noun and a verb for example), and common sense would suggest that it makes sense to help students to unpack sentences that confuse them.

  That doesn’t necessarily justify a lot of grammar worksheets and the like, but it does argue for teaching students about sentences as they meet them. For example, look at the following sentence from Nikki Giovanni:

  “The women of Montgomery, both young and older, would come in with their fancy holiday dresses that needed adjustments or their Sunday suits and blouses that needed just a touch—a flower or some velvet trimming or something to make the ladies look festive.”

  It is a long sentence (44 words), and it has lots of embedding (witness the author’s use of 2 commas and an em-dash). I surmise many students would struggle to make sense of this sentence primarily because of the complex grammar. How would you deal with this?

  First, I would have the students read this page from Giovanni’s Rosa and one of the questions I would ask would be, “What did the women of Montgomery do?” Perhaps I’d find that the students weren’t as perplexed as I assumed in which case I’d move on. But let’s imagine that they couldn’t answer my question... then I’d show them how to break this sentence down.

  For example, I would point out that the phrase between the commas, “both young and older,” adds an idea but that I want to set it aside for now. That would simplify the sentence a bit:

  “The women of Montgomery would come in with their fancy holiday dresses that needed adjustments or their Sunday suits and blouses that needed just a touch – a flower or some velvet trimming or something to make the ladies look festive.”

  Even with such a simple change, I bet more kids would understand it better, but maybe not. Let’s go further:

  As with the commas, the word “that” (which shows up twice here) signals the inclusion of a separate or additional idea, and as a reader that is another point of attack that I can use in trying to interpret this sentence. And the word “or” is another good place to separate these additional ideas.

  Let’s slice the sentence at the first “that” and the first “or:”

  “The women of Montgomery would come in with their fancy holiday dresses”

  “that needed adjustments”   

  "or their Sunday suits and blouses that needed just a touch–a flower or some velvet trimming or something to make the ladies look festive."

  Obviously, we could keep breaking this one down, but again, many kids would get it at this point: The women were bringing in their fancy dresses… Which women? The young and the old. Which fancy dresses? The ones that needed adjustments. What other kinds of outfits did they bring in? Sunday suits and blouses. Which suits and blouses? The ones that needed just a touch—something that would make them look festive.

  The point of this kind of exchange would not be to teach grammar per se, but to help students to untangle complex grammar so that they could independently make sense of what they read. Frankly, few of our children know what to do when they confront this kind of text complexity. Kids who know something about sentences and parts of speech will be at an advantage, but they still will not necessarily be able to interpret a sentence from that alone. This kind of scaffolded analysis is aimed at both untangling the meaning of this sentence and in giving students some tools for unpacking such sentences when they are on their own.

  Your reading program should provide some instruction in grammar, and it should provide you with some support in providing students with instruction in parts of speech, sentence combining, and/or the kinds of scaffolding demonstrated here. It is pure romanticism that assumes that children will just figure this kind of thing out without any explicit instruction (and it is even more foolish to assume that English language learners will intuit these things without more direct support).

  There are so many choices: kids will be reading more challenging texts; close reading will revolutionize the reading lessons; high school English, science, and social studies teachers will teach disciplinary literacy; there will be greater attention to argument, multiple text, informational text, and writing from sources, and so on?

  So which is the biggest change? Perhaps one that you haven’t even thought of…

  Past standards were long lists of skills, knowledge, and strategies; lists so endless that they were less standards than curriculum guides. Until CCSS, the typical standards looked like a scope and sequence chart rather than a list of outcomes.

  In fact, the lists were so long that most of the young people who have become teachers since 1991 have no idea what the difference is between standards and curricula. When you have such complete lists of outcomes, you end up with an extensive list of lessons rather than learning goals.

  Standards are goals; they are the outcomes that we want our children to accomplish. Standards tell you what the point is, but they really don’t tell you what needs to be taught.

  Example: the standards require that students be able to write/compose high quality narratives, expositions, and arguments. However, the standards do not expressly require schools to teach students to use manuscript hand, cursive writing, or keyboarding.

  That has some critics in a tizzy, but it is as it should be. The standard tells you the outcome that must be accomplished, but not everything that a student may need to learn to reach the goal is specified. That's where the teacher comes in… what do we need to teach to accomplish these standards? That is up to us.

  Just try to teach kids to compose without making it possible for them to express their ideas in printed, written, or typed words… that wouldn’t make any sense, and I assume most schools and publishers will eventually figure out the reason for this "omission" and kids will still be taught to put their words on paper (even though CCSS doesn’t even mention it).

  The same can be said about teaching students to comprehend text. The standards don't require you to teach comprehension strategies, but research suggests that if you do you will be more likely to get the students to the standard.

  The standards say teach students to summarize… but they don’t specify all of the possible subskills, pre-skills, or types of texts that students should be able to summarize. Try teaching summarization by just having students practice summarizing and you won’t be likely succeed.

  So the big change? The CCSS takes us back to a time when the educational goals were separated from the curriculum, which puts teachers back in charge of the curriculum.

  Now if we could just get teachers to see tests as something separate from goals and curriculum.

Shanahan response:  

What a great question. In my blog post, I cited particular studies and Dick Allington’s focused on a completely different set of studies. This is what teachers find so confusing. 

  The experimental studies that I cited randomly assigned students to different treatment groups, so that children were matched to books in different ways, which allows a direct comparison of the impact of these methods—and gives us some certainty that the differences in learning were due to the different ways students were matched with text and not to something else.

  Allington cites several correlational studies that examine existing patterns of relationship. These studies show that the lowest readers will tend to be placed in relatively harder texts and that they tend to make the least gains or to be the least motivated.

  The problem with correlational studies of this kind is that they don’t allow us to attribute causation. From such evidence we can’t determine what role, if any, the student-book match made in kids’ learning. 

  The students may have lagged because of how they were matched to books. But their low learning gains could also be due to other unmeasured instructional or demographic differences (many differences between high and low readers have been documented, but those were not controlled or measured in these studies). It could just be that the lowest readers make the least gains and that it has nothing to do with how they are matched to books. That’s why you need experiments (to determine whether the correlations matter).

I looked at studies that actually evaluated the effectiveness of this instructional practice (and these studies found either that student-text match made no difference or that harder placements led to more learning). While Dick looked at studies that revealed that there was a relationship between these variables, omitting all mention of these contradictory direct tests or of any of the correlational evidence that didn’t support his claims.

  There were two experimental studies in his review, but neither of them manipulated this particular variable, so these results are correlational, too. For example, Linnea Ehri and her colleagues created a program in which teachers provided intensive reading support to young struggling readers (mainly explicit instruction in phonological awareness and phonics). However, teachers varied in how much reading they had the students do during the intervention and how they matched children to books; the kids who did a lot of reading of easier materials seemed to learn the most. That is an interesting finding, but it is still just a correlation.

  One possibility is that there were other differences that weren’t measured (but that were somehow captured indirectly by the text-match variable). Perhaps the teachers were just responding to the students who were making the biggest gains and were undershooting their levels since they were gaining so fast. That would mean that it wasn’t the student-book match that was leading to learning, but that the better learning was influencing teacher decision-making about student-book match. How could we sort that confusing picture out? With experiments that systematically observe the impact of book placement separate from other variables; such as the the experimental studies that I cited.

  A couple of other points worth noting: the kids who gained the least in the Ehri study were placed in texts in the way that you say your school is doing. In the Ehri study, the kids who made the biggest gains were in even easier materials than that; materials that should have afforded little opportunity to learn (which makes my point—there is no magic level that kids have to be placed in text to allow them to learn).

