Teacher Question:

Question:

Teacher question:

You have attacked DEAR time [Drop Everything and Read] because you say it does little to raise reading achievement. But what about having kids read on their own as a way to motivate them to be readers? As a teacher I want my kids to be lifelong readers, so I provide 20 minutes of daily independent reading time. What do you think?

Shanahan response: 

I think you sound like a nice teacher, but perhaps not a particularly effective one.

As you remind me, the effects of DEAR, SSR, SQUIRT or any of the other “independent reading time” schemes are tiny when it comes to reading achievement. Many of those studies have not been particularly well done, but even when they have been the learning payoffs have been tiny.

Surprising to me is that this pattern holds even with summer reading programs — which should be the clearest test of the power of such reading (since recreational reading isn’t replacing other academic activities during a school day). James Kim has studied that kind of thing a lot and while he concludes that some very small learning benefits can be derived from such programs, he has had a lot of difficulty obtaining even those result from study to study.

Unfortunately, the motivational impact of such procedures has been studied less—and with even less payoff. In my experience, the better readers enjoy the free reading time—so they continue to like reading even within a DEAR time framework—but the other kids don't enjoy it much since they don’t read very well. Yikes!

I definitely understand the logic that you are working with—I believed in it as a classroom teacher. The idea that kids practicing independent reading would make them want to be independent readers in the future seemed compelling at the time. But when you think deeply about the practice, its problems become more evident. 

How do kids perceive these practices? I know one program that requires kids to read 45 minutes per day on their own at school and another 45 minutes at home. This doesn’t seem particularly “independent” since it is mandated and I’m not sure that kids see this as being qualitatively different than the more circumscribed reading assignments in traditional textbooks. So what is it that distinguishes so-called independent reading from other classroom assignments?

1. Whether the reading is going to be done or not.

If the teacher makes me read for the next half hour, that doesn’t seem particularly “independent.” She might let me choose the text I read, and she doesn’t make herself available to provide assistance, but what if I’d rather not read at all or would prefer reading during math class? Now that would be independent. Required reading time — even when it does not include much teaching — isn’t inherently motivational for everyone (studies show reading motivation to be closely linked to how well kids can read and their home background). Making somebody do something may accomplish compliance, but compliance doesn’t necessarily contribute to motivation. (As they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him take a bath.)

2. Whether the reader picks the text.

This one is a bit easier. In fact, many experts talk about “self-selected” reading rather than independent reading, since book choice may be the only agency students are allowed in these routines. Lots of times the unmotivated kids still can’t find anything they want to read, and, of course, there are complications. Many teachers/schools constrain these “free choices,” such as only allowing students to read books at particular levels (à la Accelerated Reader). If I can choose only books with blue dots, then my choices are decidedly constrained; and if I’m not particularly interested in reading about any topic, then choice wouldn’t be much of a motivator. (Someone I know is fascinated with tennis. I once bought him a book about tennis, sure he’d love it. Instead he was a real pill: “I love playing tennis, not reading about it.” There is an important motivational lesson there.)

3. How accountable is the reading? Do I have to answer the teachers’ questions? Or write a summary to be evaluated? Or read a segment aloud so the teacher can check on my fluency? Or discuss this with the book club group and not look like an idiot?

As research accumulated exposing the lack of learning from unaccountable reading (e.g., DEAR, SSR), teachers started adopting procedures for conferencing with kids about their books. In other words, they are trying to make independent reading more like reading lessons — we’ll determine the levels of the texts that you will be allowed to read and you must prove you read the material and understood it; not exactly how most of us use our free time. My point isn’t that such accountability is bad — au contraire — but certainly doesn’t seem particularly well-aligned with the idea of fostering a love or reading.

See what I mean? The logic of requiring kids to read for enjoyment doesn’t seem as brilliant as it may have at first blush.

What does motivate us? I’ve read a lot of that literature on motivation and being required to do something never comes up as a powerful stimulator of lifelong desire; though self-control does. Being sent off to do something on one’s own has not been found to entice kids (it can feel isolating) but working cooperatively with others has. Being engaged in activities that provide a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment may contributed to a lifelong love of literacy, but how much accomplishment or fulfillment do you think most of the poorer readers get from such “independent reading”?

If you don’t want kids to love reading, then focus on motivation rather than learning. Instead of providing explicit teaching and stimulating group discussions, require that they choose books by F&P levels, read them on their own, and punctuate this supposedly motivational routine occasionally with one-on-one conferencing. (Not surprisingly, the extensive scientific literature on motivation doesn’t entertain such practices as being likely to stimulate motivation).

But if you really want kids to love reading, teach them to read. Achievement does more for motivation than the other way around. Set up opportunities for kids to work together and with you around books. Encourage them to include reading in their daily live away from school. If you want them to care about books, give them a chance to take on books that may be too hard for them, but that they think to be worth the effort. Give them ways to gain social rewards for using the knowledge they gain from their reading.

I appreciate your evident devotion to your students. I hope you care so much that you’ll be willing to alter your methods to meet your very appropriate goals for them.

          What an peculiar—but all-too-common—question.

           What has led to this weird belief that schools can have either textbooks or good teachers? That investments in teacher development and textbook adoption are opposites? Or, that the good teachers will run screaming from the room upon textbook purchases?

           The real issue isn’t whether teachers or programs matter, but whether students are best served by a corps of good teachers using a shared program of instruction.

           There is no research showing that textbooks automatically lead to higher reading achievement. But, the reverse is true too… there is no research showing that teachers without programs are in any way advantaged by their omission.

           Over the years, I have known many schools without reading programs. As director of reading in the Chicago schools, there were principals who refused to buy reading programs. Like you, they believed that teachers and kids would do better without them. Achievement levels in those schools were in the bottom 20 percent nationally. I remember proudly telling those teachers I wouldn’t “impose” a reading program on them; their cries of anguish and dismay still haunt me. I’m not blaming their low achievement on the lack of textbooks necessarily, since there were other equally low achieving schools in Chicago that did have them.

           Of course, I also know high achieving schools without textbooks. I’d not credit their high attainment to the dearth of textbooks, but their lack was conferring no obvious disadvantage either. (The schools have particularly well to do clienteles, so I suspect that if you did away with classrooms and teachers, too, they would still be in pretty good shape).

           Anyone honest on this issue knows that it isn’t “scripted boring basal readers” versus “brilliant committed talented teachers” any more than it is “research-based high quality engaging textbooks” versus “lazy underprepared washout teachers.” If it were, it would be an easy choice. Textbooks and teachers are both mixed bags—when looked at collectively.

           To my knowledge only in teaching would anyone make such bizarre decisions… imagine if hospitals agonized over whether to hire highly qualified physicians or to stock the pharmacy!

           Some reasons to have a program, and not just each teacher constructing her own:

1.    Teaching is a team sport, not an individual event.

If teaching were akin to a track event, like a marathon, I’d gladly defer to individual talent. Just hire a good teacher (or runner) and let her do her thing to the best of her ability. The more those individuals hone their idiosyncratic skills the better they’ll be, and their individual styles and choices won’t matter.

But teaching is a collective activity, more like running a relay than a 50-yard dash. Make the separate machinery mesh, you win. In team sports, it’s rare that the best players all end up on one team. Instead, they figure out how to combine all the varied parts into a transcendent whole.

Your metaphor for teaching might be “To Sir With Love” or “The Dead Poet’s Society”—films in which hero teachers, without support of colleagues or administration and certainly with neither textbook nor curriculum, save the world. My metaphor of choice will be the Chicago Bulls—back when Michael Jordan stopped trying to be the hero and learned to pass the ball to his less talented teammates; and when the whole team agreed to the discipline of a structured offense, rather than everyone playing up to their individual ability. A coherent PreK-5 program makes more sense for teaching students to read than 6-7 teachers each doing their own thing, even if they are really nice people and are trying hard.

2.  Teachers have lives, too.

      Another reason I don’t think elementary teachers should be expected to spend their nights designing all the lessons from scratch is because so many teachers do crazy things like get married, have babies, get divorces, take grad classes, take care of ill parents, get ill themselves, and, well, you get the idea. Teaching, when you do it right, is exhausting. Add to that grading papers, IEP meetings, parent phone calls, finding a way to get Bobby home since he missed his bus, and then the less arduous lesson planning (like figuring out the best way to deliver the lesson in the textbook).

     In most situations, teachers simply don’t have the time on their own to put together great lessons everyday. Alternatively, textbook companies hire people who do little besides designing such lessons; they can put all of their energy and resources into that portion of the job. If teacher plans are so sacrosanct, then why do so many teachers without textbooks scan the internet in search of workable lessons other teachers have posted or illegally photocopying texts and materials from elsewhere? The issue isn’t whether teachers can formulate lessons as good as those in the textbooks. On average, they definitely can. The real questions are whether most teachers can do so over long periods of time, or whether their time might be better devoted to studying the kids and fitting textbook to those diverse needs.

3.  Programs sometimes are better.

     One of the things the National Reading Panel looked at was whether teachers should teach “responsive phonics,” that is teaching phonics skills as students need them rather than following a predetermined curriculum. It certainly makes sense that kids would benefit from such personally tailored teaching; very personal, very individualized… and relatively ineffective, when compared to the use of a systematic program. Having tried to teach responsive phonics to first-graders myself, I’m not surprised that following a well-designed phonics curriculum would guarantee high levels of decoding performance to more kids than the jerry-rigged approach.

4.  Systematic improvement.

     If all teachers in a school or district employ the same fourth-grade program, then it is easier to deal with a problem like low fourth-grade vocabulary. Addressing, or even noticing, such patterns is less likely when everyone is does their own thing. If vocabulary were low then apparently everyone needs to change—both those who teach vocabulary poorly and those who teach it well. Sorting out which teachers are struggling gets really touchy, so it usually isn’t addressed at all. In schools in which all teachers are highly effective experts, laissez-faire is usually the school improvement policy of choice.

It is time that we start trying to build quality on quality in education. By all means hire the best teachers you can find, and then invest heavily in their professional development (you’ll find few people who've spent more on teacher’s professional development than me). But then give those teachers the best instructional tools available for supporting their work so that they can, in concert, teach their students to high levels of achievement. (And, don't leave principals, parents, specialists, assessments, etc. out of the equation either).

Our school is in review which means that we have to improve reading test performance—or else. We are doing some crazy things with test preparation (that I know you disagree with), but we have also been ordered to put a big emphasis on reading homework. I’ve never been a big fan of homework because not all the kids do it and that doesn’t seem fair. What do you think about this strategy?

