Recently, Education Week published an interesting piece about a Florida program aimed at extending the school days of children in the 100 lowest-performing elementary schools in the state. These schools were mandated to add an extra hour of reading instruction to their days. The result: 75% of the schools improved their reading scores, 70 of them coming off the lowest-performing list. Fla. Pushes Longer Day With More Reading in Struggling Schools

Duh!

Those who know my work in the schools are aware that amount of instruction is always the first thing that I look at. When I was the director of reading in the Chicago Public Schools it was one of my major mandates. Research overwhelmingly shows that more instruction tends to lead to more learning, and many supposedly research-proven programs obtain their advantages from, you guessed it, offering more teaching than kids will get in the control group.  

But the Ed Week article went on to point out that most of these extra-hour schools were still underperforming demographically matched schools and that 30 of them were still low performing.

Why doesn’t added time always work if it is such a no-brainer?

There are at least a few reasons.

First, time is not a variable. It is a measure or a dosage. Scientists abhor the idea of treating time as a variable. Long ago, the best minds thought iron rusted because of time. Eventually, they figured out that rust is due to exposure to moisture, and that time was a measure of how much moisture the iron was touching. More time meant more moisture.

In education, time is a measure of the amount of curriculum—explanation and practice—that children exposed to. It is the curriculum and how it is taught that makes the difference; time is simply a measure of that.

What if a curriculum is not sound? That is, what if being exposed to it does not usually lead someone to read, or repeats valuable lessons students have already mastered or fails to offer sufficient practice. An hour extra of something that doesn’t work won’t improve things. Time is just a measure, right? An hour of low quality teaching is an hour wasted.

Another problem is whether a mandated hour is actually an hour. Reading First, a federal initiative under No Child Left Behind, required that teachers provide 90 minutes per day of reading instruction. But classroom observers found a lot less than that in Reading First classrooms. Kids in those classrooms spent a lot of time waiting for instruction rather than being instructed.

Teachers don’t always appreciate how powerful their time with kids can be, so they are wasteful of the minutes. Do some self-observation of this and you’ll see what I mean. Thus, the schools stay open. The buses pick kids up an hour later. The teachers and kids are in the classroom. But reading instruction, not so much.

Finally, an extra hour may not equalize performance simply because it may be insufficient. We don’t know how much instruction and practice in reading anyone is getting. How much time is devoted to teaching reading during the school day? How much reading do students do in math, social studies, and science classes? Research studies show big differences in amount of reading instruction in school-to-school and even classroom-to-classroom comparisons.

How much do students read at home? How much time do they spend on the kinds of homework that make a difference? How much language development opportunity do they get before they come to school? What kinds of activities do they engage in through their libraries, parks, churches, synagogues, scouts, etc.?

The fact is that some students receive thousands of hours of instruction and practice in language and literacy each year, while others receive considerably less. An extra hour per day is precious (thank you, Florida), but it simply may be insufficient to overcome the huge differences that exist.

Teacher question:

In a recent workshop I attended, the following comment was made:

"A child cannot read and comprehend at a level higher than they can listen and comprehend.  A deficit in listening comprehension predicts a deficit in reading comprehension." Could you explain this correlation further or refer me to professional reading material that would expound on this topic? 

Shanahan response:  

This long-standing claim is true, or sort of true. Or, to be perfectly correct, it’s true whenever it isn’t false. (And you thought those kinds of “perfectly clear” claims were gone just because the election season is over.)

          When I was becoming a teacher we learned that listening comprehension was a terrific diagnostic tool because listening would reveal a student’s cognitive capacity to understand. Thus, if you questioned a student about a fourth-grade passage that you had read to him and he could answer the questions successfully, then it was clear that his intellect was sufficient to make sense of texts of that level of difficulty. If his reading level was lower than this, then further reading growth should allow him to eventually read fourth-grade texts with understanding.

           This idea makes sense…as far as it goes. The problem is that the relationship between listening comprehension and reading comprehension is complex and developmental (that is, it changes with growth).

           Young children definitely understand more by ear than by eye. Decoding skills create a bottleneck that limits the level of text they can understand. Such incomprehension or miscomprehension is due to their limited ability to decode. If they can understand a text when it is read to them, but not when left to their own devices, then decoding is the likely culprit.

          Of course, decoding isn’t the only possible difference between reading and listening. For example, oral language carries lots of meaning clues in the prosody (in the rises and falls of the voice, the pausing patterns, and so on). Some of that is marked in the text, with punctuation points or bolded words, but much of it has to be provided by the reader. Listening can be easier than reading is because the listener doesn’t have to figure out where the sounding emphasis lies.

          But what is true for young readers is not necessarily so for older ones. At some point, silent reading outdistances oral reading and reading becomes easier than listening. The point this happens varies across studies, and there is a lot of variation even within studies, but usually, it takes place by the time a student can read about an eighth-grade level.

            What changes? Many readers reach peak levels of decoding and fluency performance about that time. Once decoding becomes truly automatic it is no longer a differentiator between reading and listening.

            If I can decode well and without using many cognitive resources to do it, then I should be able to understand a text that I read as well as one that I listened to. The same thing must occur with prosody interpretation; if I can insert the meaning sounds myself then listening carries little advantage.

            Reading comprehension and listening comprehension don’t actually become equals, however. From the point where they become equals, reading comprehension begins to elbow its way ahead. Most literate adults can understand complex texts better by eye than by ear.

           This is because as texts become increasingly complicated, they place greater demands on memory and analytic skills. The rate of presentation during listening isn’t up to you. Readers can reread knotty sentences, skim through repetitive parts, pause and ponder what seems most important, and even sort out homonyms with more information than is available to the ear.

           This means that what you were told about the superiority of listening to reading is true, but it is only true until students become adept enough at reading that it matches and even surpasses listening. Using listening as a way of determining how well younger students or lower readers might be expected to read is reasonable, but not so with older students.

          There are lots of studies on the relationship of listening comprehension and reading comprehension. One classic that is available to you free online is Tom Sticht’s important book, Auding and Listening. 

Twice this week I’ve been asked how to organize instructional time for literacy. Both inquiries noted my earlier objections to Daily 5 and CAFE.

