Teacher question:

I’ve taught literacy and literacy courses in every grade from K-graduate school. I take the view that synthetic phonics taught directly and systematically is essential to any literacy program. However, we also propose that teachers be given the training an option to use analytic phonics when, after reasonable attempts of using direct instruction, the synthetic phonics approach fails a particular child. I recognize that currently virtually no one is doing it that way. Now my criticism of systematic synthetic phonics is not that it shouldn’t be done, I believe that it should. Rather it’s that the way it is being done in many places is taking up far too much instructional time. Is there a middle ground that would help teachers help students? I await your answer.

Shanahan response: 

Forty-eight years ago, I was taking my first course in the teaching of reading. The previous fall I had been tutoring reading in an inner-city classroom in Pontiac, Michigan. I didn’t plan on becoming a teacher, but the experience intrigued me, so I wanted to know more.

I was taught in that college class that there were two kinds of phonics: synthetic and analytic. These supposedly differed in effectiveness and so the only reasonable approach was analytic phonics. I dutifully recorded this in my notes. Basically, synthetic phonics taught children letter-sound correspondences and then had kids synthesizing words by blending the sounds for each of these in the following fashion:

“b makes /b/, a makes /?/, t makes /t/… so, it is buh- ?-tuh… buh ? -tuh… /bat/.”

Analytic phonics, on the other hand, focused on combining larger sound units (such as word families or phonograms: ab, ack, ad, ag, am, an, ap, at, etc.), or using known words as analogies for figuring out unknown words. Using that a student might approach decoding like this:

“I already know the words big and rat and here is a new word bat… so it starts out like /b/ig and ends up like r/at/… so it must be /bat/.”

My professors claimed analytic phonics was better because students wouldn’t get confused by all those extra vowel sounds that plagued synthetic phonics (it’s impossible to pronounce most consonants without adding a vowel sound, hence we may end up with /buh/ rather than /b/.

Then I became a first-grade teacher.

I taught analytical phonics lessons, following all the steps, and my kids—well some of my kids—did fine. The others struggled to make sense of those lessons. They were trying to learn what I was teaching but found it too complicated or abstract. These 6-year-olds were just confused by it all.

So, I started to “cheat.”

Because my students were having trouble I began “simplifying” my instruction by teaching synthetic phonics lessons and that seemed to help. I saw it as a useful expedient, teaching synthetic phonics to get the kids started more straightforwardly.

Jump ahead 28 years... I served on the Alphabetics committee of the National Reading Panel. We reviewed the 38 existing experimental studies on phonics instruction in grades K-12.

We found that systematic phonics instruction was best. Please note the highlighted word. It is amazing how many phonics proponents mistakenly read that word as “synthetic.”

What we meant by systematic is that successful decoding instruction employed a specific sequential phonics curriculum. Kids did best when their teachers employed such a regimen. This was better than trying to teach phonics skills as kids seemed to need them. We didn’t conclude that one particular sequence was best, since so many of these schemes had worked well, only that schools needed to follow a well-planned sequence.

What did we find out about synthetic versus analytic phonics?

Across those 38 studies, synthetic instruction led to higher average effect sizes. That means kids taught synthetic phonics scored higher on reading tests than those taught analytic phonics. However, that difference wasn’t statistically significant. That means that the difference was so small that could just be a chance occurrence rather than any consistent genuine superiority.

Since then, there have been some reviews that have claimed that synthetic phonics really is better, but these have not controlled for some important differences, so I wouldn’t trust those.

That means that phonics instruction is beneficial, but there is no clear learning difference between synthetic and analytic phonics.

Given this, based on my personal teaching experiences, I’d begin with synthetic phonics (or would insert synthetic supports into an analytic program if I were required to teach that). It’s just easier for kids.

However, at some point kids do need to analyze words (and this analysis should consider both phonemic and morphological features, addressing pronunciation, spelling, and meaning implications of these patterns).

The big take away:

If kids are having trouble learning something, simplify it.

No matter what your beliefs about learning the alphabetic system, we are teaching it to young children. Simplifying things to get them started makes a lot of sense—and synthetic approaches are relatively easy to understand.

However, if kids are having trouble applying something that they have learned, then you need to complicate it.

When children know their phonics skills but struggle to read or spell words, then working with word analogies and getting kids to thinking about alternative pronunciations of spelling patterns (bread, break, bead) is the way to go.

The idea of combining synthetic and analytic phonics instruction violates no research, and if done well, may help more kids to succeed.

We are trying to raise our third-grade reading scores. What do you think of “platooning” to help us meet that goal?

Shanahan response:

Platooning, or what in my time was called “departmentalization,” is apparently on the rise in America’s primary grades. Schools like yours are hungry to raise reading and math achievement, and this looks like an inexpensive way to do it.

It costs nothing to have classrooms departmentalized rather than self-contained: it requires no additional teachers; there are no added professional development costs; there are no added textbook, computer, or other instructional materials costs; and many teachers love the idea of no longer being responsible for subjects that are part of the state testing.

Moreover, there will be lots of winners. Platooned teachers won’t have to prepare as many lessons, since they’ll get to reteach a lesson two or three times. And, they get to spend a larger portion of their day teaching what they are comfortable with or even passionate about. Principals won't have to worry about hiring teachers capable of teaching the whole primary grade curriculum either; a teacher candidate’s lack of knowledge about phonics, long division, or global warming shouldn’t be a concern during job interviews (the weaknesses can be easily hidden behind departmental assignments).

Sounds great.

Except…for one itsy-bitsy problem… it usually doesn’t work.

Basically, research has not been especially kind to efforts to improve achievement by changing school or classroom organizational plans. Or, better put: platooning hasn’t been found to improve reading achievement.

I’m not arguing against departments for high schools (in fact, I’m for that idea). The high school curriculum is deep and diverse enough that it would be foolish to expect an individual to master the whole thing to the point where consistent good teaching would be expected. I’ll even go for that in the middle schools for the same reason.