           Studies of homework have been thoroughly analyzed by Harris Cooper. This is an area where I can provide the researcher’s well-honed answer: Does homework improve achievement? That depends…

           I wish you had included your grade levels, because the effectiveness of homework in improving reading achievement depends a lot on that. For instance, generally studies have not been especially kind to homework in the primary grades. If the goal is better reading achievement, then a big emphasis on reading homework in K-2 might not be such a great choice (more on this later).

           That starts to change as one transitions into the upper grades, presumably because students are more able to apply their reading skills independently. In grades 3-8, homework has a fairly consistent impact on achievement—and the payoff tends to increase as students advance through the grades (but so does the amount of homework time needed—more on that later, too).

           In high school, the benefits get even bigger, but not until students are doing more than an hour of homework per night; up to that amount, there seems to be little learning benefit.

           It is clear that homework for young children is unlikely to pay off in greater learning. However, many teachers that I work with argue for homework in the early grades as a way of socializing kids into schooling. Their idea is that the students should get used to homework since at some point it really does have learning value.

           Having watched my own kids with their early homework, I think this makes great sense. Young kids love homework—it seems so grown up to them. I like the idea of getting them into a routine of taking care of their homework when they get home. In other words, the idea with those assignments is to teach responsibility rather than reading. That might not show up on your school’s tests right away, but it may pay some real long-term benefits.

           Some of the biggest arguments over homework tend to be linked to how much homework is appropriate. Here I rely on Cooper as well. He has suggested that the old school saw that ten minutes of homework per grade level is sound is in good alignment with research. That means in grade 1, kids would do 10 minutes of homework per night, in second grade it would be 20, third grade 30 and so on. That sounds good to me, both pedagogically and from a busy parent’s point of view.

           When I entered teaching, the concern you expressed about kids who don’t do homework was widely held. (One of my colleagues, who had taken homework assignments to a truant child was ordered off the property at gunpoint: “He can do your school stuff at school and his home stuff at home.)

           Despite that, over time, I have changed my mind about that. Homework can be beneficial to kids, at least at some ages. Holding back something beneficial just because not everyone will or can take advantage of it seems wrongheaded to me now. (Grading homework is still another issue. I think it would be unfair to grade kids based upon how well organized and supportive their homes are.)

           To increase your hit rate, keep parents and guardians informed about the importance of homework (and how much of it there will be and when it will come home). Telling the parents this directly can pay real dividends, as their children will not necessarily let them in on the secret.

           Level with parents. Let them know that you understand that there are nights that get out of hand and homework just can’t get done, and that you won’t punish their child for that. Tell them you’d appreciate a note from home when that happens. However, also stress the learning benefits to their kids.

           Having someone else do the homework also happens when a child can’t figure out how to do an assignment. Some kids are terrified in such situations. Encourage parents that instead of having someone else do the work, encourage their children to come to you at the very beginning of the school day—before you are even collecting homework—to show you what they had trouble with. Great teaching opportunities arise from less.

          Homework can become a terrible system of communication, sort of like an unreliable pony express for parents and teachers. The teacher sends homework. For some reason, the homework isn’t going to be done that night. Mom doesn’t want the teacher to think she doesn’t care, so she does it herself or has an older sister do it. Voila, homework completed! The teacher looks at the homework that obviously wasn’t done by her student and from this assumes mom doesn’t care. Yikes.

           Try to break out of that vicious circle with parents. If everyone is on the same page about what is going on, you’ll see more homework completion.

           What if mom and dad aren’t so great with English? That might mean they can’t get overly involved in homework assignments. If you can’t read the passages, you can’t tell if your child has answered the questions correctly. But they can tell if the homework has been completed and I would encourage parents in that situation to do what they can. Even that kind of involvement and support can make a difference in their kids’ enthusiasm and effort.

           I would also suggest trying to make sure homework assignments are worthwhile. That means keeping them clear and easy enough that they can be completed at home, and demanding enough that they can lead to learning.

           For instance, in the primary grades I don’t surrender to the research finding that homework doesn’t improve reading. That is usually true, but there are exceptions. For example, Keith Topping’s work on sending home reading books for nightly fluency practice with 7-year-olds suggests one possibility. Set it up so kids have someone at home to read aloud to nightly.

           Or, a suburban principal I know had the parents of first-graders focused on practicing sight vocabulary for about 10 minutes per night. Amazing how that sped up these young children’s reading development—freeing up teacher time to focus on more complex aspects of reading.

           As kids move up the grades, this gets easier, of course, because kids can read and write more independently. Increasing the amount of accountable reading students do—reading and answering questions, reading and preparing discussion notes, reading and writing—can expand opportunity to learn.

           Final word: I was working with a middle school last year where the textbook-based math homework was often incomplete because neither students nor parents knew what to do! I’m not complaining about a lack of parental math knowledge here, but about unclear assignments. The same kind of confusion often happens in the primary grades with homework worksheets, too. I’ve seen mothers cry over that one—they just want to help their kids and feel stupid and embarrassed when they can’t. The lack of written directions on homework can be a real problem for moms and dads. There might not be directions because it is supposed that the little ones can't read them, or that the older ones will remember how to do the task later when they are home. But lack of homework directions often means the homework cannot get done. Please look hard at your assignments and make sure someone who is not a teacher can figure out what is required. It matters.

Vocabulary teaching is currently in vogue; there are lots of good books and articles out there on how to teach word meanings. That’s good, as far is it goes.

        Steve Stahl used to argue that there were three facets of vocabulary teaching. One, indeed, we need to explicitly teach the meanings of words and word parts. Two, we need to teach students to infer word meanings from context. And, three, we need to teach students to determine word meanings from dictionaries.

        These days I’d say we’re doing a much better job with the first part of Stahl’s vocab triad – in classrooms that I visit teachers are definitely focusing explicit instruction on the meanings of words. But the second leg (context) is kind of wobbly, and the third may as well not even be there at all. Often there are few dictionaries in classrooms, and even when there are classroom sets, they seem like mood setters (sort of like the faux fireplaces and faux wood beams in some restaurants) rather than functional tools. [An important exception to this is with second-language learners. Those kids often have a dictionary on their desks and many of those dictionaries appear to be well used.]

        I’ve written before about how important it is to not preteach words that you believe students can figure out from context, and that bears repeating here. Instead of preteaching such words, ask about them along with the comprehension questions and take students back to the words to guide them to discern the word meanings.

        But, like many of you, I’ve been ignoring the role of dictionaries. Your question prompted me to a take a quick look, and I found what to me was a surprising amount of research showing—both with first and second language learners—that dictionary use has a positive impact on reading comprehension and that it increases students’ knowledge of words. Thus, we definitely should be teaching kids to use dictionaries.

        I wrote in an earlier entry about teaching myself French. I’ve never used dictionaries as much in my life as I do in this endeavor, but it takes a lot of work and the new electronic dictionaries are wonderful in terms of ease of use.

        I don’t know what article your teachers may have been reading, but I agree with them that the word learning that accrues from dictionary use alone can be somewhat superficial. When I look up a word, that doesn’t mean I retain it. In fact, there are some words I’ve looked up many times.

        However, that is true both with explicit teaching of vocabulary and with use of context. Making words stick takes a lot of repetition and it can help if one develops a richer sense of a word’s meaning than just its dictionary definition.

        One of my favorite approaches to vocabulary teaching is one that my friends Isabel Beck and Moddy McKeown developed many years ago (no, not Text Talk). They explicitly taught about 10 words per week to kids. However, the amount of review was remarkable. In week 1, they taught 10 words. In week 2, they taught 10 words. In week 3, they reviewed the 20 words taught in weeks 1 and 2. Week 4, they taught 10 words. Week 5, they reviewed the words from weeks 1, 2, and 4. And so on, throughout a school year. Of all of the vocabulary research, this vocabulary instruction had one of the clearest and most powerful impacts on reading comprehension.

        I suggest that dictionary skills should be taught in third grade and I would devote several weeks of vocabulary lessons to this. This instruction should definitely include how to look words up in both electronic and print dictionaries depending on what is available, as well as what to do when there are multiple definitions. Stay away from copying exercises and work on trying to use the definitions to figure out the meaning of the texts that are being read. (I’d revisit this ground in grades 4 and 5, too, limiting this review to a couple of weeks of instruction and guided practice.)

        From then on, I would encourage dictionary use; perhaps a point system with rewards when kids show evidence of using their dictionaries. However, when kids do look up words, a record should be kept and these words should end up in the review system (in the vocab notebooks, on the word wall, etc.). In other words, don’t allow dictionary usage to lead to a superficial consideration of a word, but use it as a jumping off point for developing a deeper understanding of the words under investigation.

        (And, of course, thesauri and encyclopedias can play a valuable role in vocabulary development, too).

        It is a three-legged stool: explicit teaching of words and word parts, use of context to derive word meanings, and use of dictionaries and other reference tools. Teach all three and give students a strong word-meaning foundation—one that won’t let them fall over.

Last week I answered a teacher’s question about free reading time during the school day and its relationship to reading motivation (e.g., making kids like reading). I pointed out that such reading time has a rather weak relationship with learning (various kinds of instruction exert about an 800% greater influence on learning than on having kids reading on their own during the school day) and that the connection with motivation appears to be even more tenuous. I then compared the DEAR/SSR practice unfavorably with theories and research on what motivates human beings.

Not surprisingly that generated much comment. Although the following was not sent to me, it was so addressed and posted at the blog site of Gwen Flaskamp, a practicing teacher. She is evidently passionate about this practice, and I think her posting deserves a response. I have quoted liberally from her posting below in italics—and have interspersed my responses throughout. To read her complete statement in its entirety, please follow this link Blog Post on Independent Reading Time

Flaskamp blog:

“My Letter to Tim Shanahan: In Defense of Independent Reading

“Recently, I read the latest blog post by Tim Shanahan where he provides his strong opinions how giving students time to independently read in class is wasteful. Although I usually value his opinions and have referenced him several times on my blog, I had a strong, visceral response to his latest piece…. I felt compelled to stand up for the inclusion of independent reading time during the school day. Thus, I crafted this letter. I'm hoping he reads it.  

“But, more importantly, I'm hoping that teachers who wish to instill lifelong reading habits in their students do not stop with Mr. Shanahan's advice and consider my perspective and the perspective of others on this important topic.