They were right I am not a big fan of those approaches.

My reason (with these any similar, but less popular schemes): they distract teachers from an intense focus on what they are trying to teach students. Teachers must be focused on learning—not activities.

Of course, many teachers would point out that the idea is for kids to learn, and teachers address learning through those activities. I don’t disagree about the need for instructional activities as the means for increasing student knowledge and skills, but that doesn’t mean we should fetishize the activities.

There are many ways to accomplish learning goals and teachers should select among these as they help students to meet the required outcomes. Locking oneself into a particular daily activity is foolish.

Research has shown that teachers struggle to keep focused on kids’ learning; that they get so wrapped up in the activities that they often lose sight of their purpose. What do they say about alligators and swamp draining?

That’s why so many teachers and principals measure success in terms of how smoothly an activity went rather than on what it enabled kids to do.

Any scheme that focuses teachers on activities rather than outcomes is a non-starter for me.

However, I appreciate that teachers embrace such schemes because of their manageability. Some of the most onerous decisions for teachers concern how to parcel out their valuable instructional time, and schemes that help teachers to do that have some value.

The framework that I have long used is both like—and wildly different from—these schemes that I’m criticizing. My framework also gives teachers guidance with time use, but its emphasis is on the outcomes rather than the methods.

I start from the premise that students are going to need to spend a lot of time with literacy to become literate. Given that, I think kids should spend at least 2-3 hours per day dealing with literacy.

A second premise is that we have multiple goals in literacy and that they all compete for instructional time. I believe that it makes sense to divide the available instructional time among these different goals.

What are these goals? My reading of the research says that students need to learn words and word parts (to read them, to interpret them), they need to be able to read text fluently (with sufficient accuracy, speed, and prosody), they need to be able to understand and interpret the ideas in text, and they need to convey their own ideas through text (writing). These are all critically important goals, and each of them has many sub goals.

I would argue teachers should provide students with explicit instruction and lots of practice time in each of these four learning areas daily. Rather than focusing on four or five activities that kids should be engaged in everyday, I’d rather have teachers thinking about what activities they should encourage based on the learning goals in each of these areas. Thus, it would be very reasonable to spend 30 minutes on words, 30 minutes on fluency, 30 minutes on reading comprehension, and 30 minutes on writing everyday (on average)—even though the actual activities would vary.

A daily organizing plan that is focused on these outcomes makes greater sense than one based on activities such as read to self or read to someone.

And such a plan makes sense even when using “core reading programs” or “basal readers” because they help teachers to choose among the many options that such programs provide.  

Blast from the Past: This entry was first published on June 1, 2014, and is being re-posted on March 30, 2019. The reason for the re-posting? In the last two weeks I have received several questions and several requests for speaking engagements focused specifically on what the literacy school day should look like. This entry doesn't propose a particular schedule, but it does provide the key tenets on which to plan a day's lessons.

Man, I hate to see so many frustrated teachers.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been hearing from teachers who use Daily 5. They’re mad because I criticized the idea of organizing their day around activities instead of outcomes. Many have been surprised that I said there isn’t any research on Daily 5 or the activities it promotes. Some complain that I just haven’t seen it well implemented. But that really isn’t the problem.

The fact is teachers find it difficult to stay focused on learning. They become consumed by classroom activities and daily routines. And because of that, any scheme that encourages them focus on activities over outcome is a really bad idea.

The point of Daily 5 is a good one: teachers should routinize the use of classroom time. Reducing the sheer number of daily scheduling decisions for teachers is smart.

But routinizing a day is not the same thing as ensuring learning. Especially when the activities you are including aren’t certain to instill learning. There has to be a better way.

Let’s take it a step at a time.

First, decide how much time will be devoted to literacy. In many schools, 90 minutes is the standard, but I’d argue for 2-3 hours per day. Provide more literacy work when kids are especially challenged, and less otherwise.

Second, decide which learning categories require attention? Put the time into aspects of literacy prove to help kids become better readers and writers. There is substantial research showing that if you teach young children to hear the sounds within words (phonemic awareness), then they end up doing better with decoding and comprehension. I would definitely teach that. There is similar evidence concerning the systematic teaching of letters and sounds, so phonics is in, too. And, there is a substantial body of work indicating the value of teaching word meaning (vocabulary), oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. They all deserve some time within your schedule.

You can be a bit arbitrary in dividing the time across these categories. For instance, I group all the word skills—phonics, phonological awareness, sight vocabulary, meaning vocabulary—into a single set, and they share 25% of my ELA teaching time. That means kids would get a lot of decoding instruction early on, and less vocabulary support; but as they went through the grades they would get less and less phonics, and more and more focus on word meaning. Fluency, comprehension, and writing, would get the other portions of time.

Third, these categorical divisions then need to be expressed in terms of specific learning goals. Let’s say 15 minutes per day of the word time in my kindergarten this semester is focused on letter names and phonological awareness. My goal for the kids is to make sure they can recognize all the alphabet letters and can fully segment words (that is divide spoken words into all of their separate phonemes). Or, perhaps, the fluency goal this report-card-marking in second grade is to make sure students can read texts at 75 words correct per minute, with pausing that reflects the punctuation and meaning.

In reading comprehension my goal may be for students to be able to read and summarize 3 text pages without teacher input or support. Or perhaps I’d want them to be able to read a social studies chapter and explain the connections among the subsections.

Such goals do not have to be singular or simple. Either or both of these comprehension goals could be a point of focus of my lessons, or the teacher could emphasize additional—and very different—goals, like wanting students to develop a rich knowledge of their literary heritage. That means I could teach the above goals, and simultaneously expect kids to gain an understanding of the significance of a particular cast of characters or plot elements from fairy tales or Shakespeare.

None of these are activities. They are all measurable learning outcomes and my days should be organized around these kinds of goals.

Fourth, once I know what I am trying to accomplish, then I must select activities and texts consistent with those learning goals. Sometimes these choices will be highly constrained by the goal itself: if you want students to know the characters and plot of Romeo and Juliet, it is probably wise to focus heavily on that play. If you want kids to distinguish Little Red Riding Hood from the Wicked Stepmother, and the Wolf in the Three Little Pigs from the one who devours Grandma, then this probably dictates a Fairy Tales Unit.