  Another important point to remember: Allington’s article made no distinction based on grade levels or student reading levels. His claim is that all struggling readers need to spend much or most of their time reading relatively easy texts, and his most convincing data were drawn from studies of first-graders. However, the Common Core State Standards do not raise text levels for beginning readers. When students are reading at a first-grade level or lower (no matter what their ages), it may be appropriately cautious to keep them in relatively easy materials (though there are some discrepant data on this point too--that suggest that grouping students for instruction in this way damages children more than it helps them).

  Experimental studies show that by the time students are reading like second-graders, it is possible for them to learn from harder text (as they did in the Morgan study). If we hold students back at their supposed levels, we are guaranteeing that they cannot reach the levels of literacy needed for college and career readiness by the time they leave high school.

  Let’s turn the world on its head.

  Recently, I came across a fascinating new investigation of the relationship between reading achievement and SES conducted by Stuart Ritchie and Timothy Bates and reported earlier this year in Psychological Sciences. They aren’t educators and they weren’t interested in explaining the determinants of school achievement (a la Coleman). Instead, they went the other direction. They set out to explain the determinants of SES; why are there differences in income levels?

  Here is the abstract of the study:

“Understanding the determinants of socioeconomic status (SES) is an important economic and social goal. Several major influences on SES are known, yet much of the variance in SES remains unexplained. In a large, population-representative sample from the United Kingdom, we tested the effects of mathematics and reading achievement at age 7 on attained SES by age 42. Mathematics and reading ability both had substantial positive associations with adult SES, above and beyond the effects of SES at birth, and with other important factors, such as intelligence. Achievement in mathematics and reading was also significantly associated with intelligence scores, academic motivation, and duration of education. These findings suggest effects of improved early mathematics and reading on SES attainment across the life span.”

  This study of more than 18,000 children/adults convincingly reveals the importance of early reading achievement in later educational and economic success. Not to put too fine a point on it: Better readers (at age 7) will out earn their classmates who don’t read as well.

  Correlational studies cannot show causation—that would take experimental research, but there are things that researchers can do to increase the chances that the relationship may be causal. Thus, it is important that these second-graders’ reading scores continued to explain differences in later incomes even after their parents’ SES was controlled for. We often talk about a “cycle of poverty;” poor parents raise children who will themselves likely live in poverty. That these children’s early reading and math scores do a better job of predicting their futures shows the power of education to break that cycle; poor parents do tend to raise children who will live in poverty as adults, unless the kids master their reading skills.

  Reading was measured three ways in the study: a 30-item word reading test, a 5-point scale in which teachers rated children from non-reader to avid reader; and the book level that the students were able to read. Individually, there appear to be only small differences in the correlations of these separate measures with later SES. In other words, all of these were meaningful assessments of reading (perhaps we could use these kinds of teacher rating scales to reduce the amount of screening assessment that we do?).

  Of course, these data were based on children’s reading scores a long time ago (these 42-year-olds were 7 in 1965). However, in the U.S. the correlation between education and economic success has been increasing. In 1965, it was still possible to make good money without much education (working in a factory may have been boring but it could be lucrative). My guess is that how well 7-year-olds read is even more important today than it was for the children in the study.

  Teaching someone to read is to give them economic power—even if they are only 7.

  No, CCSS neither requires the use of commercial programs nor does it prohibit such use. That is strictly a local decision.

So should we use a program?

  I’ve long argued that teachers need programs. The development of extensive lesson plans and tracking down appropriate materials each day is overwhelming for most teachers, and it introduces great variability into classroom instruction. One of the things I learned as director of reading in Chicago was that having everybody teaching something different makes it well nigh impossible for any kind of systemic improvement. I don’t believe that programs are necessarily better than the lessons good teachers create, but I do believe that all instruction is limited and it is essential for school systems to improve widely rather than a teacher at a time

But if it is okay for us to develop our lessons then why shouldn’t we?

  Again, research certainly does not show that commercial programs generally do any better than teacher made lessons. Nor does it reveal such programs to be inferior to teacher lessons. I would rather have teachers adjusting shared lessons and then using the saved time to focus on the learning needs of the children. No one can teach all day, design lessons as extensive as those in typical commercial programs, and focus on children’s needs and problems. Of course, programs can have problems, but in a good system these problems will be identified over time and the schools can respond system wide rather than individually.

Our district is making model lessons and we are supposed to then come up with our own lessons based on the models?

  Many states, school systems, unions, and publishers are designing such lessons. This approach suggests that it is possible to formulate worthwhile lessons that can be used on scale. In other words, these groups are using their money and teacher sweat equity to create lessons to be used by others. That’s the same thing that publishers do.

You seem to think developing such lessons is a waste of time?

  I generally do think such efforts tend to be expensive and expect too much of teachers. And, yet, I have worked on many of these CCSS lesson design efforts around the country, and engaging students in such lesson development can be great professional development. (And research bears this out; designing and redesigning lessons with feedback—that’s usually my role—can teach a teacher a lot). It is once those very expensive prototypes have been developed and the process is turned over to teachers to do that day in and day out on their own that I get skeptical. That’s the benefit of commercial programs; they give teachers a base to work from and it locates the materials for the lessons, etc.

What is the biggest problem that you are seeing in these kinds of lessons?

  One of the big problems that I have seen is the designs that try to break the standards down into parts. Thus, if a standard asks for kids to do two or three things in combination, they reduce this to doing each of those things separately—which is not the same thing. Teachers tell me that it is easier to understand and teach the parts, which I don’t doubt at all; but doing it that way tends to miss out on what the standard actually means. It is harder to carry out three actions in concert while reading a challenging text; that’s the point. You can simplify it, of course, but then you aren’t actually teaching the same standard.

My state has done that for us.

  It doesn’t really matter who makes the mistake, it is still a mistake if your goal was higher achievement.

You said you have seen lots of groups developing units and lesson prototypes. Are any of them better than the others?

  Not in terms of who is developing these. I see both good and bad examples across the board.

It sounds like you believe teachers should be using commercial programs. But we are seeing lots of materials with Common Core stickers that don’t look very Common Core.

  Me, too. This is a case of “buyer beware.” It is more efficient to use commercial programs and it is fairer for kids since it equalizes the playing field a bit (“my teacher couldn’t/didn’t find as good a story as the teacher next door”). But just because it is commercial it will not necessarily be any good. It is clearly up to the teachers to determine quality of the overall program and then to monitor the program for weak spots during use (which is easier than everyone spending hours designing all lessons themselves). Take a good careful look at the materials that foks are trying to sell you and be critical; if you think they have just relabeled their old lessons to make them look Common Core-ish, then ask them to show you both the program they are selling you and the previous edition of the program. That will uncover some of the chicanery that sometimes takes place.

Aren’t textbooks for lazy teachers?

No, they are not, and I think that can even be a dangerous claim. I’ve seen teachers over the years (including myself early on) defining quality in terms of whether the teacher uses a textbook or not. Not using a textbook won’t make you a good teacher by definition. You can be a good teacher with our without a textbook program, which means good teachers have to plan instruction even when they have a textbook. That is more efficient and it will give kids a fairer shot at success, but it won’t guarantee quality; only teachers and principals can do that.

Shanahan Response:

Thanks. I hadn’t seen this post by Jeremiah Chaffee, an English teacher. I've only  focused on his “cold reading” remarks.