However, as we move down the grades, it is harder to justify. Not surprisingly, when there are positive research results in the platooning column in the elementary grades, they have a tendency to be with fifth-graders (not second-graders).

Departmentalization or not, I frankly would not want to hire a third-grade teacher who couldn’t read third-grade level books, do third-grade level math, or master the intricacies of third-grade science or social studies content. I’m not surprised at all that the teacher who has worked out an effective teaching strategy for leading kids successfully through the labyrinth of Turn of the Screw may not know how to do the same for the graphical representation of an algebraic function or for distinguishing meiosis from mitosis or for investigating the primary documents relevant to President Truman’s momentous decision to construct an H-Bomb and its role in the Cold War.

I appreciate that not all teachers (including me) can do all of these things easily and well—on a daily basis.

While I buy that, I don’t think it’s crazy to expect primary teachers to understand and be able to teach kids about borrowing in subtraction, character analysis in Where the Wild Things Are, the role of fire departments in a community, and that for plants to germinate, seeds require heat and moisture.

Most studies of platooning in the elementary grades have found no advantage to the practice, though a small number of studies have reported some benefits, usually in math—not reading (McClendon, 2016). These math advantages have most often shown up in fifth- and sixth-grade studies, but at least one found positive outcomes as low as third-grade (DelViscio & Muffs, 2007).

I haven’t found any meta-analyses of the issue but given the large number of no-benefits studies and the tendency for the positive effects to be small, I wouldn’t expect such an analysis to result in a meaningfully large effect size due to platooning—especially if one controlled for things like grade level.

One interesting recent study found that departmentalization improved math scores a bit, but only when the teachers were deficient in math knowledge (Taylor-Buckner, 2014).

I definitely would not promote platooning in the primary grades, or even in the upper elementary grades if my purpose was higher reading scores.

Platooning shrinks instructional time (moving kids and teachers around increases transition times). It limits a teacher’s ability to differentiate levels of support, since no matter how well a teacher understands a student’s reading situation, she won’t be working with him/her much of the day. And, platooning can have a pernicious impact on teacher-student relations; building a learning-supportive classroom community is tough when the kids aren’t with you.

If you want to raise reading achievement look for approaches that will increase the amount of time that can be devoted to reading and writing instruction, that will better focus instruction on the skills or abilities that lead to literacy learning and improve the quality of the teaching that is provided.

I understand that it is hard to accomplish those recommendations—certainly harder than just moving kids around the school. But unlike platooning, they have a proven track record of success.

For more on platooning, here is a piece that Scholastic recently posted:

https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/2017/platooning/

Are there any resources that provide a list of morphemes to teach at each K-5 grade level? I have been looking for a definitive list of morphemes that is organized by grade level like the Fry sight word list. I often come across research about how L1 and L2 students acquire morphemes, but I am looking for a list that represents the morphemes that students will most likely see in print at each K-5 grade level. Does anything like that exist? Thank you for your time.

Shanahan response:

The short answer to this question is, “No, I don’t know of such a list.”

But when have I ever been satisfied with the short answer to anything?

Let’s make sure we’re all in agreement as to what constitutes a morpheme? Basically, a morpheme is the “smallest grammatical unit.” It isn’t the same thing as a word, and yet many words are morphemes. The distinction turns on whether the unit (the morpheme or word) can stand on its own. Words have to have that kind of independence, while morphemes don’t require it.

Thus, bags, trucked, running, and redirect are all words in the English language while bag, s, truck, ed, run, ing, re, and direct are all morphemes. Each morphemic unit carries meaning, but sometimes morphemes can do that independently (bag, truck, run, direct), and sometimes they need to be combined with other morphemes to be considered a word (s, ed, ing, re).

I admitted ignorance on this issue, and I’ve tried to turn that ignorance to your advantage. I contacted Jeffrey and Peter Bowers. Both are outstanding scholars (Jeff at the University of Bristol in the UK, and Peter at WordWorks Literacy Centre, in Ontario) who are particularly knowledgeable about teaching morphology to improve literacy. They’ve both published widely on the issue, and both have chided me when they felt I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to how words work morphologically. These days I know no one better able to provide you with a thoughtful answer to your question, and boy was I right! I apologize for the poor renditions of the Word Matrix and the Word Sums. I'll be working with my webmaster to get the real graphics in, but in the meantime you can go to the Word Works website to see them in their full glory.  http://www.wordworkskingston.com/WordWorks/Home.html

Word Matrix:   A map of a word family

Word Sums:  reveal underlying structure of any complex word (a word with more than just a base)

Here is Peter Bower’s response (with my light editing):

“I have no knowledge of such a list, but I wouldn’t recommend one anyway. 

“My recommendation based on theory not direct research evidence — is that the main value comes from teaching all or many members of a morphological family at one time with the matrix and word sums (see the attached figure illustrating a matrix and word sum). In the younger grades I start with free bases [those morphemes that stand alone as words], but once that is established, I have no trouble introducing bound bases [the units that can’t stand alone]. This relates to the research we cite about the value of studying meaningfully related items at one time rather than disconnected items. 

“Instead of a “scope and sequence” of morphemes to teach, what I recommend is starting with words in the children’s vocabulary, analyzing such words to find their bases, then looking for other members of that family. 

“The point is not that there is a “scope and sequence” of morphemes to teach. Rather there is a kind of a “scope” of orthographic concepts that we want students to learn, and teachers can address those concepts based on whatever words are central to the readings they are introducing to the students.

 “A brief list of those concepts that should be taught would include:

• Every word is a base or a base with something else (another base or affix)
• Bases and affixes (morphemes) are the meaningful building blocks that construct words. 
• We can analyze complex words into constituent morphemes with word sums and show their interrelationship with a matrix. 
• English spelling prioritizes consistent spelling of morphemes over consistent pronunciation of morphemes. (This is why we refer to morphemes by their spelling not their pronunciation. The base of the word action is not referred to by the pronunciation of the word act. Instead it is referred to by its spelling. The base “a - c - t”. This is the same as the fact that we don’t refer to the <-ed> suffix by one or all of its three pronunciation, we call it by it’s spelling “e-d suffix.")
• Thus, we need to understand grapheme-phoneme correspondences from within the context of morphological families. (e.g. we learn the phonology of the grapheme by studying morphological families).   

https://tinyurl.com/y8kxh4ag

• There are reliable conventions for the three suffixing conventions. 