In other cases, there are choices. Should the student read the selection in parts or all the way through? Will the teacher ask questions or will the students take over this role as in Book Club? Will the analysis be through discussion or writing? Will the phonics practice be synthetic (focusing on the individual sounds within words) or analytic (using known words as analogies)? Will students reread a fluency text a set number of times or until a particular performance criterion is met?

Such decisions should be shaped by research considerations and learning considerations—not routine. Research is pretty clear that students do better in decoding when taught systematically from a sequential program than when teachers try to be diagnostic and individualized. That likely means the phonics portion of primary grade reading instruction is best spent delivering lessons from a high quality phonics program. Or, studies show that oral reading fluency practice leads to the most learning when the texts are at students’ frustration levels. That means that having students read texts aloud to each other (partner reading) might be a good choice (though so is echo reading), but teachers should assign frustration level texts to either of these activities.

Last point: the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) require the teaching of all of the topics that I have mentioned in this entry. But CCSS does not specify how to organize time around that instruction. The plan put forth here should help teachers to consider the whole set of standards, not just particular activities (e.g., close reading).

Similarly, core reading programs (e.g., basal readers, literature anthologies), provide teachers with lots of texts and activities; usually more than can be delivered in a typical school schedule. This plan can help teachers to decide what to include and what to delete. Many teachers that I know routinely omit the writing activities. If writing outcomes were their focus 25% of the time, many of them would not make this bad decision. Or, teachers often complain that there are just too many decoding lessons. That may or may not be true, but if I had decided to devote 30 minutes a day to phonics teaching, I could determine pretty quickly what to omit and what to teach.

Next time I’ll explore issues of flexibility and the applicability of this scheme in upper grade levels, including high school.  

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been explaining an organizational plan that is a better alternative than Daily 5. Although I appreciate an approach (like Daily 5) that structures time for teachers, I believe it’s better to organize around outcomes rather than the teaching activities. Teachers need activities, of course, but they also must keep focused on what they are trying to accomplish, on what they are using those activities towards. Teachers can get too bogged down in methods, activities, approaches, and the like, and lose sight of the purpose of those actions. That is true of many other professionals, too, I’m told. The trick is to set time for certain goals and then to select the best materials and activities to accomplish those goals (there are usually multiple ways to do that).

Won’t it get tedious if I structure the day in the same way every day?

Perhaps, but that isn’t what I’ve recommended.  You can use my scheme in a repetitive manner and there are both benefits and drawbacks to that. A clear routine can be efficient, but it can also become boring. However, the issue isn’t so much the sequence in which the components are addressed, but whether you’re spending enough time focused on the right goals. How you organize that in a day is up to you as a professional. If you plan on spending 45 minutes on words in your first grade, that doesn’t mean you must teach words from 9:00AM-9:45AM every morning. You could vary this day to day, and you also could divide this time into smaller chunks. 

Shouldn’t I integrate instruction?

There are two basic ideas of integration. The first refers to the integration of the instruction of these components. That is basically accomplished by making a text or set of texts the center of instruction -- the source of vocbulary, the topic of writing, the texts that one works to fluency, the text that is the focus of comprehension work. The other has to do with the connection of literacy instruction with social studies or science. Again, text is central. There is no reason why students can't do voabulary, fluency, comprehension, and writing work with texts from other subject areas or in pursuit of projects from those subject areas.

What kind of flexibility is possible?

Again, perhaps, but because the boundaries are not firm across these categories, it’s possible to be very flexible. A fifth-grade teacher might decide that she needs more than 30 minutes to teach a good comprehension lesson—because of the lengths of texts the students are reading. She could teach reading comprehension every other day, instead of every day, allowing an hour for such a lesson (she could swap writing with reading comprehension on alternative days). Or, what if the teacher was teaching comprehension, but found out—right in the middle of the lesson—that more vocabulary work was needed? The teacher could provide that instruction and even out later, by trading with one of the other categories.

My school requires that we all teach reading at the same time (in a 90-minute block at the beginning of the day), so I can’t do this.

You could use the required block and add additional time later in your school day. However, I’m not a big fan of your school’s approach. It makes it more difficult to provide intervention services to the struggling readers. If everyone teaches reading at the same time, either fewer students can get Tier 2 services or kids are pulled out of reading to get what should be extra help. 

I'm a secondary teacher and we don’t have a reading class. I don’t see how this can work in my situation.

Many secondary schools have taken this plan on successfully. It requires cooperation among the various departments, however. Typically, we work on a weekly basis. That would mean that we need to provide 10 hours per week of literacy work (2.5 hours of vocabulary/morphology, 2.5 hours of reading comprehension, 2.5 hours of writing, and up to 2.5 hours of oral reading fluency—depending on the students’ fluency levels). Each department agrees to provide some portion of this weekly regimen and then some horse-trading is done to ensure that there is sufficient time for everything. All of this work is done with the texts and contents of each class.

My school requires that we all teach reading at the same time (in a 90-minute block at the beginning of the day), so I can’t do this. 

You could use the required block and add additional time later in your school day. However, I’m not a big fan of your school’s approach.  It makes it more difficult to provide intervention services to the struggling readers (if everyone teaches reading at the same time, then if a student is pulled out during that time, he/she gets less reading instruction). 

We are required to implement our core program with fidelity. I don’t see how I can do that if I follow this scheme.

I very much like the idea of following core programs with some kind of fidelity, but this isn’t always possible because of time considerations. Typically, core programs offer more instructional activity than fits in a 90-minute block or (even in a 2-hour space). They do this because of they recognize the diversity of the kids that you are teaching and the need to vary instruction accordingly. Teachers in such cases may follow with fidelity the parts of the program that they teach, but what about the parts they must omit? This plan helps teachers to make the decisions of what to keep and what to drop. If there is too little instruction, of course, then the teacher could follow that with fidelity, but then would need to supplement.