“Dear Mr. Shanahan,

“I think you sound like an impolite blogger, and perhaps a misinformed one. You've neglected to consider the following important points in your discussion of the value of independent reading.

“You claim that time spent independent reading is wasted due to the fact that "even when they have been done well, the "learning payoffs" have been small. By "learning payoffs," I am assuming that you mean students' progress on standardized exams (typically the way reading growth is measured in research studies) does not increase with the inclusion of independent reading time in schools.

“Some major problems exist with this claim.

“Increased reading does lead to increased achievement.

“Research does support the idea that students who typically achieve higher on reading tests are also those who read more voraciously. Those who score at the lower end usually read less.”

Shanahan response:

Dear Ms. Flaskamp.,

Thanks for writing. There are several problems with your claims up to this point.

That good readers read more than poor readers is true, but has no bearing on my response to that teacher’s question. Correlation doesn’t prove causation. That good readers read more does not mean that it was reading more that made them good readers. Maybe good readers choose to read more because they can do it well. You are making a good argument for teaching everyone to read well, not for sending kids off to read on their own during the school day.

You are citing very selectively here. You refer to the correlational studies that can’t answer the question, while ignoring the experimental ones that have directly tested your theory. Studies in which DEAR time is provided to some kids but not to others have not found much payoff—even when the non-readers were doing no more than random worksheets!

You seem to be claiming that since reading on one’s own leads to improved achievement--then any and all approaches to encouraging reading must be effective. Following that logic, then telling kids to read on their own, buying books for them, rewarding them with pizzas, or employing electric cattle prods… all must work, too. Remember I wasn’t saying kids shouldn’t read, only that requiring “independent reading” during the school day has not been effective. Only one study bothered to check its impact on amount of reading, and it found that middle school kids read less as a result of the practice—since it reduced the amount of reading they did on their own.

As a parent and grandparent, I’d rather that teachers reacted intellectually rather than “viscerally” to questions about instructional practices. Similarly, I hope my physician will be visceral about my health and well-being, but not about his pills and scalpels.

__________________________________

Flaskamp blog:

“Since research also shows that the amount of time middle school students typically spend reading outside of class declines as they grow older, finding time for students to practice reading independently in schools is crucial.  If we do not attempt to foster a love of reading inside the classroom, how will we help students who have not yet discovered the joy of reading on their own increase their reading minutes?”   

Shanahan response:

Indeed, that is a great question. Given that we know this method hasn’t improved achievement or made kids like reading, then why cling so tightly to it? Or, given that DEAR time has been so ubiquitous in elementary classrooms for the past generation, how is it possible that middle school students are reading so little? If this practice so powerfully fosters “a love of reading” among kids that lasts a lifetime, then why aren’t years of it lasting even until kids are 12?

________________________________

Flaskamp blog:

“I'm sure you are aware that much research exists linking student engagement (i.e. motivation) to increases in learning. Thus, spending time on increasing student motivation should, in fact, lead to increases in achievement.”

Shanahan response:

That makes sense to me, and yet studies show that this particular approach accomplishes neither. That might mean that what you are so certain must be motivational for all kids, maybe isn’t.      

____________________________

Flaskamp blog:  

“You advise teachers that " If you don’t want kids to love reading, then sacrifice their instructional time to focus on motivation rather than learning." This argument, although cleverly disguised, is a type we would use with students when poking holes in an argument and is a type of logical fallacy. Your argument seems to suggest that teachers can focus either on motivation or on learning. Can we not focus on both?...”

Shanahan response:

Your analysis of my argument is flawed. We are in agreement that we can focus on motivation and learning simultaneously. Where we disagree is whether you can do that with a procedure that has failed to successfully foster either motivation or learning.

________________________________

Flaskamp blog:

“Have we forgotten that we are teaching students and not robots?”

Shanahan response:  

Yikes. There are many statements here evidently aimed at conveying the idea that I’m rude, that I don’t care about kids, and that I pay attention to numbers rather than stories. If that is a model of what is now being taught students about productive argument, then it might be better that kids go read during such lessons. (Sometimes disagreements arise from different analyses or different evidence—not necessarily because the one you are arguing with is bad.)

It is summer and not a good time for a long blog on literacy teaching. So, I took the time to write a short one. I didn't want to get worked up in the summer heat, so have provided a pithy critique of 5 popular myths about reading instruction.

1.  No, the fact that you do not use a textbook to teach reading does not make you a good teacher.

The idea that good teachers don’t follow a program and weak ones do has been around since well before I became a teacher. It is absolutely silly. The good teachers are the ones who manage to teach kids a lot and the poor ones accomplish less. That has nothing to do with whether a program is followed or not.

 2.  No, the fact that you have regularly scheduled free reading time in your classroom does not mean the kids will improve in reading.

Kids can learn something from reading on their own. But they tend to learn much more from reading instruction (reading a book along with other kids discussing it with a teacher, and writing about it). Free-choice reading time—SSR, DEAR, SQUIRT—ranges from having no affect on learning to having very tiny effects. Encourage free reading when teachers aren’t available to work   with kids and encourage teaching when they are.

3.  No, focusing only on reading—ignoring writing and content instruction—is not the best way to raise reading achievement for struggling readers.

The idea that kids who struggle with reading need more literacy instruction makes sense and is supported by research. But often this is offered at the cost of other kinds of instruction. Writing about text has been found to have bigger comprehension effects than reading alone, reading and rereading, and reading and discussing. Skipping writing instruction and activity for extra reading is obviously a bad idea. And, though it might be necessary to pull kids out of some content instruction to get the reading help they need, the bad effects of this should be reduced by making sure the texts used for this instruction is content rich.

4.  No, assigning students (in grades 2-12) to reading books at “their reading levels” does not facilitate learning to read.

I’m still finding teachers who are sure there must be research supporting the idea of teaching kids with texts of particular levels of difficulty (such as those they can read with 95-98% accuracy). There isn’t. Kids can learn from a wide range of text difficulties, and it makes sense to guide them, within instruction, to make sense of texts that they would struggle to read on their own.

5.  No, reading to kids does not teach them to read.

There are few activities that I enjoy as a parent, grandparent, or teacher than reading to children. And, yet, studies show that such activity has positive impacts on children’s vocabulary (kids who are read know the meanings of   new words). However, the idea that reading to kids teaches them to read is a bad idea—and one not demonstrated in the dozens of studies on reading to kids. I definitely would continue to read to children, but not instead of reading instruction. Reading picture books or chapter books to kids should not take the place of any part of the reading and writing instruction blo

Last week I pointed out that from grades 2-12 it wasn’t necessary to match students to text for instruction to proceed effectively. Research has not been kind to the idea of mechanical “instructional level” criteria like 90-95% accuracy (e.g., Jorgenson, Klein, & Kumar, 1977;  Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, Morris, Morrow, et al., 2006; Morgan, Wilcox, & Eldredge, 2000; O’Connor, Swanson, & Geraghty, 2010;  Powell, & Dunkeld, 1971; Stahl, & Heubach, 2005;  Stanley, 1986).

Language learning doesn’t work that way.

That got lots of response, online and off. Some of it quite angry, too. Although I answered many queries and shout-outs, I thought a little more formal response this week might be in order. Here are some key ideas when thinking about teaching kids to read with more complex text than we might have dared to use in the past:

 1. No, an easier text is not more motivating.

Several respondents thought it only common sense that students would be frustrated by harder texts and stimulated by easier ones. I know that feeling. I shared it much of my career until I analyzed the evidence.

One thing researchers have found repeatedly is that student readers tend to select books at their frustration levels for independent reading (e.g., Donovan, Smolkin,  & Lomax, 2000). Of course, with really low readers, what else could they choose? But this appears to be the case for the better readers, too. I guess their curiosity about the content of the harder materials outweighs their fear of failure. Looking back, I did a lot of that kind of frustration level reading myself as a boy—not always fully understanding what I read, but learning much from the struggle.

Researchers thought students would lose motivation when reading harder texts (Fulmer & Tulis, 2013). Reality has been more complicated than that. Readers’ motivation does vary across a text reading—but the degree of difficulty doesn’t seem to be the source of that variation.

And, the idea that we want students to be challenged, but not too much—they can miss some specific number of words, but only that number and no more—just hasn’t panned out. When learning and book placement have been studied there has usually been no connection at all or the harder placements have led to more learning (in other words, our relatively easy book matches may be holding kids back, preventing them from exposure to more challenging features of language and meaning).

If we are going to make these decisions based on our imaginings of how children must feel, then not only should we think of how frustrating it might be to struggle with a text that contains many words you don’t know, but we should consider how boring it must be to always deal with content aimed at younger kids who already can read as well you can.

2. No, not all texts need to be at an instructional level.

If one challenges the idea of placing kids in instructional level books to facilitate learning (e.g., guided reading, Accelerated Reader), why is the alternative to only place kids in frustration level texts? The idea that all reading should be at the instructional level is wrong in part because of the inherent notion that all reading experience should be at any particular level. Text difficulty should vary; kids should move across a range of texts from easy to difficult.

In the teaching of most skilled activities (e.g., foreign language, dancing, bicycle racing), the idea is not to protect the learners from harder applications of those skills, but to vary the routines between relatively easy challenges and those that scare and potentially embarrass the learner. If you have any doubt, go learn to do something.

3. No, text level is not the only feature of the learning situation that can be varied.

Not only should texts vary in difficulty, but the amount of help, guidance, explanation, and scaffolding ought to vary, too. When kids are placed in frustration level texts they need greater support than when they are reading instructional level or independent level texts—just the opposite of what many of our instructional routines provide.

I should intentionally place kids in easier or harder text and should add or withdraw support based upon need. When kids are in easy texts, the training wheels can be taken off. When they are in harder texts, as a teacher I need to be prepared to offer greater guidance and support. That means easier texts when reading with 30 kids, and harder texts—certainly beyond the normally prescribed levels—when I’m sitting closely with 6-8 kids and can monitor more closely and intervene more easily.

If your teaching skills are so limited that the only way to protect kids from failure is to keep them always in the shallow water, then so be it. But for most of us, there is a greater range of pedagogical response available that would allow kids to swim often in deeper water without drowning.

4. No, a more challenging text will not disrupt kids’ development of decoding skills.

I heard from some last week that if you placed kids in more challenging texts then they just guessed at words. That might be true if you were to do this with beginning readers, but grade 2 is not beginning reading. Kids should be placed in relatively easy texts initially (grades K-1), texts that have clearly decodable or consistent spelling patterns.