• Studying and understanding the suffixing conventions is not primarily about improving spelling accuracy, it is about being able to analyze hypotheses about connections between words. We can test the hypothesis that "imagine"  has a base "image" only if we know vowel suffixes replace final, non-syllabic "e" (image/ + ine —> imagine).
• The “structure and meaning test”: To determine that two words share a base, we need evidence from both structure (word sum) and meaning (etymology). So with the earlier example of words related to "play" (play, playing, playful, replay, playhouse), we can prove all of those words can be analyzed with word sums with coherent affixes and bases. But we can also show that they all go back to an Old English root plegan, plegian for “frolic, move rapidly”. However, the word "display" which can be analyzed structurally turns out not to be related. It does not belong in the morphological family with the others because it goes back to a Latin root plic(ere) for “fold”. So to “display” is to “unfold”.

“If we are going to teach children how their writing system works, we need to teach them the interrelation of morphology, phonology, and etymology. As we have pointed out, this is why Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) is not about “adding” morphological instruction to phonics instruction — its about teaching how the system works. This is why I argue that SWI teaches grapheme-phoneme correspondences more explicitly and accurately than phonics. Phonics instruction (under the definition of associations of pronunciations and letters without reference to morphology or etymology) cannot explain the grapheme-phoneme correspondences in countless words like does or rough or every or homophones, and so on. So many people miss the absolute detail into orthographic phonology that comes with SWI. 

“Here are some videos to illustrate my point:

• Gr. 2 teacher showing investigations from his class     Grade 2 morphology video
• Investigating grapheme-phoneme correspondences in a Gr. 1 class — with the context of morphological word sums       Grade 1 morphology video          
• A kindergarten lesson I taught introducing the word sum and matrix that touches on grapheme-phoneme correspondences like the pronunciation of the <-s> suffix for /z/ and /s/      Kindergarten morphology video

“It’s as simple as starting with the “known” and then expanding from that. Even if kids know all the words in a morphological family (e.g. play, playing, playful, replay, playhouse) the lesson is not about new vocabulary, but learning how word structure links words. That concept can then be applied anywhere.

“The other thing I keep in mind when choosing morphological families to investigate is the orthographic concepts a family has to offer. If I’ve established the fact that words that share a base share a spelling and a meaning connection, then I can introduce a base like with words like actor, acting, react, and action as a way to introduce the fact that the pronunciation of morpheme might change but keep the spelling. In that way we learn the phonology of t is not the “t sound”, but that the grapheme can write /t/ when that is the appropriate sound. I’ve attached an example of a lesson I’ve used for that before. 

“I also draw on the <-ed> suffix from early on to highlight this same concept that morphemes do not have pronunciations until they are in a word. The pronunciation of a word like is another useful one to get rid of this idea of a “t sound” since this very common pronunciation of a very common suffix is what is typically thought of the “t sound,” but their ain’t no /t/!

“And then you also encounter words that give rise to the need to teach all the suffixing changes.

“These are concepts teachers need to learn and they can bring into work with their class as they investigate words.” 

Shanahan again:

I don’t disagree with Peter on any of this, except I’m not as dismissive of the kind of list that you are requesting. I don’t see it as mutually exclusive from the curriculum goals that he specified or contradictory of the kind of instruction he described.

Many teachers, when referring to morphology or “structural analysis”, actually are talking about affixes alone, and not the bases. If that is the case here, there are some lists like that which present the most common prefixes and suffixes from textbooks in grades 3-9 (White, Sowell, & Yanagihara, 1989). You can easily find those lists on line and you could definitely make use of those lists to make sure that you are hitting all the notes if you do the word sums and matrixes that Peter recommends.

Otherwise, I haven’t been able to come up with a graded list of bases for you to use. But I have passed your letter along to my friends at MetaMetrics (the Lexile people) and have asked if they could produce such a list from their language corpus of more than 1 billion words. Stay tuned!

Part of the problem is that many teachers believe their actions are deeply moral so if anyone questions their choices, they go off the deep end (there are few small disagreements about reading instruction these days).

But honestly a really big part of the problem is the term “independent reading” itself. The assorted tweets revealed deep disagreements about what these tweeters thought independent reading was—which was interesting since they apparently all thought they were talking about the same thing.

I doubt that it is possible to convince someone who is deeply invested in in-class independent reading that they can do better, but it certainly should be possible to clarify what the practice is and what its implications may be. This one is a two-parter (maybe three). There is a lot of ground to cover here.

Before doing that, let me declare my positions as forthrightly as possible using the definitions and explanations that will follow.

1. I believe that kids should read a lot in school and out of school.
2. I believe that most out of school reading should be independent.
3. I believe that most in school reading should not be independent.

What is independent reading?

According to Wikipedia, “independent reading is a term used in educational settings, where students are involved in choosing and reading material (fiction books, nonfiction, magazines, other media) for their independent consumption and enjoyment.” That sounds good, but then what do we call the reading that kids do on their own away from school?

And, what of all those teachers who explained that they checked on the students’ comprehension regularly and guided their reading in various ways; doesn’t that steer the purpose away from enjoyment towards just another school assignment?

Back in the 1960s, Russell Stauffer wrestled with this problem. He tried to clarify by using the term using “self-selected reading” to refer to the reading assignments kids did at school that allowed them a choice of reading material. That certainly distinguishes that this reading is still under the control of the teacher and that the only thing independent about it is who selects the texts.

The National Assessment people explain independent reading differently than Wikipedia. They don’t seem to think the educational setting is the main thing. Like Stauffer and Wikipedia, NAEP keys in on choice, but for them it is the consequential choice of whether to read or not that determines independence.