I find myself agreeing with your approach, but I still love the activities that my students have been doing through Daily 5. Isn’t there a way to compromise?

Like you, there are activities that I want to have in my classroom. For example, as a primary grade teacher, I read to my students every day. I did this, not to teach them to read, but as a tone setter for my classroom and as a way of exposing students to cultural artifacts (I loved reading Charlotte’s Web to them, for instance). If I were teaching in the primary grades today, I would still read to my students, I just wouldn’t count it as reading instruction and wouldn’t let it take the place of instruction in decoding, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, or writing. Isabel Beck and Moddy McKeown have certainly shown how I could translate that kind of teacher read aloud into an effective vocabulary lesson for the younger kids, so I could perhaps count it that way, but I might not make that choice either. That’s the real benefit of this approach—it keeps you focused on learning outcomes, and it keeps you in control of the choices.

What about Common Core or the other state standards?

Those standards establish learning goals; the goals that your instruction should focus on. All that I’ve done is to categorize these goals into sets and matched them with time expenditures. For example, many primary grade teachers look at the standards and conclude that they are supposed to teach more comprehension than decoding. My plan allows the teacher to protect enough time to make it possible for students to learn to decode proficiently. Just distribute the various goals across the four categories that I set.

I’m a pull-out reading teacher. Should I use this plan in my teaching?

I expect interventions to either be especially targeted (like a pull-out fluency program only for students lagging in fluency) or individualized. My scheme requires the teacher to balance literacy instruction in his/her classroom, but an intervention teacher should be aimed at balancing the child. If Hector is strong in decoding and fluency, then the intervention teacher should aim at comprehension. If Sylvia is weak at decoding, then the intervention should be aimed at strengthening this weakness. This plan makes sense if a student is low in everything, but if there are stronger and weaker patterns of skills, try to even the child out by building the weak spots up (that isn’t a good way to go in a classroom, because the teacher simply has too many kids often with greatly different needs. That’s why in the classroom addressing all of the needs equally is the surest way to higher achievement for the most kids.

Teacher question:

I am wondering what you think are the acceptable ways to read text in a text in grades 3-8.  Obviously, round robin or popcorn reading is not one of them -- and these are still options we see too often. Independent reading is desired, and some degree of teacher read aloud to the whole class to model fluency and dramatic reading is appropriate as well. What other ways do you think are effective? How much time would you say we should push teachers to do each? (i.e. 60% independent, 20% teacher read aloud...) etc.

Shanahan response:

I’m with those who believe that students need to read a lot during their school days. Yes, they should read at home, but within their schoolwork at school in class, students need lots of opportunities and requirements to read.

  The most powerful of such reading (in terms of stimulating student learning) seems to be oral reading with feedback from a teacher. I would discourage popcorn or round robin but not because the reading practice that they provide is so bad—just that they provide so little practice. When one student is reading, many more are just sitting waiting for their turn. The students who are reading are learning, and the others, not so much.

  Research suggests that techniques like paired reading (in which kids read and reread texts to each other), reading while listening, echo reading, radio reading, etc. can all be good choices. In all of these techniques, many students are able to practice simultaneously, they read relatively challenging materials, and then they reread these in an effort to improve the quality. If students can read texts (8^th grade or higher) orally at about 150 words correct per minute, I wouldn’t bother with this kind of practice, and if they could not, I would provide about 30 minutes of it each school day.

  As powerful as oral reading is at stimulating student reading ability, we can’t ignore the fact that most reading that we engage in will be silent, and students need to practice this as well. I would strongly encourage teachers to have students read those texts silently that they are to write about or that are going to be the focus of group or class discussion. When I assign such reading in classrooms, kids often tell me that I’m doing it wrong (because their teachers have them read the texts round robin). Teachers do this to make sure kids read it and to monitor their reading. By doing the fluency work noted above, I do away with the need to monitor their fluency progress (I’m already doing that), and teachers can make sure students read from the discussions and writing that ensues. I would usually have students reading their literature selection and their social studies or science chapters silently. If students struggle with this, divide the assignments into shorter chunks (even 1 page at a time), and then stretch this out over time. I would suggest that students should be engaging in as much silent reading as oral reading in these grades (and if students are fully fluent as described above, then the silent reading should be almost 100% of what students read).

  I would argue not only for minutes to be dedicated to fluency practice but for another 30-45 minutes to focus on reading comprehension daily—and a lot of this time would entail silent reading. However, silent reading is also going to come up during science, social studies, and other subjects and this counts, too. Thus, having students spend as much as 15 minutes reading aloud (paired reading for 30 minutes would allow each student 15 minutes of such practice), and having students read for 20-30 minutes of a 45 minute comprehension lesson and reading another 10-20 minutes a day in other subjects would give kids a substantial amount of oral and silent reading practice.

  Even in the silent reading context, there should be at least some oral reading. Most prominently: students should read aloud during discussions to provide evidence supporting their claims or refuting someone else’s.

  It is a good idea to encourage kids to read on their own, but this has such a small impact on student learning that I would make such opportunities available in ways that would not appreciably reduce the instructional doses suggested above. Getting kids to read on their own beyond the school day while providing them with the heavy involvement in reading across their school day will be the most powerful combination for getting students to high-performance levels.

           That challenges the most popular ways of introducing texts in schools—such telling students information about the text topic or exploring student knowledge relevant to the topic. CCSS proponents bridle at such practices. They want students to become independent readers, which means they’d be able to read texts effectively without extra information—information not provided by the author. 

Want to win an argument about literacy? Just claim your approach is “balanced.” 

Balanced is an affirmative term… That’s why Fox-News claims to be “fair and balanced.” It not only makes your position sound reasonable, but implies your opponents may be a bit off, you know, imbalanced.

It is not too surprising that school principals and district literacy leaders often tout their reading programs as balanced.

“Balanced literacy” sounds great, but what does it mean? What is being balanced?

A few weeks ago, I responded here to some arguments about reading instruction that had appeared on the Washington Post website. One of the participants in that argument, a school principal I believe, was arguing that balanced literacy referred to the balancing of text difficulty. 