  First, Common Core doesn’t use the term, “cold read.” It appears to be meant as a pejorative for close reading, though it only characterizes one dimension of close reading (the withholding of information from outside the text—while ignoring its emphasis on how texts work and the use of text evidence in interpretation). Close reading sounds warm and cuddly (“let’s get close”); while cold reading is, well, cold.

  Mr. Chaffee claims cold reading is inherently boring. I’m sure it can be, but I don’t think it has to. I’ve been working on a study, observing large numbers of reading lessons of the type he champions, but contrary to his claims, many of those lessons seem painfully boring. I, again, don’t think that has to be the case, but there it is. I’ve spent much time in classrooms over 40 years, and I’m not convinced there is any way of reading that is necessarily intellectually stimulating, nor do I think any of these popular reading approaches are consistently stultifying either.

  Part of the problem is that these ways of reading are really philosophical positions about epistemology that are being translated into instructional practice. Those who espouse particular ways of reading strive for philosophical consistency. The problem is that none of these reading approaches consistently pays off; and readers are likely better served by a wider palate of choices. 

  Mr. Chaffee says the “cold” approach to text has something to do with standardized testing. It doesn’t. In fact, the notion that students should read texts without lots of added background dates to the 1920s, in college English departments --without any thoughts of standardized testing or testing preparation.

  He criticizes David Coleman for indicating that close reads “level the playing field,” by limiting students to the information in the text instead of their background knowledge. I agree with Mr. Chaffee on this one, and his many examples all make sense to me. Readers are going to make connections when they read, and you won’t easily bridle this activity, nor should you. David C. (as well as many of his critics) do seem a tad confused on this point… they seem to believe that how we present a text to students will change the nature of reading comprehension. It won’t. These modern-day Canutes can order the ebb of the tides all they want; to no avail.

  Human beings appear to be programmed to see connections and relationships. Close/cold reading may not intentionally emphasize the application of prior knowledge during reading, but it can’t very well prevent it.

  I have expressed my own criticisms of close reading and the Coleman videos in this space before and readers can turn to past posts about close reading to see what my views have been (there is an index on the right side of my page). One point that I have made is that close reading is not an identical process across disciplines, and I think that is partially what Mr. Chaffee is getting at in his complaints about the Gettysburg Address lesson (it is one thing to analyze the rhetoric of the text, and another altogether to determine what led to this speech or what its implications have been--English teachers can satisfy themselves with the former, while history teachers can neglect that and focus on the latter).

  But I think Chaffee’s argument is as simplistic as what he complains about. Yes, a teacher could definitely have kids discuss their experiences at funerals, since Lincoln’s speech was delivered as part of a memorial service. However, like Coleman, I suspect this would only waste time and lead kids astray rather than focusing them on a deeper interaction with Lincoln’s message and rhetoric. As historians (Garry Wills, for instance) have so articulately explained, Lincoln’s address isn’t characteristic of eulogies at ordinary funerals, but of the addresses at funerals for heroes; and the language and structure that Lincoln chose was in that tradition (his speech was based on Pericles’ Oration).

  I’ve been to too many funerals and have seen too many memorial speeches, none of which was anything like Lincoln’s talk—in style, structure, language choice, or purpose. The more relevant background experience, for me, is what I know of public funerals—such as those of the Kennedy brothers, the Challenger astronauts, and Martin Luther King, all of which I watched on television. My Uncle Bud’s beery sendoff shared no obvious connections with Gettysburg. (Of course, the reason Lincoln’s address is similar to those given at modern heroic funerals is because these modern eulogists have been ventriloquizing Lincoln.)

  If your students have more than a passing familiarity with memorial addresses at heroic funerals, then I would definitely encourage them to make this connection, a connection that could be stimulated with no more than a sentence or two of explanation (studies suggest that is all that is needed to get our natural relating and connecting proclivities flowing). But teachers should not spend half the period showing videos of such memorials prior to reading because at that point it would be better to have them focused on Lincoln’s words and ideas (close reading).

  The basic idea that Coleman and company have been expressing is that it is important for students to gain extensive experience in reading and interpreting text. Towards that end they are trying to reign in some of the unfortunate classroom practices that have often done more to distract students from texts rather than involving them in reading texts more reflectively and thoughtfully. (Regular readers know Coleman long ago backed off on some of the more strident claims about close reading that Mr. Chaffee is reacting to).

  The problem is that teachers have too often allowed precious classroom reading time to be waylaid by errant discussions of student background; discussions that may be irrelevant to interpreting the text, that may reinforce students’ existing misconceptions; and that, even when focused appropriately, may be more extensive than necessary to prepare students to take on a text effectively. It is easy to mistake a lively discussion of family funerals (oxymoron intended) as a sign of student engagement; it may be, but it is not an engagement in reading.

Question:

The Education Department in Louisiana (Louisiana Believes) has a scope and sequence that teachers can use to teach the CCSS in ELA. Teachers have informed me there are too many standards in each ELA unit to teach in order to effectively teach them. Of the 10 standards in each of the following: reading literature, reading information, and writing, most of them are listed in each ELA unit. Teachers are aware that students should be proficient in all ELA standards for their grade level. 

What are your thoughts regarding teachers focusing on 3-5 ELA standards per unit and continuing to work with these standards throughout the rest of the units? They will be teaching the remaining ELA standards as they apply to the text.  Focus standards in each unit will continue to be taught and students will continue to work with them throughout the year.  By the end of the year, they will have taught and students will have worked with all ELA standards in their grade level with the goal of students being proficient in all ELA standards for the grade level.

In your opinion, would it be effective for teachers to do this?  

Shanahan Reply: 

I have taken a look at the Louisiana material and I can see why teachers are confused. The lists of books are useful, but many of the assignments seem not to be especially connected to Common Core (writing one’s own story based on the pictures in a storybook does not constitute writing from sources, for example). In terms of your specific question…

  First, although CCSS has fewer standards than were evident in past state standards, they are still overwhelming. Listing pretty much all of the standards for each unit is pretty worthless as a management approach. Let’s get some control of this.

  I think it is imperative that teachers understand that there are not 20 reading comprehension standards at each grade level, but only 10. CCSS shows how these 10 standards look in literary and informational texts, hence the confusion that these constitute 20 separate standards. There are also 10 writing standards, and these overlap in important ways with the reading standards (see items 7-8-9). My point is that it will be helpful to see these lists in the most economical ways possible. Fewer standards will give you greater purchase on the entire set. The Louisiana materials--by listing each standard repeatedly for each unit--magnifies the problem of too many items to focus on; it should be striving to reduce the load, not increase it.

Second, the categories are as important as the individual standards (since the categories reveal the purposes of what are in each set). The Louisiana plan misses this key point and it is part of the reason the guidance is so overwhelming. For example, the first three reading standards emphasize that readers need to be able to grasp the “key ideas and details” of the texts they read. They should, for instance, be able to summarize what they read, or answer questions about what the text said explicitly or implied. Looking at these categorically will help you to see them in a more coherent way. The Louisiana materials encourage a more fragmented approach, and teachers are overwhelmed by all the little pieces.

  Third, it is important to understand that standards are not synonymous with curriculum (something that CCSS has stressed repeatedly). If you are trying to teach students to make sense of a text’s key ideas and details what do you need to teach to get them there? It might be helpful to teach them to identify a main idea or how to paraphrase; or some kind of note-taking might help. By just matching outcomes with texts/assignments, the whole idea of curriculum has been washed away. Louisiana’s guidance neglects this basic point—again, confusing things.