Those silly people over at the American Association of School Libraries apparently would reject most if not all of the independent reading views that have been thrown at me over these past weeks. They claim that independent reading is the reading students choose to do on their own, that it involves personal choice of material, as well as of time and place. It is reading that no one assigns, and it requires no reporting or accountability.

I’d love to tell you this confusion is new—and then blame it on Lucy Calkins or Steven Krashen. But that is not the case.

In fact, the term independent reading has been used for more than a hundred years (thanks, Google), and Wikipedia seems to have it right—it seemingly has always been used in relationship to schooling. Think about it. When you talk to your friends about what they are reading… do you talk about reading or independent reading?

“What are you reading independently, Gloria?”

I found sources in the Nineteenth Century that referred to independent reading as the reading one did for homework—it was independent of the school building, but not of the school. And, some Twentieth Century sources refer to independent reading as silent reading; that is, it is the reading the teacher doesn't listen to you doing.

By the Twentieth Century independent reading had started to accumulate synonyms like “spare time reading,” “recreational reading,” “free reading,” and “reading on their own.” None of these synonyms is entirely satisfactory, but they all suggest that control of the reading has shifted to the kids and away from the teacher.  

In that vein, the Report of the National Committee on Reading (1925) talked about independent reading as reading with little or no assessment (there go those one-on-one teacher conferences). By the 1940s, “independent reading,” whatever they may have meant by it had even become part of the basal reader instruction of the day.

By the time I was teaching, Lyman Hunt had institutionalized the idea of independent reading as “uninterrupted sustained silent reading (USSR).” The teacher was to schedule regular class time for kids to do independent reading. They were to choose the texts they read, and teachers were to stay out of that process. No one was to quiz or question the kids on those books, and teachers were to spend that time reading, too. (The term USSR soon was soon shortened to SSR to distinguish it from the Soviet Union, and later it was replaced by more child-friendly terms like Drop Everything and Read—DEAR time).

SSR was studied quite a bit, and it wasn’t found to do much for kids in terms of either improving their reading or their motivation for reading. Quite appropriately it started to fall out of favor in schools.

Accordingly, various educators started gussying up “independent reading” to make it look more instructional. In some cases, this meant controlling what kids could read (perhaps they could still choose, but now only books at certain levels or ones the teacher had prepared). In other cases, it meant adding mini-lessons to teach reading strategies or weekly conferences, so the teacher could check whether students were actually doing the reading. In other words, they were trying to make independent reading less, well…independent.

This is a mess. We need different terms for these different conceptions of independent reading. Here is my shot at it:

Independent Reading

I’m with the librarians and NAEP on this one… independent reading is the reading that people choose to do on their own—reading that they are not required to do, reading that is not assigned, reading that they will not be tested on or questioned about since it is being done for their own independent or individual purposes (to learn what they want to learn, to enjoy, to fulfill themselves as they conceive of fulfilment). And, of course, independent reading involves a choice of what you read.

Independent reading entails many choices-- whether or not to read, why to read, when to read, where to read, and how to read.

Independent reading can and does happen in school. Little Kevin or Bridget get their work done early and pull out their copy of Captain Underpants just because they want to is every bit an example of independent as the kid in the Norman Rockwell painting who is sneaking a read by flashlight under the covers late (too late) at night.

Required or Mandated Self-Selected Reading

The most important choice in independent reading is whether to read or not.

I love reading, but not as much as I love spending time with my grandchildren. When my daughter asks me to babysit, I know it means I’m going to lose out on independent reading time, but I don't care because I’d rather play with babies.

Most of what teachers call independent reading these days is actually mandated reading.

"You don’t like to read? Too bad… this is reading time."

"You’d rather do your math or talk to your pal? Too bad… this is reading time."

"You’re not interested in anything that we have books on? Not my problem, it is your time to read for pleasure."

That’s a bit overwrought, sure, but I get many letters from parents telling me that’s just how their kids feel—especially if they have learning problems, or if they just don’t sit well for long. (And believe it or not, some kids just don’t enjoy reading).

What’s independent about this kind of thing? It is independent of school purposes (e.g., teaching kids to read, social studies content to be mastered), it is independent of textbooks and teacher choices, it is independent of pedagogy (e.g., oral reading practice, vocabulary instruction), it is independent of assessment (the purpose may be to give kids a chance to practice what they have learned, but no one is going to check up on that).

This category as described is the one most similar to sustained silent reading. Although students have to read (or at least pretend to read), they get to choose what they want to read. Teachers trying to provide this kind of reading experience may offer some guidance when kids are having trouble finding a book, but such choices are not limited and are ultimately up to the kids.

Required/Mandated Limited Selection Reading

This category not only requires that students read, but their reading choices are limited, too—and, it should become obvious that the reading purposes get reshaped a bit as well. The reason for limiting the students’ reading choices is usually aimed at making certain the pedagogical value of the exercise.

In the previous category, a teacher might require independent reading for a general purpose like “teaching students to love reading,” but in this category such blunt pedagogical purposes are sharpened. Not all books will lead to the learning that we want to see, so teachers necessarily constrain student choices.

One popular choice constraint is book leveling. If the book doesn’t have a blue dot you can’t read it independently. That means the kid who is dying to read a book that his friend loved may be out of luck since his buddy is a better or worse reader.

Likewise, many teachers tell me that in the “independent reading” in their classrooms, kids get to choose from restricted sets of books that satisfy certain pedagogical concerns. For example, a teacher might assign five novels by Walter Dean Myers for her three “book clubs” to choose from. Or another might have a set of books that he has developed questioning guides for conferencing, and the kids’ independence has to stay within those bounds.

In this category, kids have to read, but they get some choice of what to read—though these choices are constrained more or less by topic, author, level or some other criterion to increase the chances of good learning outcomes.

Required/Mandated Reading with Accountability

This category is very similar to the preceding one in that it tries to reap pedagogical benefits from supposedly independent reading. In this one, instead of limiting what students can read, teachers insert themselves into the process by monitoring how the reading is going.