I’ve heard balanced literacy promoted as a balance of textbooks and trade books, reading and writing, phonics and comprehension, motivation and teaching, and several other pairings, but challenging and easy text was a new one on me. 

That’s one of the cool things about balance… you can tailor what is being balanced to your audience. If you’re meeting with the NAACP, you can tell them that you have a “balanced literacy” program, and when they ask what that is, you can look down your nose and answer (as if everybody knows), “it means that we balance the literature selections by White and Black authors.” They’ll love it. 

The same ploy will probably work at the NOW convention.

And, Common Core? It asks for 50-50 coverage of literature and informational text. So CCSS is a set of “balanced literacy standards.” Oh me, oh my.

The term “balanced literacy” was coined by the late Michael Pressley. He even published a book on it, during the “reading wars.” Michael was a proponent of phonics (he was an author of the Open Court reading series at the time), but he wanted to heal the great divide between people like him and Whole Language advocates. His felt that we needed to balance the demands of the two groups.

He supported the explicit teaching of decoding but believed the Whole Language folks were right when it came to motivation. He took it that Whole Language was all about or mainly about getting kids interested in reading.

He didn’t see balanced literacy as simply a political compromise between two warring camps, but as an acknowledgement about what each group had right. He himself had conducted observational studies in high success classrooms and was amazed at how motivational the teachers were (Michael, a psychologist who had never taught children or spent much time in classrooms before this, so his amazement is understandable).

Of course, Whole Language advocates didn’t love this compromise at the time—let’s face it, they saw their position as being more than the dessert after the vegetables. And, many of my explicit teaching colleagues still see it as a way of avoiding sufficient amounts of explicit teaching. 

I’m probably more in the camp of the basic skills folks than the whole language ones, but not rabidly so. One school I know adopted my literacy framework (2 hours of literacy instruction each day divided equally among word knowledge, fluency, reading comprehension, and writing), but then added an extra 30 minutes dedicated to motivating kids to be lifelong readers. This included time for teacher reading to kids, student self-selection, book clubs, and other activities and discussions aimed at promoting literacy.

I had no problem with that, but I don’t see it as balanced. The two hours of explicit instruction and guided practice is supported by research and has been found to benefit kids. The motivational efforts, whether good or bad, are on thin ice when it comes to evidence that they work. I accepted that compromise as reasonable because it didn’t interfere with a heavy dose of effective teaching. Too often it does. 

Unfortunately, “balance” these days tends to mean a minimum of substantial systematic explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, spelling, handwriting, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, or writing. Studies show convincingly that explicit teaching of these things is beneficial in moving kids forward in literacy learning and the idea of balancing these essentials against anything else just because someone likes whatever else may be is irksome.  

It’s time that we retire “balanced literacy,” focusing less on ideological and rhetorical gamesmanship and more on what has been found to actually help kids to become better readers.

Once when visiting the Big Easy, a young woman who had clearly been over-served, stopped me and said, “You’re that guy.”

I smiled, bemused, unsure what to say. Her friends fanned out around me.

“You’re that guy. You’re that guy on TV.”

My grin grew idiotic. At first, I tried to explain that I wasn’t “that guy,” but that just seemed to convince them even more that I must be. They insisted.

I never figured out who she thought I was, but I copped to it, and thanked her for her support and asked her to keep watching. I’m pretty sure she had me confused with George Clooney (Cyndie says it more likely was Bozo the Clown). 

I’m still pretty sure it was Clooney, though my hair hasn’t really turned as much as his has. 

That got me thinking… It really matters that we know of who and what we are speaking. I know many of you are thinking: Tim Shanahan, George Clooney, what's the difference? But--believe it or not--there is a difference and it could matter to somebody.

That’s true of lots of things. Like guided reading, for instance. 

The term “guided reading” is causing a lot of confusion. Most of us now use it as shorthand to refer to those instructional procedures recommended by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell in their book, Guided Reading (1996, 2016) – much as many of you might use George as shorthand for Tim Shanahan. 

The problem with that conception of the term “guided reading” is that it actually conglomerates three separate aspects of instruction into one idea.

And, that’s where the problem is. When I say that the Common Core contradicts the fundamentals of guided reading—I mean George Clooney, and you’re thinking Tim Shanahan.

From the emails I receive and the audience comments at my presentations, it is evident to me that many of you—probably most of you—think of guided reading as instruction with leveled books; that is, with books matched to the students' instructional levels. Because of that, I often use “guided reading” as a shortcut key when I am criticizing the idea of leveling kids’ reading in those ways.

And that works great with some of my audience. They get what I’m saying. They definitely are not confusing me with either Mr. Clooney or Mr. Bozo.

But the Fountas and Pinnell version of guided reading means different things to different people. A significant part of my audience believes that guided reading is about small group teaching, and studies are pretty clear that small group teaching can be advantageous. Those individuals hear me challenge guided reading and they start seeing images of a clown with really big feet.

The term, “guided reading,” was not created by F&P. It was a term used by one of the basal reader companies (Scott Foresman’s Dick & Jane readers)  from the 1930s-1960s to describe their lesson plan in which teachers guided students to read a text by preteaching vocabulary, setting a purpose for reading, having kids read part of the text, and then discussing that portion in pursuit of a series of teacher questions. (A competing program at the time marketed a very similar routine called “directed reading”). 

Again, when I talk about the contradiction between “guided reading” and Common Core, some individuals are taking it that I’m criticizing the idea of reading a text under the supervision of a teacher. And, again, to these folks, they are definitely seeing grease paint and big shoes rather than a hunk.

Please understand: Research findings and Common Core standards stand in stark contradiction to the idea of teaching everybody (beyond beginners) at their so-called instructional level. The standards say nothing about small group instruction or communal readings in which teachers scaffold kids’ interactions with text. The criticisms are of the first, not of the second two. The notion that kids should be taught to read with relatively easy texts is great for beginners, but by grade 2, this approach is more likely to hold kids back than to help them to read better.

I hope that helps. 

By the way, I have made headway in convincing Cyndie that people really do confuse me with George Clooney. She is even warming to the idea. Of course, she has been dropping hints about a 7-carat diamond, but I’m sure we’ll work that problem out over time.