Then when they start taking on a greater range of texts—when they can read a second-grade text, you will usually not see that kind of guessing based only on context. In any event, whatever patterns of reading behavior are elicited by such challenging text matches at that point, they have not been found to slow kids’ reading development or to disrupt their growth in decoding ability from that point. In fact, O’Connor and her colleagues (2010) have not even found it to be an issue with our most struggling readers—those older learning-disabled students who might still be trying to master many of those beginning reading skills.

I understand the concerns and discomfort in putting kids in frustration level materials given all the reading authorities that have told you not to do that. But a careful review of that advice reveals a shocking neglect of studies of doing just that. No one, however, is saying just throw kids into hard text and hope they make it. One wouldn’t do that with beginning readers, and when kids are ready for such immersion tactics teachers have to teach—it isn’t like those routines where you hope the text is easy enough for kids to learn with a minimum of teacher help. And, finally, much learning comes from practice under varied levels of complication and difficulty—just because traditionally you were told all reading instruction should be at the instructional level doesn’t mean that when teaching with more complex text that you should aspire to such uniformity.

References

Donovan, C. A., Smolkin, L. B., & Lomax, R. G. (2000). Beyond the independent-level text: Considering the reader-text match in first graders’ self-selections during recreational reading.Reading Psychology, 21, 309-333.

Fulmer, S. M., & Tulis, M. (2013). Changes in interest and affect during a difficult reading task: Relationships with perceived difficulty and reading fluency. Learning and Instruction, 27,11-20.

Jorgenson, G. W., Klein, N., & Kumar, V. K. (1977). Achievement and behavioral correlates of matched levels of student ability and materials difficulty. Journal of Educational Research, 71, 100-103.

Kuhn, M. R., Schwanenflugel, P. J., Morris, R. D., Morrow, L. M., Woo, D. G., Meisinger, E. B., Sevcik, R, A., Bradley, B. A., & Stahl, S. A. (2006). Teaching children to become fluent and automatic readers. Journal of Literacy Research, 38, 357-387.

Morgan, A., Wilcox, B. R., & Eldredge, J. L. (2000). Effect of difficulty levels on second-grade delayed readers using dyad reading. Journal of Educational Research, 94, 113-119.

O’Connor, R. E., Swanson, L. H., & Geraghty, C. (2010). Improvement in reading rate under independent and difficult text levels: Influences on word and comprehension skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 1-19.

Powell, W.R., & Dunkeld, C.G. (1971). Validity of the IRI reading levels. Elementary English, 48, 637-642.

Stahl, S. A., & Heubach, K. M. (2005). Fluency-oriented reading instruction. Journal of Literacy Research, 37, 25-60.

Stanley, N.V. (1986). A concurrent validity study of the emergent reading level. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Florida.

RtI is used to help determine if a student might be suffering from reading/learning disabilities. The reason that student would be referred for intervention support would be because of some concern about the student’s daily progress.

Consequently, we ADD a targeted intervention to the teaching the student is receiving in order to determine whether it promotes greater progress.

If you use the intervention to replace regular instruction then that student would not receive a more intensive and extensive learning experience than what was already provided. All you would be doing is just trading one treatment for another. Not the idea of RtI and not an approach that has been successful in raising reading achievement.

Using the brief intervention to interrupt or replace the longer classroom instruction means that you won’t find out if the student would respond to the extra tuition, because no extra teaching is offered.

Big mistake to pull kids out of their classroom instruction for an intervention unless it has already been determined that they child requires a special education placement (in other words, the student hadn’t responded to the regular teaching plus the intervention). However, even special education programs—depending on how serious the learning problem—may be used as additional teaching rather than replacement teaching.

I definitely side with you in this. I think your principal is making a big mistake—both undermining kids’ learning progress and making it impossible to determine whether the student has a learning problem.

Many years ago, my daughter, Meagan, had a homework assignment. Her literature teacher assigned a short story to read and Meagan was to figure out the theme.

The theme she came up with: “People do a lot of different things.”

Needless to say, it doesn’t matter what the story was, that wasn’t the theme. (Though she was a little surprised that I could know that without even reading it.)

“Meagan how do your teachers teach you to figure out theme?”

“That’s just it, Dad. They don’t. They tell you what a theme is and I know what  a theme is,  and then when you get the theme wrong they tell you the theme and that is supposed to help you next time. But it doesn’t because that story has a different theme.”

My goodness...the same method my teachers had used with me!

Practice alone is not likely to teach kids to identify theme. The same could be said for other comprehension “skills.” No matter how often you are asked to do them, you still won’t be able to without some instruction.

That’s a problem in lots of schools. Reading comprehension instruction has to give kids opportunities to read and to use the information: to answer questions, to discuss, to source one's writing. But there has to be more to it than that. Instruction should help kids to think about that information more effectively; to remember more if it; to analyze it more deeply.

Reading practice is important. But practicing what you don’t know how to do is nonsense.

What got me thinking about that was a review of the Common Core standards for reading. Look what kids are supposed to do with theme by high school graduation: “Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.”

Man, if we aren’t going to teach kids how to figure out one theme, how will they ever know how to identify multiple themes?

I did a quick review of books for teachers on how to teach reading comprehension. It is interesting because, if they mention theme at all, they usually only define it and give some examples. In other words, the same instructional method Meagan described.

In good literature, the characters change across the text; the so-called “arc of development.” Wilbur is a different pig by the end of Charlotte’s Web; and the Elizabeth Bennett at the denouement of Pride and Prejudice is not the same acerbic Lizzy that we start with.

Kids who can’t tell you a theme, can usually track the changes the characters go through. And, they can tell you whether those changes are good or bad.

Theme is wrapped up in those changes—and because the best literature tends to have multiple multi-dimensional characters—characters who grow and learn—a story might have multiple themes. That's what Joanne Golden and John Guthrie reported in 1986 (Reading Research Quarterly). The kids may empathize or identify with one literary character, while the teacher focuses on another. Then, when the kids identify the story theme based on the character that drew their attention, they get graded down for interpreting the text differently than their teacher. 

We need to teach kids to track character changes across a story, to evaluate the value of those changes, and then to construct a potential lesson or theme based on that information.

Once kids know how to do that, practice is a really good idea. Before they know how to do that, practice can’t help much. 

Last week’s entry here focused on teaching kids with more challenging texts than we’ve been told to use in the past. The reason for the change wasn’t some brilliant insight on my part, but a gradual accumulation of direct research evidence. Evidence that shows beyond beginning reading there is no benefit to controlling the difficulty of texts in the way that we have done—matching kids to books with various accuracy criteria.

I got a kick out of one reader who led with her wonder rather than her disbelief. She did something crazy: she tried my advice. She placed students in harder texts and provided them the support and motivation to succeed and the kids did well. So far so good. Over time, if she continues to try it, I think she’ll find that she can get her students to higher levels of achievement than in the past.

Her note came in right at the time I was reading a newspaper article on reading, one printed in 1951—the same year I was born. It even quoted Helen Robinson, whose research I have long admired. However, it contained so much baloney that it gave me hope—we are learning, we are making progress. The only way to do that, of course, is to reduce the strength of our beliefs, and to increase our reliance on data. Here is what we were telling people in 1951. I follow it with my own comments.  

by Marcia Winn 

Sept 11, 1951

Home Interference May Handicap

A NUMBER of years ago when this writer was 10, a neighbor accosted her. Billy, who was 7 and halfway thru the second grade still couldn't read. Would she, the learned one of 10, take over Billy for the summer and see if she could improve his reading.

Billy's mother thought it would be nice if he could learn to spell at the same time.

The offer, made terribly tempting by a remuneration of 50 cents a week [an hour a day of dear little Billy], was snatched up. So all thru the hot summer Billy and his tutor read and spelled. He had a nice time, and she was 50 cents a week richer, and he ended up reading and spelling with great facility. Don't ask us why. Maybe he merely wanted to get back to the empty lot next door and play ball.

Were Billy 7 and half way thru the second grade today, the reading experts would protest such high-handed treatment. In the first place, if Billy is half way thru the second grade and can’t read, he is no problem. He simply isn't "ready" for reading. He's not a problem, remedially speaking, until he is in the third grade. Then he needs help only because in the fourth grade he’ll need his reading for what is described as " a wide variety of content subjects," whatever that means. One assumes he’ll need his reading to read.

Secondly, the reading experts of today say Billy's reading should be a hands-off subject at home. Let teacher do it, not mummy.

If you worry because your child seems slow in grasping reading, talk to his teacher, not to him, Mrs. Helen Robinson, director of the reading clinics at the University of Chicago, advises. If you attempt to take matters into your own hands by reading with him, all you’ll do is upset him. Naturally you’ll read better he. You’ve been at it for years.

"Often this business of reading with the child threatens his security," Mrs. Robinson says. "The parent identifies himself with the child. The popular opinion is that the child who doesn't learn to read easily is of low mentality. The parent suspects this. I've seen a mother burst into tears when assured that her child’s I.Q. really was quite normal."

Many parents try to help by spelling out the letters of the word [c-a-t, cat]. You may have learned to read this way, but Mrs. Robinson says that such home teaching is one of the major handicaps the remedial teachers have to overcome. Spelling does not precede reading she emphasizes; it follows it.

Instead, Mrs. Robinson suggests, see what your child’s teacher wants you to do. [There's no point in getting your convictions gummed up with the whole school system; Billy is not going to learn the way you learned, and that’s that. He may emerge a better reader than you, or a poorer one, but whichever way, it’s today’s soup, and you can’t change it.] The teacher may want you to read aloud to him, not with him. She may say he is lacking in his background of experience and language. She may advise excursions on which you name every object.

Reading, Mrs. Robinson says, is a language skill that depends upon vocabulary. A barren language does nothing. A child gradually develops reading ability as he develops a sight vocabulary and recognizes meaningful words. His growth in this is as gradual as is in any other part of his makeup. You wouldn't ask your child to scale a ladder before his legs, muscles, and sense of balance were ready.

____________________________________________r

There is some pretty shady advice in this column.

      1.     The major point, based on the expert advice, is that if your child is having trouble learning to read, stay out of it. We now have substantial research showing that parents can help their kids’ early literacy growth—a lot. Often parents are still put off by teachers with the, “just read to them,” advice offered in this article… but parent involvement these days tends to be much more specific than that. 