This can be done several ways. Accelerated Reader monitors the kids using multiple-choice tests to see if they get points for the reading. For many teachers, conferencing is about checking up to see that the kids are really reading the books or that they are successfully applying their reading skills (be sure to ask a main idea question).

Required Pedagogical Reading

This is just what it sounds like: it is reading that is required by the school. Kids don’t get to choose whether to read the guided reading text or the science book. Teachers assign pages and kids read them. Teachers hold kids accountable for this reading. There is nothing independent about it.

The purposes of the reading are pretty specific, too. The teacher/school/textbook are presenting the content they want kids to learn and texts that will require practice with particular text elements or reading skills. Kids may or may not like this kind of reading, but that isn’t the (main) point.

There might be some latitude in the where and when such reading takes place. For instance, homework reading typically will fit in this category, and even required reading during the school day may take place in a range of classroom and school locales (e.g., at the reading circle, in one’s desk, in the library corner, in the school library).

Obviously, when it comes to independent reading we don't all see eye-to-eye. The issue it seems to me is has to do with implications of these different conceptions. Which of them are most effective—in building reading achievement and in encouraging kids to love reading? Now that these terms have been clarified, we can start to get at that issue in a forthright (and, I hope, dispassionate) manner.

That’s next.

And, finally, perhaps in another forthcoming entry I’ll have the energy to explore whether schools even have the right to require that anyone love reading. If a teacher loves to read is her duty really to try to make the kids be like her? (Stand clear… brickbats are coming, I’m sure.)

I am a reading coordinator. We are in our first year of implementing a new reading program. As we have rolled out the new curriculum, we've been explicit about the reading instructional practices and routines that we expect to see used each day. We’ve had lots of PD. How else are we going to know the impact that the series has on our achievement data if we don't have fidelity our first year? That's the direction that we've taken. I'm sure that you appreciate the “change” process. We've changed a lot of behaviors but I'm afraid that we haven't changed a lot of beliefs of teachers about reading instruction. Our mid-year reading performance data are not where our teachers want it to be. Many of them are grumbling about going back to the old program and they wonder if we should have bought a new program in the first place. We have held off implementing the leveled readers part of the new program because we wanted teachers to have a good handle on the whole group instruction part of the program. Each grade level has their own 90-minute Instructional Framework and each is required to spend at least 10 minutes on fluency a day. I have not been able to guarantee that each teacher has done that. Some are using round-robin reading strategies because, well, I'm sure you can understand why. I’m worried that with the leveled-readers reading instruction will devolve into too much small group teaching. But I need some guidance. Are we on the right track?  Do you have suggestions or next steps? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Shanahan response:

Congratulations on the new program.

It is not unusual to have first-year implementation problems. Many teachers suffer the “new program blues.” They may suffer from “buyer’s remorse” if they were part of the selection process, and in a case like this—where they did not want to make any changes in the first place—coordinators get to suffer the recriminations (often silent recriminations, like the uncomfortable hust that overtakes the lounge when you enter).

Sometimes the second year is much better—teachers are less confused, they’ve figured out what can be skipped safely, and what needs extra emphasis—and scores rebound. It is not uncommon that reading scores drop during implementation year, but they usually come back once the unfamiliarity goes away.

Of course, other times those implementation problems burgeon, and the second year is as big a mess as the first.

I admit to being confused by your letter. You say that fidelity is important and you’ve set rules about how the new books have to be used, but then you point out that you prohibited them from using a major component of the program. Big mistake. One of the most important aspects of any reading program is the amount of reading within instruction that it fosters. These days, with core reading programs, that tends to be dual selections—one read whole class, one read in small group—but the key is they are both read. I would guess that your fiat reduced the amount of instructional reading by, perhaps, 30-35% for a full semester. That’s a lot; enough that it could make a difference in those lagging mid-year reading data.

As a program author (of several instructional programs since the mid-1980s), I’m always trying to sneak more reading in…. Longer selections, more selections, more words. It hasn’t much mattered the kind of program (core, supplemental, intervention), the target ages (K-3, K-6, 6-8, 6-12), or the publishing company; it comes up frequently.

You’ve done the opposite. You’ve adopted a program and found a way to systematically reduce the amount of reading that kids were expected to do. Wrong direction. My advice: get teachers implementing the new program more fully. That should help a lot.

A second bit of advice has to do with fluency instruction—I don’t think you are encouraging enough of it.

You don’t explain what framework the teachers are required to use, but I wonder if it includes everything that it should. Certainly, in the primary grades, I would push for 30-45 minutes per day focused on word learning: phonological awareness, phonics/spelling, sight vocabulary. Kids have to learn to decode and recognize words. Likewise, instead of 10 minutes of fluency in grades 1-5, how about 30-45 minutes—a lot of oral reading practice (not the extremely restricted practices that round robin allows). And, I’d do the same with comprehension instruction and writing.

I don’t know how much your teachers will have to squeeze or twist that reading program to get that much teaching out of it, but figuring that out is a big part of what year one of an adoption is all about. If there isn’t enough fluency teaching, sit down together and figure out how that can be remedied. If there is too much phonics, decide on the best lessons; if there isn’t enough, find supplements.

A third recommendation would be to worry less about whether teaching is in small group or whole class. What you want is effective and efficient instruction—not small group or whole class instruction. The latter are tools. Nothing more. I definitely would not be willing to drop either of them from my teaching routines.

Whole class teaching is fabulous for efficiency. Everyone gets to hear the same thing at the same time. That is a terrific way, for instance, to introduce a new reading skill or strategy.

Small group instruction is better for up close interaction; teachers can observe student responses more trenchantly and can respond to what they see more immediately. They also allow kids more opportunities to respond and interact, all important.

Like you, I think small group teaching is oversold, and that a lot of instructional time is lost to repetition. Reading instruction should be a mix of whole group and small group teaching, but I would definitely try to rely as much as I could productively on whole group teaching.

To make that successful, your PD should focus on things like how to seat the kids and position yourself so that you can see what is going on (and so the kids can). For instance, a key to successful decoding instruction is making sure the kids can see the teacher’s mouth when pronouncing the various sounds. When teachers try to do PA or phonics in a large group, how do they ensure that kids see what they need to. Or, how can a teacher get multiple responses in a whole class without taking large amounts of time in doing that?