            Another thing that was mentioned in several of the comments was annotating being a strategy for close-reading. it is a great strategy I am not sure how to annotate, most of my annotations are personal reactions and summaries.       How can I branch out and include more analysis annotations? I am never certain of what to read into and what to accept as it is. Another comment that was made was in regards to close-reading giving you the ability to question the text, but I am never sure what questions to ask and how to ask them. I had a lot of thoughts about this article, and while it was very insightful it left me with more questions about close-reading than I had in the beginning.

            When you commented "these strategy's will engage them in thinking in particular ways" my only thought was "why put your mind in a box" by saying you can only think a 'particular' way you close yourself off from looking at things in a different light, an alternate angle.

            The idea that readers should be able to understand not only what a text says, but what the subtext may be communicating seems self evident. With regard to literature, those abilities allow one to more fully appreciate the unity of the author’s work; how the word- and structure-choices the author makes amplify or reinforce his/her message is an important part of the aesthetic experience. Those same skills can help readers to decompose other kinds of texts to, in order to understand their rhetorical power and how they might be operating on us as readers.

            You are absolutely correct that readers might interpret something symbolically that the author never intended. Historically, the close reading position on that is that you are reading the text and not the author. In fact, in some versions of close reading you are not even supposed to think about the author’s intentions. See E.D. Hirsch’s article (in the Atlantic) on the distinction between close reading and more author-centered reads.

            If you didn’t have rules for interpretation, how would you know when you were done? You could try to engage students in uncovering historical information about every text they read, complete with biographical information about each author. That kind of reading is valuable, but frankly, I don’t do that every time I read. It can also be useful to shut out all the information that other readers can tell you (including the teacher), to focus entirely on the information the author has provided in the text itself (that’s the idea of close reading). In typical classroom reading lessons, one often walks away wondering if the kids could make sense of the text without all of the additional information provided by the teacher.

            Finally, annotating a text can be a useful tool for close reading (and other kinds of reading), but it is not an approach that is central to close reading. In other words, you can engage in close reading without annotating at al.

            As authors have tripped over themselves trying to convince readers that they have some inside notions of close reading or common core, they have been proposing more and more elaborate annotation schemes—proving that they know little about close reading or CCSS. The standards don’t require any kind annotation and such annotations are at best irrelevant to close reading. (In the worst cases, these schemes distract students from the texts, which is very un-close reading.)

            Of course, if you are going to read a text multiple times, being able to find particular information quickly can be really helpful. Having students leaving some kind of bread crumbs along the way can speed the process up a bit. When I notate a text in that way, the big thing that I try to mark are word choices, patterns of information, or connections between ideas that I want to revisit to examine further. If you want to teach kids to do this, go with a very simple system (Doug Fisher’s (et als.) book on Reading Complex Text (International Reading Association) proposes a system that isn’t overly elaborate.

Originally posted on August 25, 2014; re-posted on September 21, 2017. Recently, most questions that I have received have been about decoding and fluency. That often means that educators feel confident with what they are doing with reading comprehension. Perhaps this re-posting will encourage some thinking about comprehension instruction.

Teacher question:

I don’t hear anything about comprehension strategies anymore. Was that idea just another fad or are should we still teach those?

  It reminded me of when the Dairy Council tried to translate their, “Got Milk” advertising campaign into Spanish—their translator lacked sufficient knowledge of the languages and the slogan came out, “Are you lactating?” Probably not the best way to sell milk!

But they still could not read.

            I’m not a big fan of some of programs like “Teach Your Baby to Read,” but only because I don’t think their designs match what we know about teaching young’uns. I admire their enthusiasm, however.

            I’ve also have long argued for reading challenging books to little kids. Like everybody, I love picture books, too, yet I ‘m a bigger fan of sharing chapter books with preschoolers. The day my youngest came home from the hospital, I began reading Through the Looking Glass to her. By the time, my daughters entered kindergarten they knew books like The Odyssey, Charlotte’s Web, The Yearling, and Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man (my daughter who is now an engineer picked that one out herself). 

            As should be clear to any reader of these pages, I also support Common Core, specifically because those standards are higher than past standards. They are ramping up the rigor for kids and I’m on board. (I even believe in Algebra for most 8^th graders though I know nothing about the teaching of math).  

            Given all of that, I find myself in an uncomfortable position: I think beginning reading instruction (Grades K-1) is going off the rails, specifically because of attempts to impose rigor on those grades that goes beyond anything that makes sense. 

            This phony rigor—phony because it appears to be demanding, though it would be unlikely to actually elevate children’s learning in any productive way. 

            Some examples may help.

            One illustration of this kind of phony rigor is the first-grade teachers who have told me that they are going to teach with complex text. They have looked at the second-grade Lexile demands of Common Core and they want to ensure that the kids will be able to handle those text demands when they get there. 

            The ambition is admirable, but it would be wrong headed for most kids. Instead of helping them to progress faster, it would make text less transparent (harder to figure out the spelling patterns and sound-symbol relationships). That’s why CCSS didn’t raise text levels for beginners; the standards recognize that would appear to be more demanding, but it would be phony because it would just make us adults look tougher when we were actually slowing down the kids’ learning progress (in the end lower achievement, but we rigor-demanding adults could feel better about ourselves).

            Another example is how fast some people are trying to teach phonics. It’s apparently clear to them that if they teach enough phonic elements to 5-year-olds, they’ll be seen as rigorous. But displays of rigor aren’t what we are looking for. What’s more important, teaching lots of phonic elements in a brief time or ensuring kids become effective decoders?

            Part of the problem with introducing phonic elements that quickly initially is that you reduce their decoding progress. Studies, for example, have shown the foolishness of teaching complex patterns (like long vowel spelling patterns) before kids have effectively digested short vowels. It is not just that they don’t learn the long vowel patterns very well, but those patterns can mislead kids into thinking that reading is about reading the letter names—it is not; it is about matching sounds and letters, quite a different (and more abstract) idea. 

            Or, what about the crazy number of sight words some programs strive for? I’m a big sight word and flash card guy (that was certainly part of my teaching approach in Grade 1, in various reading clinics, and with my own kids), but is the point to memorize a long list of words or to become readers as early as possible? 