      Many more kids come to school reading than in the past I suspect (though without statistics for that claim), and there is clear evidence of more kids entering school knowing letter names and letter sounds. Parents can and should be involved in the teaching of their children. Obviously the reporter was put off by this strange advice—advice more based upon ideology than empirical evidence. The author had, at the age of 10, taught a struggling 7-year-old reader so she knew it could be done without harm; that’s the kind of skepticism we should all engage in.  

      2.   The notion that parent help was a major impediment for struggling readers was not something that Dr. Robinson found in her landmark dissertation. She identified many precursors to reading difficulties, but too much help and attention at home did not make her list. (And, no, if parents don’t use the school district’s approach, the works will not get gummed up.)

      3.   Younger readers might be shocked by the idea that it’s okay for kids to lag in the primary grades. The advice often was stronger than that. When I was reading specialist I was called before the school board to explain why I was teaching a struggling first-grader. The notion that kids would mature into reading is certainly not a research-based idea. Kids who struggle early tend to continue to struggle and we need to intervene early to interrupt that cycle.

      4.   Still another odd notion here is that kids need to memorize a lot of sight words to learn to read. We know a better than that now. Helen Robinson was a student of William S. Gray, the senior author of the Dick and Jane Readers. Those books did not include phonics or spelling or much emphasis on sounds and letters at any point in the process, and Dr. Robinson was clearly echoing her mentor’s unproven beliefs. These days we know much more about the central role that decoding plays in early reading development.

      5.  The idea that a good approach to teaching vocabulary is to go on a naming excursion is pretty shallow, and not likely to result in kids learning the words that they need for most reading.

Despite these questionable professional insights, there were also signs of scientific thought. The journalism seems a bit confused, but it looks to me like Helen Robinson was trying to explain that IQ was NOT the major determinant of beginning reading and that kids who struggled with reading early on were not necessarily dumb. That was a widely held belief at the time, despite the fact that research was showing that low intelligence was not the root of most poor reading. (IQ becomes more important in reading as students get older, because the importance of vocabulary, reasoning, and memory increase as one takes on more challenging texts).

My take away from this analysis: We are making progress. There are obviously many beliefs that were common in reading education that we have managed to grow beyond through empirical study. However, given that we continue to treat our unstudied opinions as if they were scientific findings, I suspect our future progress will be as hard won as in the past. Even with that, looking at the changes in our understanding of reading during my lifetime, it is clear that more progress is possible.

Teach Like A Champion

         When I was 18-years-old I was a volunteer tutor in an inner-city school. I wasn’t an education major—that came later—but I was intent on saving the world. I was excited about the idea of going into the city and working with elementary school kids who were growing up in poverty.

           But I was also nervous about it. I didn’t know a damn thing about working with kids, the inner city, or reading. A trifecta of ignorance.

           I decided to school myself the evening before my first day of tutoring, so I went to the university library and looked for some books on the teaching of reading. I found two that seemed pertinent and I checked them out.

           One was Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read and the other was Roach Van and Claryce Allen’s Language Experiences in Early Childhood. At the time I couldn’t have found two more separate takes on early reading: Flesch’s convincing polemic on the need for explicit phonics instruction and the Allen’s romantic homage to the role of early language development.

           It turns out I was also ignorant about philosophical differences. I was scrambling to figure out what to do and these books—as far apart as they may have been—were pointing me in practical, if seemingly incommensurate, directions.

           Now, 47 years later, with lots of knowledge and experience, I’m back to where I started. I no longer see them as incommensurate (again). Decoding and language, language and decoding… it’s like those television commercials: “tastes great, less filling” or “peanut butter, chocolate.” Sometimes the complementary just makes good sense.

           Recently, Chris Lonigan and I wrote a short article for Language Magazine. Its focus is on “The Role of Early Oral Language in Literacy Development.” I think both Chris and I have bona fides in the “phonics/decoding/foundational skills” community and have the scars to show it. But we are both also advocates of the so-called “simple view” of reading—students need to know how to decode from print to language and they need to know how to understand language. This is a both, not an either/or.

           Here is a link to the article. Hope you enjoy it.

Language Magazine article on oral language and reading

District leadership has advised primary teachers to focus on the Foundational Skills Strand, and de-emphasize the other strands. The belief is that if students go into Grade 3 having mastered foundational skills, they will be prepared to master the rigor of the other strands.

As the principal, the message I'm considering sending is to teach all strands, closely monitoring foundational skills with DIBELS, immediately addressing gaps. Students who are meeting foundational skills standards may spend more time in other strands while those struggling get focused support in assessed areas of foundational skills difficulty. Does that sound reasonable?

I'm concerned that de-emphasizing the other strands will make it hard for students to catch up in third grade, and many students may lose interest if not exposed to a variety of thought-provoking work. On the other hand, I understand the immense importance of systematic, explicit instruction in the foundational skills- and know they must be a focus in early years.

All that said, can you give a guideline as to the percent of the E/LA time that should be spent on foundational skills for the "typical" primary student? Our district adopted Benchmark Advance, which looks to me as though it does NOT emphasize the foundational skills. I would like to give teachers a time guideline for initial whole-group instruction in foundational skills so we know how much we may need to supplement with other curriculum.

RELATED: Is Comprehension Better with Digital Text?

Shanahan’s response:

           Imagine if district leadership advised the cafeteria crew to focus on calcium only, and to de-emphasize the other nutrients? Their belief might be that if students reached the age of 8 without strong teeth and bones, they would not be prepared for the later rigors of eating grains, meats, and vegetables.

           You’d be writing to me to find out if it’s okay to serve cereals with the morning milk and green beans at lunch. And, let's face it, these kid's autopsies would likely reveal strong teeth and bones.

           Sadly, this analogy is apt.

           Of course, one can put all the primary grade focus on some skills to try to advance progress in those skills, just as one could put all the emphasis on some nutrients to promote some health needs over others. Doing so won't accomplish the real goal, but it might fool some observers into thinking it has been reached.

           Here are some facts worth knowing:

1. In the 1960s, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) began a rigorous analysis of beginning reading in an effort to identify how effectively to avoid or to address learning problems. This coordinated effort is generally credited with much of the progress that has been made in understanding the role that skills like phonological awareness play in reading and the value of explicit phonics instruction. One important finding of that effort: addressing only students’ phonological/orthographic needs during the primary grade years leaves those students vulnerable to continued reading disability (due to a lack attention to their language development). There either are usually undiagnosed language deficits early on, that become more evident later, or the inattention to non-foundational skills limits their growth during these years. I don’t think anyone can read that body of research without concluding both that kids need substantial attention to foundational skills early on, AND that solely focusing on such skills would be harmful.


2. The National Reading Panel was pressed into service to review research on what works in reading at the request of the U.S. Congress, under the auspices of NICHD and the U.S. Department of Education. Unlike many of the critics at the time, panel members, who were unpaid volunteers, were not allowed to have any potential conflicting commercial interests. That panel reviewed 51 studies of the teaching of phonemic awareness, 38 studies of phonics, and 32 studies of oral reading fluency. The panel concluded that students would benefit from explicit, systematic instruction in each of those foundational skills during the primary grades. However, it should be noted that in no case within those studies did anyone consider those skills as separable from the rest of reading. For example, when studying phonics, the students in the control groups and the phonics groups were receiving instruction in vocabulary, comprehension, writing and the like. The only difference was that the experimental group would be getting phonics or some more ambitious version of phonics. Thus, the panel’s conclusion that these skills need to be taught was determined in the context of these skills being taught along with other reading skills. Such a heavy focus on any of these skills to the omission of the others likely would have led to very different conclusions. 


3. Over my career, I have worked with some of the biggest proponents of foundational skills teaching: Patricia Cunninghma, Linnea Ehri, Jack Fletcher, Barbara Foorman, David Francis, Douglas Fuchs, Lynn Fuchs, Christopher Lonigan, Louisa Moats, Michael Pressley, Christopher Schatschneider, Sally Shaywitz, Steve Stahl, Keith Stanovich, Joseph Torgesen, Sharon Vaughn, etc. These brilliant men and women disagree—with me and with each other--on many issues, but they seem to all be in agreement that the foundational skills are NECESSARY for learning to read (so you'd better make sure kids are instructed in them), BUT THAT THEY ALONE ARE NOT SUFFICIENT for learning to read (so you'd better do more for kids' reading than teach them foundational skills). 

           I have long been an advocate for providing children with 120-180 minutes per day of literacy instruction. I divide that time roughly in quarters: 25% devoted to words and word parts (e.g., letters, sounds, decoding, PA); 25% to oral reading fluency; 25% to reading comprehension; and 25% to writing. That means that primary grade kids would receive about 60 to 90 minutes per day of foundational skills instruction (combining the word work with the fluency work).

           There are variants on this scheme. For example, Joe Torgesen touched it up by advocating 2 hours of daily literacy instruction, with up to a third hour dedicated to remediation in those foundational skills. Thus, your idea of giving some kids more foundational work beyond the amount that everyone receives in class makes great sense and can easily be accommodated in this plan. However, ignoring essential skills that can't easily be tested to focus on ones that can be, won't help kids much.

           I sympathize with your administrators. They want a quick fix. Sadly, the positive third-grade reading data that they are imagining would at best be briefly hiding their failure. Sort of like painting over the rot in a wooden porch; the paint will make it look nice, but it won't keep the steps from soon collapsing. In addressing a problem, you must recognize what is necessary, as well as what is insufficient.

           Pass the green beans, please!


READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

            A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers, and says, “Five beers, please.”

            What do these two stories—the one about close reading and the one about Roman numerals—have in common? They turn on knowing what you’re talking about.

            If you don’t know that the Roman numeral for five is a V and that holding up two fingers looks like a V, you won’t get the joke. It won’t be funny.

            And, when district leadership doesn’t understand what close reading is or what it’s connection to complex text might be, the results aren’t funny either.

            One more story and I’ll provide some explanation that might help.

            A curriculum director invited me into her district. “I want you to make two presentations. One has to be on close reading, and do you have a suggestion for a second talk?”

            “Yes, I’d suggest that I talk about complex text.”

            “But that’s the same thing as close reading, isn’t it?”

            I’ve had that exchange several times over the past two years. I think for too many reading leaders, the two concepts—close reading and complex text—are confounded. I think it’s that confusion that’s leading to such bad decision-making.

            Let’s clarify both concepts… and see what that suggests for classroom practice.