  However, despite those complaints, Louisiana is correct in its approach that units—and even individual lessons—will need to address multiple standards. The structure of the comprehension standards is less a detailed list of disparate items than an organized set of cognitive moves one might make in trying to understand a text. Students are to be taught to identify key ideas and details while reading, to analyze how an author conveyed those ideas, and to evaluate and connect/compare texts with other “texts.” While I don’t think it makes sense to try to instantiate each of the 10 comprehension items every time students read, it might make sense to instantiate at least one standard from each category during a close reading (that would require attention to at least three standards per lesson/text).

  Which standards to address will vary from text-to-text. But this variation should not be linked to some pacing guide or curriculum guidance. It should be linked to the specific texts or tasks students are engaged with. Individual standards will match better with some texts or reading circumstances. For example, if a unit includes only a single text, you might have the students evaluate it in some way, but you probably wouldn’t have them comparing it with other texts.

  But remember, not every lesson will be the focus of close reading. The idea of mixing in other readings/exercises/lessons in which students practice a particular comprehension strategy or analyze particular aspect of a text can be mixed in, too. Research shows that such lessons can bear fruit. While such analysis or practice is not included in the standards (because this analysis or practice is not an outcome), it can be an important avenue to ensuring that students reach the standards.

  As students read various texts across the school year, they will practice particular standards in varying combinations depending on the demands of the specific texts.

My colleagues have been debating the use of thematic units in the Common Core. Several of them argue that this practice does not fit a "standards based curriculum." They argue that essential questions and enduring understandings need to be specific to the ELA standards. So, for example, a unit with an essential question for a 3rd grade should look something like this:

Unit Topic:  Ask and Answer Questions

Essential Question: How do readers ask and answers questions from the text? Why is it important to use evidence from the text to support your answer?  

  The other side on this debate argues that there must be a purpose and sense of relevancy for the units. They suggest:

Unit Topic: Questions and Answers

Essential Question:  Should you question the way things work? What makes you believe an answer?

They also argue that connecting the ELA standards to the other content areas adds meaning and relevance. So the above question could be the basis for social studies as well as science.

  What is your take?  How do we ensure that the Common Core standards are rigorous but also relevant?

Shanahan Response 

Good question. This argument is one that I, too, have been watching with a bit of chagrin.

  First, remember the Common Core does not directly insist on any particular approach to the teaching of the CCSS. So, at the end of the day, the choice is yours.

  Second, guidance in the standards or from some of the advice from the creators of the standards can seem contradictory. For example, the standards place a big emphasis on the reading and analysis of multiple texts, including synthesizing information across texts. That sure seems to encourage thematic units. But, then the standards authors write, “Care should also be taken that introducing broad themes and questions in advance of reading does not prompt overly general conversations rather than focusing reading on the specifics, drawing evidence from the text, and gleaning meaning from it." Which takes us in the other direction altogether.

  To me, the biggest change fostered by Common Core is the heavy attention to the text— the standards set specific challenge levels for the texts, provide long lists of exemplary texts to ensure that we select ones with sufficient depth and quality, prescribe proportions of time to be devoted to different kinds of text (e.g., literary, informational), and promote close reading which requires more focused emphasis on the text than in the past.

  Given all of that, I think it is pretty clear that those who want to build units around the standards themselves are as far off as can be. That’s why the E. D. Hirsch’s of the world have embraced the standards—because these standards encourage so much attention to the information in the texts; with these new standards there is some real chance of kids learning about their world. If teachers switch the focus back to the comprehension skills themselves, instead of teaching the skills within the context of the texts, we will be pretty much where we have been. (We surveyed teachers when CCSS came out and found that the majority focused their lessons on the skills and selected books accordingly. We’re watching to see how that shifts over the next couple of years).

  However, the admonition quoted earlier is an important one. Past experience with thematic units tells me that these often lack depth and can overwhelm the specifics of the text. That's one of the reasons that the vast majority of multiple text its in the Common Core emphasize the comparison of two texts, rather than the synthesis of several. A unit on non-themes like “courage” or “penguins” won’t likely provide the intellectual engagement and motivation your colleagues desire, and yet a more thematic approach (“Should you question the way things work?”) often will override the need to closely read a literary text, and will constrain interpretations. Why engage in a close reading if I already know what it means? 

Generally, I think topical units with informational text can work very well, and there are times with literature when it would be worth organizing units around selections from a particular genre or author; those approaches will allow you to keep the emphasis on the content without imposing a separate content on the texts. And, everything that is read does not have to fit into a collection; some texts are so good, they are just worth reading even if they are not in a text set.

This is a bit confusing. The basic idea of close reading is, just as you say, that interpretation is to be based entirely on the text itself. Readers aren’t to turn to author biographies or other works in that author’s oeuvre. No Cliff’s Notes either. Even prefaces, blurbs, statements of context, and explanatory notes provided by the publisher are verboten.

  These interpretive “prohibitions” are all aimed at ensuring that readers make sense of a text solely by considering the author’s case as stated explicitly and implied by an author’s own words within the text (if an author wrote about his earlier book or poem we’d reject those words, too, because they are not from the universe of the text itself).

  However, once one has read a text, grasping what the author had to say, and how he/she said it—in other words, you have successfully read it closely—then it is perfectly reasonable to wonder about how this work connects to other universes. What are the implications of this book for how I should live my life? How does it compare with the author’s other works or with other works within this genre? How does it measure up on some external quality scale? These questions are all within bounds, once a close reading has been done… and all are premature and problematic if engaged in earlier in the reading process.

  At least one of the authors of Common Core expressed trepidation to me early on about the inclusion of multiple texts, and I imagine the same concerns linger about how multiple texts are now being addressed by the testing consortia. If a text is being used to help figure out some aspect of a companion text, then it is a distraction from the immediate job of the reader—who needs to trace the path sketched out by the author through his/her words and structures. If these multiple texts are being put together to allow for a comparative evaluation or a synthesis of information from already closely-read works, then it is consistent with the goals of Common Core.

  Remember, however, that there are other ways to read besides close reading. Some of those other schemes actually encourage readers to seek and use information from outside a text:  such as when a reader uses a 19^th century dictionary to discern the meaning of a word at the time the author used it in the text, or when a reader uses clues from one of an author’s poems to help decode another. Close reading may frown on such approaches, and yet, I suspect students with these skills will be pretty college- and career-ready, thank you very much.

  However, this is a very low standard. Many text dependent questions simply aren’t worth asking.

  Last week I met a teacher who was trying to generate every literal question she could—long lists of questions. She was interpreting close reading as “thorough reading” and she was making sure that her first-graders missed nothing; no detail was too trivial for her text dependent questions.

  However, close reading does not necessarily require this kind of intensive, thorough, literal reading.

  Close reading asks readers to understand what the text says, how it works, what it means, how it connects up with other texts, what value or quality it has… but none of this requires the reader to come to terms with every fact in a text.

  The key is to ask questions that are not only text dependent, but that guide the reader to accomplish those interpretive goals. To do that the questions have to emphasize what is important in the universe of the text.

  For example, in some literary texts the names of the characters really matter. In Steinbeck’s East of Eden the brothers’ names are Caleb and Aaron and their initials correspond with those of another set of rivalrous brothers, Cain and Abel. It is a literary allusion and recognizing it is essential to interpretation. Likewise in Moby Dick, all of the characters share names with Biblical figures; again, allusions. And, it matters that the betrayed wife in The Great Gatsby is called Daisy, since nature serves as a key symbol in that book. 