Don’t ban or avoid small group teaching, but ensure that it is worth the time devoted to it.

Some things to do to keep those small groups effective: for initial teaching, keep the groups as large (and as few) as your teachers can do productively; if the leveled readers are linked, have the lower readers reading multiple little books in the same time the program has them reading only one; with the older kids, try reading club style grouping in which the teacher is not always in the group (that way 2 and 3 groups can work at the same time); consider reversing the whole class text (which is usually at grade level) with the leveled readers (which may not be)—read a leveled reader as a class to learn a new strategy and then work in small groups on the hard selection where the teacher can provide greater support in figuring out the challenging text.

My advice?

Collect information about what is going on with your new program. Do surveys or put some feet on-the-ground in classrooms, but find out what your teachers are teaching and what they are actually doing with the new program (including which lessons they are skipping or having difficulty with). You don’t just want to hear what is good, but what real problems the teachers are having (including what they are not understanding about the design and purposes of those lessons). Take a hard look at whatever assessment information that you have on the kids and see how those data match to what is going on instructionally.

On top of that, indeed, get the leveled readers going (show teachers some ways to use those—but increase the amount of reading within instruction that your kids engaged in). Obviously, if you find out that first-grade teachers are blowing off the phonics or third grade teachers don’t do fluency or they don’t know how to get the kids to actually to read the selections then either have meetings about such subjects or address it through PA (many times the teachers are doing what they know). Address gaps through PD and supervision.

I’m telling you that you have two priorities: 

1. Find out what is going on.
2. Address it.

Oh, and don’t wait for number 1 to deal with number 2.

That ways kid’s second year with the program will definitely be better than the first.

Can you point us to any research regarding the practice of Book In a Bag - sending leveled readers home with students each night?

What do you think of “Books on the Bus?”

Shanahan response:

I know of no research on either of these methods for increasing kids’ access to books. I checked both PscyInfo and Google for sources, and nada!

I’m not surprised, both of these schemes were local school district ideas that captured media attention—and then spread from one district to another.

I must admit I like both ideas. Generally.

In both cases, kids are encouraged to read. Can’t fault that.

In both, books are made available for kids to read. Books are good! Check.  

And there is at least some research on the importance of easy access to books—more on that later.

Both districts from whence these inquiries came were taking on these approaches in order to encourage reading while preserving instructional time during the school day.

I like that. We should all be trying to expand reading into the kids’ daily lives.

That sure beats the “drop everything and read” idea. I mean how many people can just drop their work or other responsibilities to read? “I know it’s time to place your catheter, Mrs. Mandelbaum, but I’m going to drop everything…” well, you see what I mean.

Instead of creating the mindset that reading, even reading for pleasure, is a school thing, and that if one gets that chore out of the way there, then home reading isn’t necessary, it would be better to teach kids that reading should be part of their lives—not their school lives—and that they have to learn how to manage that among the other myriad of things that they do. Smart.

If I were to quibble at all, I’d criticize the districts for committing to an idea before seeking research evidence. We need to change that sequence… first, look at the research, then make the decision.

But as I say, that’s a quibble in this instance, since these schemes both seem positive, reasonable, and even inexpensive. Whether or not they improve reading achievement or make kids like reading, they look like a lot of fun and could be affirmative ways to communicate to the kids (and their parents) that we think they should read more when not in school.

Sort of like chicken soup and colds… I don’t know if it really helps, but it couldn’t hurt! (Currently, I’m on the board of advisors of Reading is Fundamental (RIF) and in the past I’ve done that for Reach Out and Read (ROR); both are prominent organizations that work hard at increasing book access for kids.)

What can I tell you from the research?

Awhile back (2010), Jim Lindsay published a meta-analysis on access to print for Learning Point (commissioned by RIF). https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5731ee0840261d67c7155483/t/5767517d29687f6102b04f75/1466388897631/Lindsay_Children%27s+Access+to+Print+Material+and+Education-Related+Outcomes_2010.pdf

Not surprisingly, most studies of increased access to books focus on less affluent kids. Since its inception the national assessment (NAEP) has reported fewer books available in the homes of poorer readers and various studies have shown that economically disadvantaged neighborhoods tend to be book deserts, particularly with regard to children’s books: fewer and more distant libraries, fewer and worse book choices, etc.

Basically, this report found that book access tended to have positive effects on a variety of outcomes including reading achievement, reading readiness, attitude, and amount of reading in which students engaged. Effects tended to be highest with the least rigorous studies and with the youngest children (prereading rather than reading outcomes).

Limiting my comments to rigorous studies conducted with elementary students that looked at reading achievement, it’s evident that average payoffs were small (and non-existent in some of the studies). In other words, you might see learning improvements from your new programs, but it’s unlikely—and if there are payoffs they are likely to be small and, perhaps, intangible.

Some of these programs did more than distribute books—and these other features may have figured in their success (or lack thereof). Some studies found that results varied based on whether the books were lent or given to the children (though it wasn’t consistently clear which was best). Most of the programs (75%) involved the kids in the book choices, and that seemed to be an important feature in whether learning gains happened. And, some of the programs provided books, but also encouragement and support for parents and others to be involved in the children’s reading—again a positive feature. (In the versions of Books on the Bus that I’ve read about, this is a key feature, with kids reading together and older kids helping younger ones).

Perhaps some of these findings will help you shape and improve your programs over time. In any event, please keep encouraging and supporting the reading habit beyond the school day. Hope it works for your communities.

  During the interim, several intriguing questions have been submitted and soon I’ll be taking those on. This posting responds not to your questions, but to some public comments made by various colleagues concerning complex text and its use in instruction. My comments are responses to their handwringing over the requirement that we teach kids to read complex text. 

1. We should be concerned about the use of complex text for instruction because text complexity has a negative correlation with reading comprehension and reading fluency.