            The term “sight words” does not refer to a list of words to be memorized by young readers. Some memorization is fine, especially with words that are irregular in their spelling patterns. But reading is not remembering memorized symbols, it is quickly and efficiently translating those symbols into words. Sight words are words that children decode so quickly and easily that it looks like they are reading them from memory (but they are not).

            I remember vividly teaching my oldest daughter to read. I was teaching a group of pre-service teacher candidates at the same time and I’d tell them about her progress. At that point, my four-year-old daughter knew her consonant sounds and had managed to memorize about 25 sight words… but she still couldn’t read (by reading I mean being able to make sense of a written message from nothing but the words on the page). 

            My students asked a really good question: How many words does it take to make someone a reader? 

            The answer, of course, is that knowing lots of words will eventually be helpful, but there is no particular number of words that have to be known before a child crosses the line to being a reader. The smartest people in the field, after carefully and thoroughly reviewing the research literature on this issue decided that kindergartners should probably master a small number of sight words—certainly much less than the dozens being espoused by some programs. 

            One gets the sense they want to pile up big numbers only to impress their rigor-seeking customers, but these schemes aren’t based on research, the demands of the new standards, or even the experience of those who have most successfully taught young children to read. 

            The reason for the high numbers: It's a kind of selfish. Teachers and administrators stung by the charges that they have been too soft and sloppy in the past want to look rigorous. They sincerely hope to do good, but have nary a clue about what good might be. If someone tells you 5-year-olds need to master 92 sight words to become readers, grab your wallet and run. 

            Pointlessly high learning goals won’t help kids more if they appear to be rigorous and demanding. They're still pointless. Remember, the real goal is to teach kids to be wise readers--not to see how fast we can introduce particular lists of skills. Such lists, no matter how quickly, introduced don't make kids readers. 

Teacher question:

I have a question that many teachers have asked and would like your help when thinking through the grading process for common core. How might the children receive grades for the many standards without giving a test? The teachers are doing a lot of processing text together as a class or in partners so they are wondering about the accountability for the students and how to get a grade to measure their knowledge. 

I get this kind of question frequently from teachers who work with struggling readers, so I decided to respond publicly. What I say about these two tests would be true of others as well.

Blast from the past: This blog was first posted on March 31, 2014; and was reposted on November 15, 2017. The reason for revisiting is that over the past couple of weeks these unproven claims against teaching reading to young children have emerged yet again--this time in a posting by Valerie Strauss for the Washington Post. As usual, the press likes a good educational controversy rather than helping a community figure out the best way to address educational problems. Teaching young children to read is not harmful despite the claims.  

During both my childhood and the early years of my teaching career “reading readiness” dominated. The idea was that if you taught kids reading too early, you would do damage. My kindergarten teacher warned Mom not to try to teach me anything, and we were still stalling when I taught first grade.

Blast from the Past Re-issue June 28, 2017

Originally published February 27, 2014

I thought we were past all this, but I've been asked these kinds of questions twice this week. Educators are trying to make sure that they are doing exactly the right thing again--with standards that don't try to prescribe just the right thing. This one made a lot of folks angry the first time around (see the comments), so it seems like it is time to take another look.

          I’ve been receiving queries about the CCSS from teachers, principals, and consultants trying to figure out the standards. They don’t always like my responses—in fact, some have argued back that I must be wrong.  I’m not (he said, modestly).

          But I’m getting ahead of myself, first the questions: 

          One of the differences between the writing standard 1a in grades 9-10 and 11-12 is that students “introduce precise claims” (9-10) while in 11-12 students “introduce precise, knowledgeable claims.” I’m working with a group of teachers in clarifying the difference. It seems as though a precise claim would be also be grounded in knowledge rather than intuition or guesses or… Can you clarify?

Or…

          Our team is now debating the differences between recount and retell.  We have found definitions of recount/retell, but we can’t seem to find credible resources that will clarify the differences. Since the Core uses retell in the K and 1^st grade Core standards, and switches to recount in the 2^nd grade standards, we feel it is critical that we are clear in explaining the differences. Can you help us to clarify the differences, or point us to a credible source to cite as we clarify the difference?

            My response is that these well-meaning educators are not approaching these standards appropriately. They are looking for a narrow precision of meaning in a document not intended to provide that. I know that close reading is in right now, but a close reading of the standards—trying to make these fine distinctions by analyzing the words and structure closely—will undermine successful educational efforts rather than supporting them.

            We aren’t lawyers and these aren’t legal documents.

            Grant Wiggins has argued that the verbs in the standards need to be much more precise if they are going to provide a good roadmap for assessment. Grant Wiggins Blog Entry

            But I’d argue back that it’s more important for the standards to support quality instruction rather than a spiffy test design.

            These standards, because they are from the “fewer, bigger, better” school of standard writing, are intentionally not so precise. They leave a lot out, relegating many important choices and decisions to teachers and curriculum makers.

            If the standards say students need to “summarize text,” then those who try to formulate a very precise conception of summarization are going to undermine, rather than facilitate, student learning.

            Instead of that kind of hermeneutic verb analysis, it would be better to brainstorm in the other direction. That is, try to be inductive rather than deductive:

            Think of all the kinds of texts and information sources that might be appropriate for students to summarize (consider different lengths of texts too, and any features that could make them difficult to summarize). Ponder, too, all the subskills entailed in summarization, such as recognizing and omitting unimportant information, identifying main ideas, creating generalization statements to replace lists of ideas, paraphrasing, and so on.

            That is what the standards are asking us to teach, and those who try to serve such rich dishes of learning are likely to be successful. I’d want my kids to dine at their table—the dishes sound nutritious and delicious. But the cooks who are trying to split hairs among summarizing, recounting, and retelling –trying to make sure that kids are served one, but not the others—will be serving leftovers long past the expiration date. No, thanks.

Teacher question:

I've been looking for online and workshop information on close reading and everything I've seen and heard has recommended doing close reading on material that is well above kids independent reading level. Your post talks about the futility of doing a close read on preprimer material, which I completely agree with. What do you think about using higher text, say second grade, with second semester first graders in a teacher-supported group lesson?