  But character names don’t always carry deeper meanings. It doesn’t really matter much that Tom Sawyer is named Tom or that Becky Thatcher is Becky. If they were Bill and Lizzie, it wouldn’t change much. The same is true for Bigger Thomas in Native Son.

  Thus, asking about the names in East of Eden, Moby Dick, and Gatsby would make sense because there is some chance that these questions would encourage the readers to notice these key interpretative details, while asking about the names of the characters in Tom Sawyer of Native Son would emphasize text dependent, but trivial information.

Ask questions that are text dependent by all means, but make sure they help students to accomplish the key interpretive goals, and that focus on important ideas.  

 

 Shanahan response: 

Good question. I share your concerns. There are very few articles or stories appropriate for K/1 that would make any sense for close reading. The content usually just isn’t deep enough to bear such close study (and, frankly, if you look at the comprehension standards themselves, specifically standards #4-9 for those grades, it should be evident that CCSS doesn’t envision particularly close reading at these levels).

  I think the problem is the nature of typical beginning reading text, not the students’ intellectual capacities. Given that, several beginning-reading experts whom I have spoken with about this all agree: teachers can read wonderfully rich literature and informational texts to these young-uns, texts that would be too hard for the kids to read themselves. With your guidance they should be able to analyze such texts in terms of their craft and structure or their value and connection to other texts. Close listening experiences in Kindergarten and Grade 1 could lay a valuable foundation for the later development of close reading ability.

Some additional advice on this: (1) keep your eyes open for that very occasional beginning reading text that could support a close read (you're most likely to find such texts later in the year during Grade 1); and (2) don’t overdo it; close reading (or listening) is important, but it is not the only reading goal set forth by CCSS; every reading does not need to be a close reading. 

  Two years ago, a Kindergarten student could be on level B, and be promoted.  Now, two years later, they must be on Level D/E. The pattern continues throughout the grades, what was acceptable a few years ago as grade level is no longer the case. This presents a problem for my students with reading disorders, whose primary struggles are with decoding/fluency, and in turn sometimes comprehension.

  I have dyslexic students who are on grade level in math, but below in reading, and my administrators feel that retaining them in first grade will "give them a chance" and prevent reading failure in the future. I feel that retaining them is not the right decision, as they are on grade level in pretty much everything except decoding/fluency. I think it is wrong to hold back these students and I think the research shows this.  Just wanted to know your thoughts, as you are an expert. 

My response:

First, let’s distinguish the common core from what I suspect you’re confronting. Common core is neither for nor against retention. What you are running into is currently a big policy debate across the nation. Many states and large districts are adopting stricter student retention policies for the primary grades as a big part of their “reading by grade 3” initiatives.

      Why is retention such an issue? Not because of common core, but because of some recent research on the success of Florida’s educational reforms. Some states have accomplished improvement on their state tests, but have faltered on other measures. Not so Florida. It improved on the NAEP, too, and the gains have held up.

Why have they done so well? One possibility is Florida’s test-based retention policy. Jay Greene and Marcus Winters examined the results of this policy in a study reported in the journal, Educational Finance and Policy in 2007.“The results ...suggest that students subjected to the treatment of Florida’s test-based retention policy made signi?cant and economically substantial gains in reading relative to promoted students. Further, that the impact of the policy for reading scores grows after two years is consistent with the idea that retained students will continue to gain ground in reading relative to promoted students in later years as academic material becomes more dif?cult. The fact that the size of the impact found after one and two years is quite similar across these two quite different comparison approaches provides con?dence that our results are robust.” (Greene & Winters, p. 336).

      A more recent study on the same policy was even more positive in its findings (Schwerdt & West, 2013):

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG12-09_West.pdf

        “Although conventional OLS estimates suggest negative effects of retention on achievement, regression discontinuity estimates indicate large positive effects on achievement and a reduced probability of retention in subsequent years. The achievement gains from test-based retention fade out over time, however, and are statistically insignificant after six years.”

      These newer studies tell me that it is possible to retain kids and to get good results from such efforts. However, it might not be that simple. Past studies, unlike these, have detailed lots of problems with retention. In my next blog I'll talk about the one big gap evident in these newer studies, and what some of the past concerns have been. Based on the older studies I have long advised schools against retention, and frankly, I'm not yet convinced, though these newer studies have definitely given me pause and I think this evidence is too good to ignore. I'll explore those ideas more fully next time.

 

I am writing to you for some suggestions and recommendations concerning working with science and social studies teachers in light of the writing standards in the common core.  I am a former English teacher with 35 years of experience and have, for the past seven years, worked to develop and present workshops and classes for content area teachers in reading – focusing on both disciplinary and content literacy.  

  I have been asked by a school district to provide professional development for secondary science and social studies teachers in implementing the writing standards in the common core.  Their suggestion was to start with a grammar workshop – which I think would be the best way to drive the teachers in the opposite direction as well as provide the wrong focus.  However, I have not found any resources to guide in the best way to involve these teachers in their ability to incorporate these standards in their classes. 

  As a proponent of disciplinary literacy, I believe that the writing should be approached from the perspective of the disciplines and not from the perspective of an English teacher.  One idea that I had was to start with sample papers to evaluate and introduce them to the standards through a rubric and the actual evaluation of the papers.  Specific concerns about grammar, diction, sentence structure… then could be addressed through mini-lessons as needed.

  I just cannot seem to find any literature to give some guidance. 

  Shanahan response:

I agree with you on this one. Starting with basic skills is not going to pull in the teachers, and, if it did, it would not pull in the students. You really have two choices: (1) disciplinary writing which means inducting kids into the actual writing of the discipline—focusing on having students write up experiments so exactly that they can be replicated, summarizing observations with all of the hedges and temporizing of science (what were the limitations of the observations?), synthesizing information from multiple conflicting texts in history, writing stories with themes in English, etc.; OR (2) writing to learn by which I mean focusing on getting kids to summarize, analyze, and synthesize information they are studying using writing to help them to remember the information or to understand it better. Either or both of those in some kind of combination will give you a good basis for developing writers (and they will entail some attention to grammar, but not in the way being recommended to you). 

  There is very little written on this that I am aware of. I would strongly recommend that you seek out an old book (really booklet) by the late James Howard—Writing to Learn. It makes some really valuable contributions in this area and it will make a lot of sense to the content teachers. Howard, like you wanted to start with disciplinary writing and quality rubrics that the content teachers could easily use. I’ve never found anything better in that category. The guidance he provided was great and the examples of writing assignments, evaluations, and kids’ work are very informative. I know that is no longer for sale (the Council for Basic Education that released it is defunct). However, I think some library collections still have it and these days you might even be able to find it online (it is short enough to download or to photocopy if you locate a copy). I have done some preliminary looking to see if I could locate a copy for you, but with no luck so far.

 

No, they are not. Informational text is factual, but that isn’t the point (or it isn’t the only point). CCSS is emphasizing the reading of literary and informational text to ensure that students are proficient with a wide variety of text. If the distinction was just fact vs. fiction, then text could be limited to narratives. Kids need to learn how to read exposition and argument as much as stories. Each of those types of text has different purposes, structures, graphic elements, text features, etc. And, that’s the point: exposing kids to all of those elements.

Isn’t close reading just highly accurate reading?