  The premise here is correct, but the conclusion is false. This is what logicians refer to as the non-sequitur fallacy. I know of no one who rejects the idea that complex text is harder to read and understand than simple text.

  There are definitely quibbles over whether some approaches to measuring text complexity are adequate, but even then the notion is that more complex texts will be harder to understand. Researchers long ago showed that while shorter sentences tend to be easier to comprehend than long sentences, there are many exceptions to this correlation. If sentences are shortened to omit explicitly stated causal connections, for instance, the brevity tends to reduce understanding more than it facilitates it. (That kind of work was not an argument about whether text complexity made comprehension more difficult, but over where such complexity resided.)

  Conceding that the use of more complex texts will likely lower students' daily fluency and comprehension performance with the instructional passages—which it will—tells us nothing about whether or not we should require complex text instruction.

  To get to there, one needs to add another premise—an unstated one in this case. The missing premise is the claim that students learn or learn best from texts they comprehend easily and that they don’t from relatively harder texts.

  As I’ve written before, evidence for that hidden premise doesn’t actually exist, though educators cling to it as a matter of faith. The experimental studies—studies where difficulty levels of texts are systematically varied to determine if that factor affects learning--have not found that working with easier texts improves learning.

  The confusion between how well kids can read the instructional texts and how much they learn is misleading. Indeed, complex texts tend to be more difficult, tend to elicit reading performances that are not as polished as what can be demonstrated with easier texts. However, that does not mean that kids learn less from the more challenging texts. In fact, it appears to be the opposite!

  2. Educational standards that require teachers to teach students to read complex text are over-emphasizing the role of text in reading comprehension.

  This one surprised me a bit. The theory my colleague works within claims that reading comprehension is the result of an interaction between reader, text, and task. Not a bad idea that one, and one that I would have expected to support the idea of complex text--given its place in that holy trinity. My colleague's fear seemed to be that requiring complex text would lead to an undervaluing of the role of task (e.g., question types) in classroom reading work.

  Accordingly, her argument was that text complexity is not such a central issue in reading comprehension. Her evidence that text complexity was being overvalued? She noticed that different National Assessment questions about the same text elicited different levels of student performance. Seventy percent of students could answer a question about a given passage, while only 35% could answer other questions from the same passage. She attributed this difference to the fact that some tasks or questions required literal recall and others depended upon inferencing (though assessment research has long found performance levels on those tasks not to vary in any consistent way across passages).

  Her analysis is shaky again because of an unstate and indefensible assumption—the assumption that all portions of a text should be equally challenging.

  Obviously, sentences that include especially challenging vocabulary words will be harder than ones that use plain language. Questions about such sentences--even if drawn from the same text--are likely to differ in how well students do with them. We’ve long known that ideas that are high in the information hierarchy of a text will be better grasped than ideas that are lower in that hierarchy. That means you would usually see big variations in performance if they tapped an understanding of different information from the same text. Thus, the idea that 70% of kids can answer a question about one aspect of a text, but only 35% of kids can answer a question about another aspect doesn't necessarily tell us anything about readers or tasks since all of that variation may--or may not--be attributable to the text alone.

  I don’t think that problem with her argument means that we, therefore, need to teach text of a particular Lexile level, though it suggests to me the need to engage kids in the of reading texts that they will not comprehend easily—texts that may trip them up in particular ways. That means focusing more attention on what makes texts difficult and less on teaching question types and the like.

3. We shouldn't be stampeded into teaching complex text based upon flawed research studies--studies that varied not just text complexity but the instructional methods.

  Again, a correct premise, but a shaky conclusion.

  This claim points out that those experimental studies that I tout do more than just compare the impacts of the book levels on learning. The experimental groups that were being taught with the harder texts were sometimes being taught differently than the students who worked with the easier texts.

  For example, in one of those studies, the experimental groups working with the harder grade level texts did more fluency work than the guided reading comparison group that read the easier books. Perhaps the study outcomes have been due to those variations in instruction rather than to the text levels themselves.

  That is a fair concern, but I have two fair responses to it.

  First, while this charge is true of some of the studies that I cite, there are others in which it is not the case, but with the same outcome results. The same finding—that teaching kids with instructional level texts either doesn’t help or actually hinders readers to learn to read—is obtained whether the instruction has been held constant or not. Thus, if this concern is used to impeach the evidence, it can only do so for part of the evidence (and still doesn't explain why no studies that have tested teaching kids with easier texts have found any benefit).

  Second, frankly, I would expect good instruction with complex text to look different from good instruction with simple text. This point is extremely important for educators to understand.

  If I were trying to teach kids to read with books that they already could read with a high degree of accuracy and without much need of instructional support (the so-called “instructional level”), then I would expect the kids to spend a large amount of time reading those texts—doing substantially more reading then I see in a typical guided reading classroom. And I would expect much more required engagement with the texts than is afforded by the shallow small-group discussions that are usual in those classrooms. Perhaps I’d increase the amount of classroom reading by 3-5 times over the current amounts and would greatly reduce the small group talks in favor having kids writing much more and more extensively about those easy texts and doing more extended projects (probably a lot more work would be pushed away from the school to be done at home given the low demands of the texts and the notion that kids would learn so much just from doing the easy reading).

  If, on the other hand, I were working with really hard texts such as those required by more than 40 states then my students would certainly do more fluency work, and they would read shorter texts more intensely (with a lot of group discussion and the like). I’d ask the kids lots of questions about ideas in those texts, especially questions that got at the ideas that I thought might be difficult to gain due to particular aspects of the texts’ complexity. I would have the kids engaged in much more rereading than is common, too.

  Of course, good instruction is likely to be a blend of both of these visions—since no one in their right mind would expect instruction to only emphasize hard to read texts (though it is odd that so many of my colleagues have long held to the idea that kids should read only what for them would be easy texts--prohibiting so many learning disabled, second language, and racial minority from the opportunity to struggle with the grade level ideas).