            First, close reading. Close reading is an approach to literary interpretation—though it can be applied to at least some informational texts, too. It is an approach proposed for literary critics, and it is one widely taught in American universities. As such, it doesn’t focus on issues like word recognition or decoding, or even on basic reading comprehension, only on high-level interpretations or analyses of text.

            Originally, close reading was a push back against the idea that one had to study an author’s biography, or the historical period that a text came from, or even what the words meant at the time they were authored.

            To read a text closely one must only rely on the words in the text and their relationships to each other. They don’t turn to other sources. Close readers learn to notice metaphors or symbols, interesting juxtapositions of information, ambiguities, and the like (clues authors might have left behind to reveal the text meaning to those who read closely).

            The Common Core State Standards require that we teach students to be close readers—to not only grasp the literal and inferential meanings of a text, but to understand how an author’s word choices and structures convey higher-level meanings; how to figure out the subtler aspects of a text.

            As such, close reading only makes sense is if texts have deeper meanings. If there aren’t deeper meanings requiring such text analysis, then close reading would have no value. That means close reading requires certain kinds of text complexity.

            And what do the standards mean by text complexity? Like close reading, it isn’t explicitly defined in the standards, despite being central to them. A close reading of the standards and their appendices suggests at least two meanings of text complexity.

            One of those meanings is particularly relevant to close reading. We want our children to read high quality literary and informational texts. These texts should have depth. If we only read such texts carefully, but without conducting a close reading, we would likely end up with only a superficial understanding. Thus, in the past, if students read the “Three Bears,” we’d want them to be able to conduct a retelling of the story or to complete a story map with all the key plot details.

            A close reading of the Three Bears, however, might lead us to examine language that is used repeatedly (“someone’s been…), or why Papa and Mama Bears’ belongings are always inappropriate for Goldilocks, or the significance of the special relationship Goldilocks seems to have with Baby Bear’s possessions (she breaks his chair, eats his porridge, and falls asleep in his bed). The Three Bears would be appropriate for close reading because it includes words, structures, and literary devices that one can analyze to figure out what the story means and how it works.

            But I said there is a second definition of text complexity. That second definition has to do with language complexity—how well a reader could make sense of text features like vocabulary or grammar or how ideas are linked across the text. These features have more to do with how well an author’s language choices match up with the readers’ language proficiency. Thus, if the author uses words like ebony, porridge, clearing, latch, and peeped to tell the story, readers might get tripped up just following what was said if they don’t even know what those words mean.

            The first kind of complexity—the literary, symbolic or poetic complexity—is not measurable with Lexiles, Atos, or any of the other schemes for predicting how well readers will do with a text. The second kind, the linguistic complexity, can be measured or predicted by tools like Lexiles. We might say a text is fourth-grade level because texts with language like that are usually understood by fourth-graders; it is a kind of prediction. When you say the text was a grade level beyond your students, that’s what you are talking about.

            Now here is where people get tripped up. The standards require that we teach kids to read complex text closely—which means exposing them to texts that have symbolic or poetic complexity. Those texts could be easy to read (in terms of recognizing the words and knowing what they mean and being able to handle the sentences), but hard to interpret. The standards do encourage kids to struggle, but the struggle that is intended is a struggle to make sense of those more complex ideas and those more subtle aspects of how an author tells something.

            The standards also call for kids to learn to read text that has more sophisticated language. But that requires that we gradually ask kids to read a series of texts that stretches them while providing them with any necessary scaffolding that well help them to figure out what a text says. These supports may take the form of phonics guidance to help them decode particular words, the preteaching of vocabulary, or supports in making sense of the grammar of a sentence.

            Your coaches seem to be mixing these concepts up… So…

1.     Make sure that close reading is focused on texts with the appropriate kinds of depth. These texts do not need to be “hard to read,” but, indeed, they might be confusing or frustrating to students. Don’t give into that frustration by just telling them your interpretation of the text but definitely engage them in a productive struggle with those big ideas. 


2.     Make sure that kids are getting opportunities to read texts that are at the specified reading levels set by your standards. These texts are likely to be somewhat hard to read—in terms of decoding, vocabulary meaning, grasping what the author is explicitly saying. As such, they might not be the best texts for close reading. 


3.     When you do ask kids to read texts that are hard to read, you need to be prepared to scaffold—to give students supports that will help them to make sense of the text; helping with decoding, preteaching vocabulary, breaking down sentences, connecting pronoun referents, making sense of organization, etc. A productive struggle here means helping kids with the difficult stuff so that they can learn to figure it out on their own.

Teacher Question:

Our reading coach has encouraged all of our teachers to use a lot of the “think-pair-share” reading strategy. I’m an upper elementary grade teacher. Is “think-pair-share” research based?

Shanahan responds:

           This seems like such a straightforward question, but it has been tying me in knots for days. It all depends on what you mean by “research based.”

           You might be asking me whether there is there any empirical evidence showing that if you use “think-pair-share” in your classroom your kids will end up with higher reading achievement by the end of the year. If that is the question, then my answer is a decided no. That has not even been studied as far as I can determine.

           However, if your question is, “Is there any evidence that think-pair-share will do what its proponents say it will—that is increase student interaction, increase the likelihood of right answers, encourage students to elaborate their oral responses—then I can say there is a small amount of research supporting the practice.

           When kids get the opportunity to discuss something with a partner before responding to a teacher question all of those positive outcomes have been seen in the primary grades in reading and in the upper grades with second-language learners.

           It is possible that the long-term benefit of such elaborated talk would be better reading comprehension eventually, but at this point there is no such evidence.

           A couple of years ago I was observing reading classes across a low-income suburban school district here locally. In this particular school I was sitting in on a couple of kindergarten classes right in a row. I don’t know if it was just luck of the draw or whether the principal had encouraged the teachers to deliver the same lesson, but I got to see two versions of the same listening comprehension session.

           In the first class, the teacher read a section of a book to the children gathered at her feet, and followed each segment with some questions that she aimed at particular kids. Pretty direct—but not very engaging. I was struggling to stay awake by the end.

           Then I was squired to the next classroom, and was distressed to see the same book, the same arrangement of kids on the carpet… “Yikes,” I thought, “staying awake for another half hour is going to be unbearable.”

           Again, the teacher read a segment, asked a question… but this teacher asked the kids to discuss it with their partners… They jabbered away for a moment or two and then were eager to respond to the teacher. And, boy, did they respond… with better answers, more text evidence, and even some questions of their own.

           The lesson proceeded that way for the rest of the period, and I thought it was delightful. The kids seemed to enjoy it far more than their peers down the hall, and the text discussion was both livelier and deeper in an informational sense.

           I’m not suggesting that your fourth-graders would respond to think-pair-share with the same enthusiasm shown by these young’uns, but just before the end of the school year, I was in Montana teaching some middle school classes. Admittedly, those 12- and 13-year-olds weren’t as exuberant as the 5-year-olds that I’d observed, but they still were more engaged—and seemed to draw more out of the texts—when they had those kinds of opportunities for interaction.

           I think there are other good ways to make that happen as well, but think-pair-share can provide some immediate payoffs without too much of a teacher investment. Perhaps someone out there will consider doing an experimental study of the impact of such discussions on long-term learning when compared to more usual teacher-student interaction patterns (like initiate-respond-feedback). At this point, I can’t tell you think-pair-share leads to higher reading scores--it is possible, but unproven, but there is good reason to believe that it can help you to run a classroom well enough that you can do the kinds of things that research has found to positively impact reading achievement.

           Please discuss with your partners.

Shanahan's response:  This question seems so straightforward, but it actually has a lot of moving parts. The two tests being compared, DIBELS and CTOPP, have different purposes, there are things you need to know about phonological awareness (PA)  development, and there are problems with the analysis in the study that you read.

          Let’s take one of these at a time.

Difference between CTOPP and DIBELS

          Perhaps the easiest one to deal with has to do with the purposes of the two tests. CTOPP sets out to provide a thorough analysis of phonological awareness in a way appropriate to a wide range of ages, including low literacy adults. DIBELS, instead, is just a screening test; it doesn’t purport to provide a thorough inventory of skills, only a reasonable quick prediction of who may need more help.

          The CTOPP would certainly provide your district with a more detailed analysis; sort of a everything you ever wanted to know about your students sound perception skills. It not only will tell you who is having trouble, but it will provide specific diagnostic information about what exactly might need to be taught. And, for that, it will take you about 30 minutes of testing per child; a big investment that no one in his/her right mind would be willing to make several times a school year with classes of real kids.

          In contrast, the DIBELS assessment can be given in a couple of minutes, and all it will tell you is who has an adequate level of PA to be able to learn to read. As I say, they have different purposes. If you are just trying to figure out who may need some extra attention in PA, DIBELS is the way to go, while if you are trying to make a detailed instructional plan, like you might want to do in a Special Education program, then CTOPP is the way to go. It’s up to you to decide what you want.

Sequence of development

          Your letter and the study that you cite seem to conceive of a collection of different phonological awareness skills. However, most experts on the matter seem to believe that phonological awareness is actually a single line of development, with particular issues or skills emerging at different points of development (Anthony & Francis, 2005; Anthony, Williams, Duran, Gillam & Liang, 2011).

           Analyses of many different test instruments, thousands of kids, and multiple analytical methods suggests that PA is a single continuum with the following characteristics: phonological sensitivity progresses from large language units to small language units, and from syllables to onset-rimes to individual phonemes within words; detection ability precedes manipulation of sounds, and blending precedes segmentation development; and children do not move through this progression in distinct stages, but may be consolidating one level of learning while starting to progress in the next.

           The point of all that is that the highest level of development in phonological awareness is segmentation of words. Basically, kids have a lot to learn about phonology, but once they can easily fully segment words they have sufficient phonological awareness to learn to read. If they only can blend, then they are not likely to have sufficient sensitivity for the demands of learning to read.

           Given this, it should not be surprising that a predictive screener is going to evaluate whether kids can segment and other more complete measures might consider blending, onset-rime proficiency, and the ability to separate syllables. One progression of learning, but two different purposes for testing.

Problem with study

          The Kilpatrick study that you cite is an interesting one, but it has some formidable problems. First, this it asks a normative question and yet focuses on a very small and narrow sample of students. The data could be absolutely correct for that sample, but tell us nothing about how this test works with a normal population of kids. One thing I noticed was that the standard deviation — that is, the amount of variance — for segmenting was different than for the other measures, and that it also seemed to differ from that reported with other populations who have used that test.