There are many good synonyms for close reading: analytical reading, critical reading, deep reading… careful reading is certainly included in each of these, but it is not a very good synonym. Close reading engages students in making sense of what a text says or implies, but it is more than this. A close reader makes logical inferences, but is aware of the inferences and recognizes the evidence and reasoning on which they are based (good readers can distinguish what they have been told from what they have assumed). Close readers don’t just get what a text says, but how it works, can evaluate the accuracy, quality, and value of the text, and compare the text with others.

My school uses Gates Foundation Units. That means that they are aligned with the Common Core, right?

While it is true that the Gates Foundation generously supported the development of the Common Core that doesn’t mean that everything that they support aligns with Common Core. Various Gates supported curricula have been appearing, and they have nothing to do with Common Core (they represent the interpretations of the common core of the individuals who got the Gates funding).

We don’t have to worry about implementing the common core because the states are dropping out?

Actually, no states have dropped out, but a few have talked about it and one (Indiana) has put it on pause to study whether to drop out. Also, Alabama has decided not to be part of either testing consortium. However, these “second thoughts” don’t have anything to do with pedagogical judgments (can we teach these effectively?), kids’ educational needs (are these appropriate for what we want for our own children?), or even the economic needs of our society (how well do students need to read, write or do math to grow our economy?). The disagreements have been about states rights and politics—this isn’t really an issue of deep political concern, but clearly some politicians hope that it will be. 

  That sounds good—if you don’t understand assessment. In some fields an assessment might be a direct measure of the goal. If you want to save $1,000,000 for retirement, look at your bank account every six months and you can estimate of how close you are to your goal. How do you get closer to your goal? Add money to your accounts… work harder, save more, spend less.

  Other fields? Doctors assess patient’s temperatures. If a temperature is 102 degrees, the doctor will be concerned, but he won’t assume a temperature problem. He'll guess the temperature means some kind of infection. He’ll want to figure out what kind and treat it (the treatment itself may be an assessment—this could be strep, so I’ll prescribe an antibiotic and if it works, it was strep, and if it doesn’t, then we’ll seek another solution; all very House).

  And in education? Our assessments are only samples of what we want students to be able to do. Let’s say we want to teach single digit addition. There are 100 single addition problems: 0+0=0; 0+1=1; 1+0=1; 1+1=2… 9+9=18. Of course, those 100 problems could be laid out vertically or horizontally, so that means 200 choices. There is the story problem version too, so we could have another 100 of those. That’s 300 items, which would be a small universe in reading comprehension.  

  A test-maker would sample from those 300 problems. No one wants a 300-item test; too expensive and unnecessary. A random sample of 30 items would represent the whole set pretty well. If Johnny gets 30 right on such a test, we could assume that he would get all or most of the 300 right.

  But what if the teachers knew what the sample was going to look like? What if only five of the items were story problems? Maybe she wouldn’t teach story problems; it wouldn’t be worth it. Kids could get a good score without those. She may notice that eight items focused on the addition of 5; she’d spend more time on the 5s than the other numbers. Her kids might do well on the task, but they wouldn’t necessarily be so good at addition. They’d only be good at this test of addition, which is not the same thing as reaching the addition goal.

  When a reading comprehension test asks main idea questions like, “What would be a good title for this story?”, teachers will focused their main idea instruction on titles as a statements of main idea. Not on thesis statements. Not on descriptive statements. If the test is multiple-choice, then teachers would emphasize recognition over construction. If a test only asks about stories, then to hell with paragraphs. 

  Conceptions like main idea, theme, comparison, inference, conclusion, and so on, can be asked so many different ways. And there are so many texts that we could ask about. Anyone who aims instruction at a test, thinking that is the same as the goal, may get higher scores. But the cost of such a senseless focus is the students’ futures, because their skills won’t have the complexity, the depth, or the flexibility to allow them to meet the actual goal--the one that envisioned them reading many kinds of texts and being able to determine key ideas no matter how they were assessed.

  Reading comprehension tests are not goals… they are samples of behaviors that represent the goals… and they are useful right up until teachers can’t distinguish them from the goals themselves.   

  We (T. Shanahan, C. Shanahan, & C. Misichia) published research that considered how disciplinary experts (historians, mathematicians, historians) handle this problem. Our historians, consistent with many past studies, revealed that they focus heavily on authors during reading. They talked a lot about what they perceived to be the author’s arguments or biases.

  The mathematicians we interviewed had a different take on the matter, claiming that author had no place in interpretation. They, according to their accounts, didn’t think about author at all when reading. Their attention was on the words and nothing more. We later received a note from a mathematician thanking us for showing that they were the only ones “who read with integrity.” 

  However, math educators at Rutgers have pointed out that mathematicians may strive to read without attention to author as they told us, but that their interpretations do account for this supposedly irrelevant fact, at least under some reading conditions. Let’s just say, the math ideal is to read without attention to author, no matter what the practice may actually be (“the spirit is willing but the body is weak”).

  The debate in literature is a more complicated one since the ideal is less clear. There was a time when the study of literature was overwhelmed by interpretations based on author’s biographies and contextual information about how the texts may have been written. The push-back to this historical approach to literature came from New Criticism. The New Critics wanted poetry to be read like mathematics; as if there were no source.

  That is where the idea of the “intentional fallacy” came from… that it was invalid to consider what the author may have intended with his or her words, rather than thinking about the words themselves.

  As Wayne Booth has shown the idea of author awareness is pretty central to the reading process – with real authors, implied authors, implied readers, and so on. What voice do you hear when you read Huckleberry Finn? That of an old codger in a rocker down by the Mississippi or a wealthy white-suited insurance investor in Hartford, Connecticut?

  The idea of author awareness comes into legal interpretations as well. This is the season when lawyers argue their cases before the Supreme Court, and the term “original intent” is pretty descriptive of what some justices try to consider in their interpretations of the law.

  I found myself thinking about all of this as I read E.D. Hirsh’s recent 85^th birthday reminiscence, “How Two Poems Helped Launch a School Reform Movement” http://bit.ly/11WCkw6

Hirsch, though trained as a New Critic, rebelled early on, writing a book that heavily influenced my thinking, Validity in Interpretation. (A book the title of which I often fondly misremember as The Ethics of Interpretation).

  So what does this have to do with the common core?

  It points out why one needs to be very careful NOT to do too close a reading. Hirsch argues persuasively in his recent essay why student prior knowledge matters in interpretation, and why author intentions play a related and legitimate role in text interpretation. That certainly doesn’t mean that we have to have a 10-minute discussion of student prior knowledge every time we read a text or that we should study an author's biography before we can profitably read his or her words. 

  By the same token, close reading should not harken back to a time when we tried to read every text as if were handed down from the mountain, with no discernible author. It is okay to allude to an author’s other works in a discussion, or for kids to explicitly use their knowledge when trying to make sense of an author’s logic. The author’s words need to be central to our focus on the text, but not to the point of being either dismissive of the intentions of the author or foolish about what we can validly conclude about a text. A little common sense is going to be needed with this aspect of the common core.

  Happy birthday, Don Hirsh. Hope it is a joyous one.

  I have a question regarding close reading and struggling adolescent readers. What I’ve read about close reading suggests that students should first read the text independently. I’m wondering if this still applies when students are reading significantly below grade level (2-5 years). Is reading the text aloud and modeling thinking (around Key Ideas and Details) during the first read ever appropriate? 

Thanks in advance for your response!

Shanahan response:

Be very careful of what you read about close reading. It is not a teaching technique; when people try to make it into one, they tend to reveal all kinds of biases and funny beliefs (my guess is that many of them don’t know much about close reading and they’re scrambling now to make you think they are “experts” about it). Close reading is an outcome. You want students to be able to read texts—without a lot of external information from teachers or publishers—getting what the text says, how it works, and what it means (including my critical response, my sense of how it connects with other texts, etc.).