My question centers on identifying students for special education. Research says identify students early, avoid the IQ-discrepancy model formula for identification, and use an RTI framework for identification and intervention. 

That said, I have noticed that as a result of high stakes accountability linked to teacher evaluations there seems to be a bit of a shuffle around identifying students for special education. While we are encourages to "identify early", the Woodcock Johnson rarely finds deficits that warrant special education identification.  Given current research  on constrained skills theory ( Scott  Paris)  and late emerging reading difficulties (Rollanda O’Connor), how do we make sure we are indeed identifying students early? 

If a student has been with me for two years (Grades 1 and 2) and the instructional trajectory shows minimal progress on meeting benchmarks, (despite quality research-based literacy instruction), but a special education evaluation using the Woodcock Johnson shows skills that fall within norms, how do we service these children? Title I is considered a regular education literacy program. Special Education seems to be pushing back on servicing these students, saying they need to "stay in Title I."  Or worse, it is suggested that these students be picked up in SPED for phonics instruction, and continue to be serviced in Title I for comprehension. 

I am wondering what your thoughts are on this. The "duplication of services" issue of being service by both programs aside, how does a school system justify such curriculum fragmentation for its most needy students? Could you suggest some professional reading or research that could help me make the case for both early identification of students at risk for late emerging reading difficulties, and the issue of duplication of services when both Title I and SPED service a student?

Shanahan response:

This is a great question, but one that I didn’t feel I could answer. As I’ve done in the past with such questions: I sent it along to someone in the field better able to respond. In this case, I contacted Richard Allington, past president of the International Reading Association, and a professor at the University of Tennessee. This question is right in his wheelhouse, and here is his answer:

  I know of no one who advocates early identification of kids as pupils with disabilities (PWDs). At this point in time we have at least 5 times as many kids identified as PWDs [as is merited]. The goal of RTI, as written in the background paper that produced the legislation, is a 70-80% decrease in the numbers of kids labeled as PWDs. The basic goal of RTI is to encourage schools to provide kids with more expert and intensive reading instruction. As several studies have demonstrated, we can reduce the proportion of kids reading below grade to 5% or so by the end of 1st grade. Once on level by the end of 1st about 85% of kids remain on grade level at least through 4th grade with no additional intervention. Or as two other studies show, we could provide 60 hours of targeted professional development to every K-2 teacher to develop their expertise sufficiently to accomplish this. In the studies that have done this fewer kids were reading below grade level than when the daily 1-1 tutoring was provided in K and 1st. Basically, what the research indicates is that LD and dyslexics and ADHD kids are largely identified by inexpert teachers who don't know what to do. If Pianta and colleagues are right, only 1 of 5 primary teachers currently has both the expertise and the personal sense of responsibility for teaching struggling readers. (It doesn't help that far too many states have allowed teachers to avoid responsibility for the reading development of PWDs by removing PWDs from value-added computations of teacher effectiveness).

  I'll turn to senior NICHD scholars who noted that, "Finally, there is now considerable evidence, from recent intervention studies, that reading difficulties in most beginning readers may not be directly caused by biologically based cognitive deficits intrinsic to the child, but may in fact be related to the opportunities provided for children learning to read." (p. 378)

  In other words, most kids that fail to learn to read are victims of inexpert or nonexistent teaching. Or, they are teacher disabled not learning disabled. Only when American schools systems and American primary grade teachers realize that they are the source of the reading problems that some kids experience will those kids ever be likely to be provided the instruction they need by their classroom teachers.

  As far as "duplication of services" this topic has always bothered me because if a child is eligible for Title i services I believe that child should be getting those services. As far as fragmentation of instruction this does not occur when school districts have a coherent systemwide curriculum plan that serves all children. But most school districts have no such plan and so rather than getting more expert and more intensive reading lessons based on the curriculum framework that should be in place, struggling readers get a patchwork of commercial programs that result in the fragmentation. Again, that is not the kids as the problem but the school system as the problem. Same is true when struggling readers are being "taught" by paraprofessionals. That is a school system problem not a kids problem. In the end all of these school system failures lead to kids who never becomes readers.

  Good answer, Dick. Thanks. Basically, the purpose of these efforts shouldn’t be to identify kids who will qualify for special education, but to address the needs of all children from the beginning. Once children are showing that they are not responding adequately to high quality and appropriate instruction, then the intensification of instruction—whether through special education or Title I or improvements to regular classroom teaching should be provided. Quality and intensity are what need to change; not placements. Early literacy is an amalgam of foundational skills that allow one to decode from print to language and language skills that allow one to interpret such language. If students are reaching average levels of performance on foundational skills, it is evident that they are attaining skills levels sufficient to allow most students to progress satisfactorily. If they are not progressing, then you need to look at the wider range of skills needed to read with comprehension. The focus of the instruction, the intensity of the instruction, and the quality of the instruction should be altered when students are struggling; the program placement or labels, not so much.

      The conception of close reading that is embodied in the Common Core standards is the one drawn from literature. However, it is not a particularly doctrinaire version of the concept, so it really can be applied across the curriculum, though it will require a bit of stretching here and there. There is more need for stretching with some texts than others. For example, in some ways a literary close read is sort of an attempt to read stories and poems in the way mathematicians read math, so math reading wouldn't require much of an adjustment. However, history reading tends not to be so single text focused so some variation is in order.

      One basic idea often stressed in discussions of close reading is that the teachers' role is to ask questions about the text. However, let's not take that too literally. That could be questions that guide a discussion, but it also could be tasks that require students to analyze the same information, such as a writing assignment or some other kind of task.

Teacher question:

I am a reading specialist working in an urban school district with struggling readers in K-5.  Do you have any suggestions on intervention programs that you find the most beneficial to students?  Currently, we are using LLI (Fountas and Pinnell), Sonday, Read Naturally and Soar to Success, at the interventionist's discretion. Is there any research supporting or refuting these programs?  Is there another program that you find more effective?  We also use Fast Forward and Lexia as computer-based interventions.  What does the research say about these tools?