           If there is not equivalent variation in one of the subtests, then a comparison of the subtests will not come out right. Why there was less variability in this measure with this small group of kids I can’t tell you, but it does suggest the possibility of a different result with a more representative sample. (Some explanations, this was a small group that would not be adequate to representing a population; the test administration could have been flawed; perhaps there was something about local teaching that was messing with the variability in particular skills; the children were tested over a long period of time — 2 to 3 months, a significant amount of time in PA development — which could have influenced variability in odd ways).

            Given that segmentation is the highest level of phonemic awareness (and the one that experimental studies aim at accomplishing through their instructional interventions), usually I would expect that to have a better or equal correlation with reading, at least in Kindergarten and Grade 1 (with second graders, CTOPP should be reserved for struggling readers).

Conclusion

          If you are looking for a detailed plan of instruction for each kid tested, then use something like the CTOPP rather than DIBELS. If all that you are trying to do is identify early young kids who might struggle in learning to read, then use DIBELS along with a measure of alphabet knowledge and you should get a good picture of who might require some extra help. In such a case, the point is to determine if a student can fully segment with ease. If he/she can, then he will likely do well learning to decode; if he/she can’t appropriate PA instruction could focus on anything from syllable separations to onset-rimes to blending to segmentation.

References 

Anthony, J.L, & Francis, D.J. (2005). Development of phonological awareness. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14: 255-259.

Kilpatrick, D.A. (2014). Phonological Segmentation Assessment Is Not Enough: A Comparison of Three Phonological Awareness Tests With First and Second Graders, Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 27(2): 150–165. 

Hintze, J., Ryan, A.L., & Stoner, G. (No date). Concurrent validity and diagnostic accuracy of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills and the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing.

Teachers question:

            Lately, there has been much to hate about it, of course. More and more school hours are devoted to testing and test preparation. Weighing the pig more frequently doesn’t make it any fatter.

            But what about SATs and ACTs, the college admissions exams? This is the time of the year when there are lots of news articles about them. Especially this year with the new SAT upon us.

            Unlike so many of my colleagues, generally I’m a fan of these exams. Research has consistently found that their use in college admissions improves those decisions (fewer kids are selected who fail out freshman year). The improvement is not great, 5% sticks in memory, but with 18 million kids going off to college that’s a lot of kids who won’t be sent off to schools likely to drop them after obtaining those hard earned tuitions.

            Although there is a lot of interest in the cultural bias in testing, it has never been found as great as the cultural bias of college admissions officers who for years kept out blacks, Jews, women, Asians, etc. It is harder to argue that a black kid won’t make it given the crummy high school he went to, when he scores a 25 on the ACT.

            This week the New York Times weighed in with an article about the new SAT. They wrote that, “educators and college admissions officers fear that the revised test will penalize students who have not been exposed to a lot of reading.” Straight-faced.

            To me that sounds like a testament to the new SAT’s validity. Students who don’t read should be at a great disadvantage in college. Weird ideologies about fairness are tripping us up here. It is unfair that schools vary in quality, so that students may get more reading opportunities in some schools. It is unfair that not every child has parents who will switch off the TV, and ask questions about reading at the dinner table.

            But, it is definitely not unfair to require high-level reading ability to get into higher-level education.

            Last week, I spent several days working with students and teachers at a middle school in Montana. I taught several lessons in which I required 7^th and 8^th graders to read their math and science textbooks. The kids admitted that they had never actually done reading in math, and they were a bit reticent about it. But they stuck with it and were able to figure out a lot more than their teachers assumed they could.

            Part of the problem was that these were excellent teachers whom I was working with. They could explain anything exceedingly well. They were skilled at anticipating what would trip students up and could avoid every stumble. If you’re that good at conveying information about math properties, coordinates and balanced chemical equations, why would you ever take a chance on kids reading the material on their own?

            The problem with that, of course, is that the kids end up knowing some math and science, but they don’t develop any of the skills needed to be an independent scholar in a field of study. As one of the math teachers related to his students, “when I was in college the math professors didn’t “teach” the way that we teach you… they assigned problems and we would come back and ask questions.” In such an environment, if you couldn’t make sense of math text on your own, apply it to problems, and ask legitimate math questions, you simply would not succeed.

            I had the kids working through 2-5 pages of math and science text, slower coverage than the teachers would have obtained had they just told the kids what it said. And yet, the amount of math learning was high—given that they were figuring out not just how the distributive property worked, but how to figure out how the distributive property worked as well.

            If the teachers, and those who follow, were to require that kind of work 1-2 days per week through 12^th grade, these kids would have 500-1000 pages of pre-college reading experience in those technical subjects alone; and if these students were telling me the truth, that would be 500-1000 pages more technical reading than they are doing now. And, yes, teachers could require even more than that.

            I grew up in a working class community, in which most kids did not go to college. There were a few “college prep” courses available at my high school, but I didn’t even come close to qualifying for any of those. I definitely wasn’t going to be asked to read books like, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as those students did.

            But I was hungry to go to college. At the time, I found a list of books that college-bound students should read; the canon. Read them I did. I’m not claiming that I got as much out of reading Moby Dick or Microbe Hunters on my own at 16 as I would have under the tutelage of a good teacher (or as I have upon rereading them as an adult), but trying to understand such touchstone texts pays dividends.

            Given that, it is good to see that the SAT has aligned itself with such reading. That is the kind of reading that should enable one to do well in college. It may be fun to read Tina Fey’s Bossypants (the American Library Association actually recommends it for college prep), but such reading isn’t likely to help one to succeed in Introduction to the Theory of Literature.

            The Times might be right that educators are worried that college entry is going to become biased against those not prepared for college. I think it’s about time.

             If you have ever had surgery, you probably have had the weird experience of signing off on a bunch of medical paperwork. The oddest form is the one that gives the surgeon permission to assault you. Think about it. Usually we don’t want people poking at us with knives. Doctors can’t do that either, unless we give our permission. Otherwise, every tonsillectomy would lead to a 911 call.

           That means context matters. Stick a knife in someone in an OR and that is cool, do the same thing down at the local tap and you'll do 5-7 in the state pen.

           Over the years, I've challenged the notion of just having kids read on their own at school. (Or, maybe not so much challenged the notion as told people about the actual research findings on this topic which aren't so wonderful.) I’ve not been a friend to DEAR, SSR, SQUIRT, or similar schemes that set aside daily amounts of time for self selected reading in the classroom. 

             Most studies don’t find much pay off for this kind of reading—either in reading achievement or motivation to read. There are many better things to do if your goal is to encourage reading than to just tell kids to go read on their own (a directive that sounds a lot like, “go away and leave me alone").

            So, what's the topic of my first blog entry of 2016? You guessed it: the importance of having kids read at school.  That's the link to surgery. People shouldn’t stab you with a knife, except when they should. And, kids should not read at school--except when that is the smart thing to do.

            I certainly would like kids to read a lot, especially when they are on their own—at home in the evening, on weekends, and during summer. You know, the 87% of their childhood time that they are not in school with teachers.

            My reasoning on this is quite simple: the payoff from reading instruction is high (in terms of reading achievement), while the learning impact of just reading on one’s own is very low--especially for younger kids and struggling readers. If I have a $70,000 a year professional willing to work with my child for 6 hours a day, 185 days a year, then it would probably be better to use that time for reading instruction, and the other 87% of my child's time could be used for activities that don’t require a teacher.

            That doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t be reading in school. Of course, there are those lost minutes when kids have down time and having books available to fill the time with reading makes a lot of sense (I read when I'm waiting to see my doctor, but when she is available, I put the book aside).

            But the really big investment in reading time in school should not be filling lost minutes. It should be a prominent part of instruction. Kids should be reading throughout their school day—during literacy instruction, during science, social studies, mathematics, health, and the arts, too.

            I visit a lot of classrooms, and I can tell you that I don’t see much reading going on. A teacher might be teaching reading comprehension—but the reading experience is more of a round-robin oral reading activity. The same happens in a lot of subject matter textbooks, too. These activities seem to be arranged in such a way that nobody has to read much. Some kids read a few sentences or a paragraph, and then there is a lot of talking, and another kid reads for 20 seconds.

            I have long argued for 2-3 hours per day of written language instruction, with that time divided among word work (both decoding and word meaning—words and parts of words), fluency, reading comprehension, and writing). If a teacher did that, it would mean that kids would work on reading comprehension for 2.5 hours to 3.75 hours per week (similar times would be devoted to the other components).

            But how much of that time should be spent on reading and writing? Not talking about reading, not being told how to write, not doing anything but practicing reading and writing. The correct answer is that nobody knows. So, let’s get arbitrary about it, and decide that during the 150 minutes of reading comprehension work we are doing this week, my boys and girls will spend 75 minutes of that time reading text!

            I think we should do the same with fluency and writing… and even with word work. There is no way that you can teach phonics effectively if you are not giving kids substantial opportunity to sound out words and non-words; reading them and trying to spell them, both in isolation and context.

            Just as we put the clock on the “90-minute reading block,” I think we should be putting the clock on the amount of actual reading and writing that boys and girls do within that reading block (and in their other studies).

            Kids need to read and write, but they will do this most productively under the guidance and interaction of a skilled teacher. Unfortunately, I don’t see a sufficient amount of those kinds of reading minutes for kids to become good readers. I don’t know if 50% is the right estimate—maybe I’m undershooting. We won’t really know until we start futzing with that more intentionally than is typical in American classrooms.

            If we want high reading achievement, we need to have kids reading and writing a lot under the supervision of teachers. Teachers, while building lesson plans, should determine how many minutes the kids will be reading, and principals and coaches during walk throughs should be looking for whether these time devotions are sufficient. 

          So, I hope you'll make this New Year's resolution: Children, within their reading and writing lessons, will spend at least half that time actually reading and writing. This could be a wonderful year for a lot of girls and boys if we followed through on such a resolution.

Two Teacher Asked Questions:

  So what’s out of place in reading education?

My nominee is the act of teaching kids to read nonsense words. Don’t do it. It don’t belong (it may even be worse than orange and green).

            This week I was reminded of those lessons; one in particular. 

           Usually, Cyndie and I took dance classes together (imagine Ginger Rogers and not Fred Astaire… but Don Knotts). However, one night she had to work and I had our young teacher all to myself. Since I was on my own that night, the teacher decided to break the regular routine. “Why don’t we just dance?”