  There is no single way to accomplish this—and there is no research showing that some particular way has worked best. Close reading has never been a major emphasis in the teaching of reading to children (except in the Junior Great Books program), and when it was the major approach emphasized in college and high school English Departments, social science research was not a common means of evaluating instructional effectiveness.

  Though it isn’t a teaching technique or method, since we want our kids to be close readers, it makes sense that in some of our reading lessons we would have students engage in such practices; if you never do it, how will you get good at it? The idea is to engage students in such practices so that they will carry the practices forward.  

  Everyone agrees that close reading includes multiple readings (even if those re-readings are only of portions of the text); everyone agrees that close reading means looking not just at what a text says, but how it says it (close reading treats text as a unity—what the author says and how he/she says it are viewed as connected, so you have to see these connections to fully understand the text); and everyone also agrees that a teacher’s major input needs to be made through asking students about the text (thus, drawing their attention to things that might be missed, confused, etc.) rather than telling kids what the text says. Beyond that you have a lot of latitude in these lessons.

  However, there is more going on in reading lessons than close reading, and it is critical that teachers remember that, too. For example, a close reading interpretative stance is a good one, but it won’t be of much use if students can’t actually decode the text (“if someone would just come and read this text to me I could do one hell of a close reading”).

  Some “experts” do suggest reading the text aloud to the students, because it is easier to focus their attention. I have no doubt that it is easier to manage when the teacher does the reading or when there is some form of round robin, and yet, if you take those approaches, when do students learn to read text themselves? During their college and career years?  Too late.

  The key is to remember what you are trying to teach, and, yes, close reading is one of the things you are trying to teach. However, if kids can only do that with relatively easy texts or with texts that you read to them, then you will have failed.

  Also, pay a lot of attention to the texts themselves. I stress the idea of reading a text three times (that is trying to resolve the key idea/details, craft/structure, meaning and integration), and, yet, with some texts you can accomplish all three in a single read (not great texts for close reading), in others twice would be sufficient, and in still others it might take you more than three reads to do these three things (“I had to read the text twice on my second read”).

  If you think about what you are trying to accomplish and you pay attention to the depth and quality of texts (so that you aren’t beating dead horses with some thin texts or skimming over the surfaces of the challenging ones), you will need to vary your instructional choices. You won’t be able to follow anyone’s scheme step-by-step.     

  Yes, it is okay to model a close listening (or viewing) rather than a close reading to show kids how it works and what you have in mind. However, most of the time close reading requires kids to actually do the reading (unless you plan on hanging out with them from now on to do their reading for them—I’m sure the PARCC and Smarter Balanced people will love that). The trick is to scaffold the readings and re-readings sufficiently to allow these students to participate successfully—they have to do the reading and thinking, you can’t do it for them.

  If they are far behind as readers, I would consider starting with some fluency preparation before you take on a particular text—don’t worry much about the comprehension yet—just getting them reading and rereading the text aloud, perhaps with a partner, resolving words, figuring out sentences. Or, try parsing the text for the students (dividing up the various noun phrases, verb phrases, prepositional phrases, etc. to help them make it sound like language). When this has been done, then you can turn your attention to a “first reading”—that is a first reading in which they are really trying to understand what is going on. Of course, you don’t have to do this “first reading” from beginning to end (though in some instances that might be a good idea), so you can have kids read a page or a paragraph or section and then discuss that, guiding them to understand what the text says with your questions. On later reads, you might do a bit of this work for them—so if you want them to pay special attention to the second sentence or the third paragraph or the part where the author describes Aunt Polly, you might read that portion aloud to the students (but, of course, this is after they have already read the text and have a pretty good idea of what it says).

  I think the key is being purposeful, flexible, and strategic in your planning and teaching. If you do that, you might make some mistakes, but your kids will also likely learn to be thoughtful readers capable of conducting their own close reads of even challenging texts.

[I noted my displeasure with much that has been written about close reading. A notable exception is the recent article published by Kathleen Hinchman and David Moore in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. Although I have some minor bones to pick with them about the history of close reading (the Post-Structuralists were not proposing a different approach to close reading, but an alternative approach to thinking about texts, in which the reader does not seek unities, but inconsistencies and contradictions, and in which external lenses are not to be shunned). Beyond such trivial quibbling however, the article is valuable and should be read widely.]

I am a Reading Specialist at a parochial school.  I wonder if you can give me some advice regarding one of my 4th grade students. She reads very fluently, however, her comprehension is poor.  We have worked extensively on vocabulary and visualization skills.  Can you make any recommendations?

Shanahan response:

Let’s assume your description of the student is correct (that is not always the case: sometimes teachers tell me that a student is fluent, but what they mean is that the student reads the words accurately, though often too slowly and without it proper prosody or expression). 

If she is a fluent reader, but not understanding the text anyway, then try something I call intensive questioning. Have her read the first sentence of a text… and before allowing her to read any more, ask her a ton of questions;

Sentence 1: “We got back from the grocery store and found the house a mess.”
1.       Where were they?
2.       What do you think they were doing?
3.       Then what happened?
4.       What did they find?
5.       Do you think they were surprised? Why?
6.       Where were they first? And, then where were they?

Then she reads a second sentence.

Sentence 2: “I had neglected to close the bathroom door again, and our Saint Bernard, Bernie, had left chewed toilet paper all over the house.”
1.       Who had caused the mess?
2.       What allowed him to cause the mess?
3.       What did he make the mess with?
4.       How did he get the paper?
5.       What kind of paper was it?
6.       What was the Saint Bernard’s name?
7.       What kind of a dog was Bernie?
8.       What did Bernie do to the toilet paper?
9.       What was the person who is telling this doing while Bernie was making the mess?

Etc.

As she gets better with that, start stretching her out to read  longer segments, but still with this thoroughness of attention to meaning. (You can also turn this around getting her to generate the questions about the sentences—then trying to answer her own questions). The idea is to keep her so focused on the meaning that you break the habit of simply calling the words.

Shanahan response:

  Good questions. I hope I can clarify. Let’s try this:

  Text difficulty matters a lot with beginning readers. They have to figure out the decoding system and much of this knowledge comes from abstracting patterns from the words they read. By keeping text relatively easy early on, we make it easier for them to figure out the code. Thus, guided reading and other schemes for nurturing beginning readers and bringing them along step-by-step through increasingly difficult text levels make a lot of sense. Definitely use them with beginners.

  Once kids reach about a beginning second-grade decoding level, we don’t need to be as scrupulous about text difficulty. Students can learn from a pretty wide range of difficulty levels, and text difficulty is not a reliable predictor of student learning.

  If the issue is teaching reading, then matching text complexity with student reading levels is NOT the issue. That’s where guided reading and similar schemes go wrong.

  Placing students in more challenging books is a good idea because it increases opportunity to learn (there is more to figure out in challenging texts). This is important since our kids do not read effectively at high enough levels.  

  But just placing students in more challenging text makes the same error that guided reading did; it just replaces an over-reliance on one kind of text-student match with another. Increases in text difficulty levels need to be coordinated with increases in the amounts and quality of scaffolding, support, encouragement, and explanation provided by the teacher. If a text is relatively easy for students, as with a traditional guided reading match, then they won’t require much instructional support with that text (though there won’t be much to learn from such texts either). But if the text is relatively difficult for students, teachers will need to be a lot more energetic in their teaching responses.

  There is more to be learned from challenging texts, but this means that there needs to be a lot more teaching with such texts. Instead of asking what book level to teach someone at, teachers should ask, “If I place a student in a book this challenging, how much support will I need to provide to enable him/her to learn from this text?"  

Shanahan response:

I feel your pain. What would it look like to scaffold a fourth-grade lesson from a social studies book with children reading at what formerly we would have referred to as a second-grade level? I think there are a number of possibilities.

First, I would “level” (pun intended) with the kids. That is, I would not try to hide from them that I was going to ask them to read a book that we would in the past have said was too hard for them. The point here is motivation. People like a challenge and kids are people. When you ask them to take on something really hard, let them in on the secret so they know to be proud of themselves when they meet the challenge.

Second, and here I have to be a bit experimental, trying some choices that might turn out not to work—or, more likely, that turns out to be not as efficient as some of the other choices. My first attempt would be to read the chapter we were going to work with, trying to identify anything that might trip the kids up: specific ideas that I thought were especially complicated or subtle or abstract, key background information that they might not know yet, essential vocabulary, sentences that might confuse, cohesive links among the words that could be hard to track, organizational structure that might require highlighting, and so on. Basically, what makes this text hard to comprehend? With that information, I would now make a decision: is the difficulty something to be prevented or monitored?

Sometimes, I will think that a problem is so big that I must get out in front of it. If there is something that you are certain the kids can’t figure out that might discourage them or that wouldn’t be worth the time, then, by all means, intervene early. If I think the key to understanding this page is a particular vocabulary word, I very well might explain that word before having the kids attempt the page. But often, I would rather have the students give it a try; there is nothing wrong with trying something and failing the first time. I can monitor their success with questions aimed at revealing whether they got that point or not, and I can follow up with assistance. So, if the students don't connect a particular concept and process appropriately because of a confusing cohesive link (like not recognizing that “it” referred to the planentary ring and not gravity), I will get the kids involved in trying to connect the various references throughout the text.

Third, the scaffolding described above will likely require some rereading—either of the whole chapter (fourth-grade science and social studies chapters are surprisingly short, so rereading the entire chapter is usually not that big a deal). Thus, they try to read it; I question them and help them work through the problems; and then they reread it (perhaps more than once), to see if they can figure it out the second or third time.

Fourth, let’s say I have tried that and the process has been really slow and labored or the kids are being tripped up, not by the ideas, but by their struggle to recognize and read the words. If this is the case, before I even get to the reading and scaffolding and rereading described above, I would have the students do fluency work. For example, I would have the students mumble read the text (or a part of the text) at their desks. Or, I would partner them up and have them engage in paired reading, take turns reading one page aloud to their partner, and then listen and helping as the partner tries the next page. That kind of oral reading practice with repetition can be a big help in raising the students’ ability to work with that text. Once they have read it like that once or twice, you’d be surprised at how much better they can read it for comprehension. Thus, they would then be ready for step two above. As I said, you have to be experimental—trying out different combinations and orders of fluency work, reading, scaffolding, and rereading.

This can be painstaking. But, in the end, the students will have read the material that formerly you would have protected them from. They will have both the science or social studies knowledge, but it will have come about because of their own interactions with the text, rather than because you read it to them or told them what it said. By engaging in such efforts (and this is a real effort—it involves a lot of teacher planning, modeling, explaining, etc.), the students become better able to handle harder text than they could at the start. Over time they build the strength to handle more challenging language with less teacher guidance.

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/rejecting-instructional-level-theory

  Last week, I read a fascinating article in the Chicago Tribune about the place of graphic novels in the high school literature curriculum (“Comics in the Curriculum”, December 27, 2012).

  Let’s start with me and my prejudices.

  I loved comics as a kid (particularly Superman), but never had much use for them as a teacher. Their reading levels can be pretty low, though estimating readabilities of comics is hazardous since the pictures carry a lot of the meaning; even if the vocabulary or sentence structure is challenging, students may be able to get by without actually reading. If kids can answer the questions without reading, it is going to interfere with learning to read.

  Comics can be pretty limited in how much text they offer, too; graphic artists don’t want too much information in those dialogue and thought balloons.

  Given that, I usually avoided the funnies as a teacher, have advised districts not to replace their physics texts with comics, and have given states (e.g., Maryland) a hard time when they pushed to make comics a big part of their state reading curriculum.

  While I get that “graphic novels” come from the comic book, they tend to be more extensive, sophisticated than past comics, and they have their own “visual literacy” demands that can be worth mastering. No, the modern graphic novel cannot be as easily dismissed from the curriculum or classroom as Archie and Jughead. Maus won a Pulitzer Prize for good reason. Finding a role for the graphic novel makes sense.

  Back to the Tribune article: 

  I was very impressed with the first anecdote. Reporter Diane Rado told of an honors English class in Chicago’s suburbs that was reading a fine and demanding piece of literature, “In Cold Blood,” alongside a graphic novel, “Capote in Kansas.”

  I love that example; smart teacher. First, this effort wasn’t aimed at the low kids; these were top students. Second, they probably weren’t reading any less since they were reading both the original literature and a graphic explanation of how that book came into existence.

  Those who champion close reading are rolling their eyes about now. The idea of close reading is that you figure out a selection without the support of external aids and outside information. This pairing of books certainly is not close reading.

  And, yet, a combination of books (graphic or not) does have a place in the curriculum. Close reading is not the only way to read. I often follow up a reading by looking at the criticism that followed. 

  Where I hit the brakes was when I got to the final anecdote, this one about some research conducted by a couple of English teachers. In it, they had students reading either Beowulf, the epic poem, or Beowulf, the graphic novel. They found that the students who read the poem took about six hours to figure it out, while the graphic novel readers only needed about two. At the end, the groups performed similarly on a multiple-choice test (about a 6% difference in favor of the poem).

  The teachers’ conclusion: It wasn't worth the extra time and effort to read the poem. 

  I respectfully disagree.

  They might be right, but I suspect that the Angelina Jolie’s movie version would require even less student effort, and who knows, maybe their multiple-choice scores would still be acceptable.

  I think we are in trouble when we decide that the purpose of reading literature is to gain the plot “facts,” and that it is the outcome rather than the journey that matters. Each time, students take on a difficult intellectual challenge successfully, they are better armed for future challenges.

  If I were teaching freshman English at the local college, I would much prefer having students who'd  spent the six hours with Beowulf and figured it out, rather than the ones who needed only two hours with the comic.

  I don’t think the hard part of the Common Core is going to be informational text or close reading. The hard part will be guiding kids through those extra four hours of reading, especially when they don’t want to. It’s been easier to use graphic or video versions and to tell ourselves that students of this generation need such approaches and that their “knowledge” of the texts will be the same. 

  I don’t think it is the same. 

  There are definitely graphic novels that are worth studying on their own. And there are graphic novels well worth reading in concert with other books. But the idea shouldn't be to lower the intellectual demands on students or to cater to their tastes over their needs. 

  I've written often in this space about the need to ramp up text difficulty. But in doing that we need to be sure not to overdo it. In contradiction to past theories of how someone learns to read effectively, I have put forth the idea that students probably benefit more from working with a range of difficulty levels (much as athletes train at varying intensities and distances). Graphic novels could play a valuable role in providing students with a more nuanced mix of reading experiences than we have striven to provide in the past, but elbowing aside more demanding texts (for the specific reason that they are more demanding texts) needs to be declared seriously out of fashion. 

  Rigor is the new black.