We’ve been talking a lot about complex text since the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) burst on the scene.

But most of that talk has focused on how to find texts that meet the complexity requirements. 

Today, I suggest that we consider some of the ways that teachers may make it look like they are dealing with complex text when they really aren't.

Anyone who has taught reading — or any course that requires a textbook — knows of kids who struggle to understand the text. If the text looks hard, they might even refuse to give it a try. For that reason, many teachers may try to make it easier or more encouraging for students. I like the notion of supporting students so that they will buy into a lesson and get engaged. But if your approach both gets the kids to participate and makes participation a waste of learning time, we've created a no win situation.

The text looks hard, so they may want to try to avoid it altogether.

The kids’ anxiety, of course, complements the way many teachers think about this problem.

Teachers don’t want the fluidity of their lessons disrupted, they want students to gain the required information from the text, and they have to worry about their daily schedule. The students don't want to work too hard or to be embarrassed. So, a kind of tacit agreement may be arrived at -- with the teacher adopting instructional approaches that reduce both the amount of teaching and the amount of learning. These methods make it look like teaching is happening, but nobody has to do too much.

What are these avoidance routines that teachers must learn to avoid?

1.     If a text is challenging, I’ll find an easier one or go without. 

Beyond the beginning reading levels, there is no evidence that kids must be taught with a particular level of text. But many teachers have been told that if a book is difficult for students it is to be avoided.

Imagine that we're supposed to get students up a mountain, and a teacher decides, “No, that looks hard. Let’s climb this little hill over here instead.”

That wouldn't be very satisfying and certainly wouldn't accomplish the intended goal. If a fourth grader is supposed to work with fourth grade texts and you try teaching him with second or third grade texts, you are avoiding the mountain, not getting him up it.

The same can be said for the teacher who decides not to use a text all -- since kids might struggle with it.

That kind of text shifting (or text omitting) means those kids will rarely get the opportunity to take on texts at their intellectual or developmental levels. 

What if we changed that up?

If a mountain is high, we should help students to climb that mountain -- not some other easier one. And we never should skip climbing altogether.

With appropriate supports and scaffolds, it can be done.

The next time you think about moving kids to an easier text or skipping the use of text, think about what you could do to get them up the real mountain rather than the instead one.

2.    If a text is challenging, read it to them.

I’m a big fan of reading to kids. 

However, there are books for teacher sharing, and there are books that students should take on themselves.  

If there is a social studies textbook, the kids are supposed to read it. If there is a core reading series, that’s on the kids, too. If your class has been assigned a grade level novel, yep, that is for student reading, not teacher reading.

Many English/Language Arts teachers get emotionally committed to particular texts -- they want their students to know Catcher in the Rye or Beloved. Nothing wrong with that -- as long as their dedication is to building the ability for students to read such texts independently, rather than just making sure the kids experience that book.

Reading such texts to your students (or having others read it to them through round robin or popcorn) are just ways to get around the mountain, rather than up it.

I have no doubt that students will be able gain information about the mountain when you read the books to them.

But they still will not be able to climb it themselves – the real purpose of the reading part of such lessons. Yeah, I want kids to know what happens in Romeo and Juliet, but I want them to know that because they read the play -- not because you read it to them or had them listen to a recording of it.

If your desire is to share information with students, then reading it to them is fine. But, if, like me, you want to teach students to gain such information independently, you must teach them to read it. Teach them to climb the mountain, rather than having them watch you climb it.

3.    If a text is challenging, tell students what it says.

This avoidance approach is very popular in upper grade content classes. Teachers tell me that they can explain concepts more clearly than the textbook can. Man oh man, some of those teachers are darn good at ‘splainin’ and ‘Powerpointin’. But this approach suffers the same problem as reading the texts to the kids. It just tells them what’s on the mountain without enabling them to summit for themselves.

Telling someone what a text says is just a good way to make the text not matter. Why should I read a text if I already know what it says?

Teachers who use this approach often tell me that the kids are “allowed” to read the texts on their own if they want to in addition to the class lectures and videos.

My response: “Good luck.” That isn't very likely to happen.

Kids are supposed to gain knowledge in their social studies, science, and literature classes -- but some of that knowledge is supposed to come from the students' own reading. If that isn't the case, you're avoiding climbing the mountain.

4.    If a text is challenging, ignore the problem.

I see this approach, too, though not as much as I used to (thak goodness).

Yes, some teachers still assign texts without any consideration of whether the students can handle them. They do check up on the reading afterwords, asking questions of the hand-raisers, and then moving on to other challenging texts that many students will simply ignore.

These teachers don’t usually get many kids to the top of the mountain (or at least, they don't get many kids there who can't already climb that mountain on their own). They leave a lot of kids stranded at base camp — with neither an idea of how to rise or any sense that anyone cares if they do. 

If you want kids to learn to read complex texts, you are going to have to let them try to read complex texts -- even if that means they don't get everything the first time through or that the lesson is a bit bumpier than usual.

No, if we want them to develop the ability and the stamina to read difficult texts, we're going to have to help them make sense of such texts without reading them for the students.

Without telling them what the texts say.

But if students are to succeed in meeting the challenge successfully, teachers need to provide guidance, support, scaffolding, explanations, and the teaching that will allow them to ascend those mountains under their own steam. 

Let’s swear off these avoidance techniques.

Let’s break the co-dependency.

And let’s teach kids to read demanding text.

It’s time.

I’m confused. Our standards say that we have to teach kids to read at 820 Lexiles, but my third-graders aren’t even close to that. They are instructional at Level N on the Fountas & Pinnell gradient that my school uses. This makes no sense. How can I get my kids to such a high level in the time that we have?

Shanahan response:

Teacher’s Question:  

Is there a particular order in which teachers should teach the letter sounds? 

Shanahan’s response:

It makes sense to put your underwear on before you put on a skirt, shirt, blouse, or pants.

Unless you’re Madonna.

Then the usual ordering of things doesn’t necessarily get the job done. Madonna changed the sequence from bra/blouse to blouse/bra and became a star. (That she is wildly talented may have also had something to do with that).

Many teachers, principals, parents, and policymakers expect the proper ordering of letters and letter sounds in a curriculum to be more than a matter of convention or style, however. This question comes up often.

I find it hard to explain to them that there is no research-proven best sequence for teaching the ABCs or phonics. But that is the case.

Back when the National Reading Panel (2000) report came out, there was a similar hubbub in Congress. The Panel reported that phonics programs with a clear sequence of instruction – that’s what we meant by “systematic phonics” – were most successful. Consequently, Congress wanted to require that everyone teach phonics using that sequence.

The problem was that the Panel wasn’t touting a specific curricular sequence. No, it was just emphasizing the benefits of a planful and planned curriculum. About 18 different phonics curricula were examined in that collection of studies, and each had its own sequence for introducing letters and sounds.

And they all worked.

But programs that had planned sequences of instruction – any planned sequence – than those that promoted the idea of responsive phonics (the idea that teachers would teach the skills as the children seemed to need them). I wasn’t surprised by this finding, since as a classroom teacher, I tried to teach phonics in a more individual, diagnostic matter, keeping track of what I had covered with each child. It was an unholy nightmare, requiring too much managing on my part and too little learning for the kids.

That doesn’t mean the letter/sound orderings should be completely arbitrary.

For example, it makes good sense to offer earlier teaching of the most useful or frequent letters and sounds. Children learn such letters — including the ones in their own name — more quickly than the letters they don’t see as often (Dunn-Rankin, 1978). It is wise to teach letters like t, h, s, n, and the vowels, before taking on the much less frequent z, x, or k. Kids can successfully learn these letters in any sequence, but teaching the most frequent ones early, enables kids to read words sooner.

When I was a becoming a teacher there was a controversy over whether to teach consonants or vowels first. Lots of argument, but not much data. Our professors demonstrated that if you took all the vowels out of a message you could still read the text, so they claimed consonants were most useful and more worthy of early attention. Other authorities would argue back that are no words without vowels and vowels have higher frequencies. They thought vowels merited earlier instruction.

Common sense eventually won out.

Instead of making it an all or none proposition, teaching a combination of consonants and vowels allows kids to read and write words earlier.

Still another general guideline has to do with ambiguity. We should try to minimize confusion to make early reading easier. Separate very similar letters.

At one time, psychologists flirted with the idea of teaching highly similar letters together since that would allow teachers to highlight the distinguishing features. But empirical studies found that it was better to separate those similar elements (Gibson & Levin, 1975). Don’t teach b and d together, or m and n, for instance. Letters that are visually or phonemically similar need to be kept apart.

Teach one of the confusables thoroughly, before introducing its partners. A student who already has strong purchase on either the /p/ or /b/ sounds, will have less trouble mastering the other. (Ws are confusing, not because of their great similarities with other letters, but because of the pronunciation of their names: I wish I had a nickel for every time I told a young writer to sound out a w, only to get the response, “Doooubbbblle-uuu…/d/”).

A related question has to do with capitals and lower-case letters. Which of those do we teach first? Basically, lower case letters have greater value in reading. You simply see more of them, so the knowledge of such letters is more predictive of eventual reading achievement (Busch, 1980).

But kids are more likely to come to school knowing their capitals (they are somewhat easier to teach because they are more distinctive, and because so many preschool alphabet toys include capitals rather than lower case letters). Teaching lower case and capitals together is fine, too -- especially for the many lower-case letters that are just miniature versions of the capital versions: c, k, m, o, p, s, v, w, x, y, z.

Beyond these very general guidelines, the “appropriate” sequences of instruction for letters and sounds are arbitrary and you have a wide range of choices in how to do it or in evaluating the sequences adopted in commercial programs.

However, I would not send my daughters to school with their underclothes on the outside, but then they aren’t Madonna.

References

Busch, R. F. (1980). Predicting first-grade reading achievement. Learning Disability Quarterly, 3, 38-48. 

Gibson, E. J., & Levin, H. (1975). Psychology of reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

When I finished, a teacher approached me. “What do you think is the most important variable in higher reading achievement?”

Teacher Question:  

         Close reading refers to an approach to text interpretation that focuses heavily not just on what a text says, but on how it communicates that message. The sophisticated close reader carefully sifts what an author explicitly expresses and implies, but he/she also digs below the surface, considering rhetorical features, literary devices, layers of meaning, graphic elements, symbolism, structural elements, cultural references, and allusions to grasp the meaning of a text. Close readers take text as a unity—reflecting on how these elements magnify or extend the meaning.