  Friends, I think you protest too much. Reading comprehension instruction should not be focused on how to answer particular questions. It should teach students to recognize and gain control over those aspects of text that serve as barriers to comprehension. To accomplish that, kids have to be asked to read texts that they cannot already read easily—even though that will reduce their initial reading comprehension and fluency with the texts we are using for that teaching. Finally, that teaching reading with complex texts means that you will need to make other changes to instruction beyond the book choice is not a problem; it is a reality. Teachers need professional development that goes beyond how to select complex text; it should teach teachers how to teach kids to read complex text. 

Unfortunately, for far too many of kids, summer vacation is a time for forgetting. You’ve probably heard that “if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.” That’s certainly true about reading. Kids who don’t read over the summer regress. Their hard-earned reading skills decline.

Boys and girls who manage to keep the rust off their reading, don’t suffer a summer reading drop.  By reading and writing throughout the summer, they may even manage to improve in reading. Summer reading is easy to build into a family schedule, and most kids come to really enjoy it.   

Here are ten ways to make literacy an enjoyable part of your kids’ summer:

1.     Go to the library and borrow some books.

When I was a boy, my mom would take me to the library once a week. I could borrow as many books as the library would allow. It didn’t take much time, but it sure gave me plenty of opportunity for fun reading.             

2.     Pick out a good chapter book to read to or with your child.

Find a good book to read with your kids. This may be a book that you want to read to them or one for them to read to you (or a bit of both). It can be hard to find time to work all the way through a chapter book during the school year, but it can be easier    during the summer months. Books by Roald Dahl and E.B. White were especially popular in our household, but here are some other possibilities:

            Kindergarten through Grade 3

            Star Jumper by Frank Asch

            Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

            The Giggler Treatment by Roddy Doyle

            The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary

            Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

            Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

            The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

            The Adventures of Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey

            Grades 4-6

            The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

            Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

            The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

            The Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper

            A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

            The Red Pony by John Steinbeck

            The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

            Sounder by William H. Armstrong

Also, ask your librarian for recommendations, or check out these resources:

http://www.cbcbooks.org/childrens-choices/

http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/notalists/ncb        

 3.     Celebrate the completion of a book.

With my daughters, when we’d finish a chapter book, we’d have a family celebration. Sometimes we’d rent a video of the book that we’d read and pop some popcorn. Other times it might be a trip to a museum related to the book’s content or a backyard camping trip or perhaps a cooking experience. One year we even picked our family vacation based on a book we’d read (Misty of Chincoteague).

Some children’s chapter books that have been into films include: Fantastic Mr. Fox, Black Beauty, The Hobbit, Bridge to Terabithia, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Harry Potter, Johnny Tremain, Jumani, Mary Poppins, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Harry Potter, My Side of the Mountain, and many more.

4.     Write a letter to your child and drop it in the mail.

Kids love to get mail. I know in our digital age people write fewer real letters, but a letter can be a surprising and stimulating experience for children. Who doesn’t like to get a personal letter? Write a letter that requires some response: What do you most want to do this summer? What are you reading now? What’s that about? Etc.

5.     Start a diary.

 When we’d go on summer vacation, we always brought along a composition book. When our kids were little, at the end of the day, we’d let them dictate their diary and we’d print out their memories for them. As they developed their own ability to write, they recorded their own trip memories. We’d leave places to tape in postcards and the like.

 6.     Schedule a daily reading time.

I mentioned that my mom used to take me to the library. That same summer she required that I stay in after lunch for 30 minutes to read. At first, I was resistant, wanting to get out with my friends. It wasn’t long before I cherished the time, however. Summer can get kind of boring for kids and having regularly scheduled activities helps. Parents are often good at loading up kids’ schedules with things like soccer or swimming—which are great—but schedule in some quiet reading time too, they’ll come to appreciate it.

7.     Subscribe to a magazine.

We tend to champion book reading. And why not? There are so many great books. However, children’s magazines are fun too, and they change things up and bit which can encourage kids to read.

There are lots of good choices of kids’ mags. Here are a few suggestions: Highlights, National Geographic Kids, Ranger Rick, Boy’s Life, American Girl, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Cricket, Cobblestones, Dig. Pick one that fits your child’s interests.

8.     Encourage book clubbing.

Some kids find reading to be lonely. There are things that you can do to make it more social and fun for them. For instance, get your child and his/her friends to agree to read a particular book each month. Then have a get-together—perhaps a sleepover— at your house for the kids to share their favorite snacks and talk about the book.

9.     Encourage your child to read and use “to do” books.

Kids love to get their hands dirty. Doing stuff is fun. Use reading as a jumping-off-point    for arts and crafts activities, sports, cooking, science experiments, etc.

Here are some terrific “to do” book suggestions:

            Rosie Revere’s Big Project Book for Bold Engineers

            American Girls’ Handy Book

            American Boys’ Handy Book

            Baking Class: 50 Fun Recipes Kid Will Love to Bake

            The Everything Kids’ Science Experiments Book

10.  Family reading time.

Parents can get in on this reading thing, too. Maybe one night a week, try turning off all the screens, and everyone pick up a good book or magazine; 15-30 minutes. Not only does that create some good reading practice time for your kids, but it shows them that   you’re into this reading thing too, which can encourage reading. Modeling will always be more powerful than telling. If you get into reading, they will, too.

I teach first-grade and this year I switched schools. In my previous school, we tested our students with DIBELS three times a year. The idea was to figure if the students were having trouble with decoding so that we could help them. That isn’t how my new principal does it. He has us giving kids a reading comprehension test with leveled books. I asked him about it and he said that the district didn’t care about DIBELS and he didn’t care about DIBELS (he only cares about how kids do on the ____ test). I’m confused. I thought the idea of teaching phonics and fluency was to enable comprehension, but the emphasis on this test seems to suggest—at least in my new school—that is no longer necessary. What should I do?

Shanahan response:

Educators often complain about the intrusive accountability testing imposed by politicians and bureaucrats who wouldn’t know the difference between a textbook and a whiteboard. But many of the dumbest decisions made by teachers and principals are in pursuit of the tests we ourselves impose.

The accountability tests—PARRC, SBAC, and all the other state tests—are there to check up on how well we are doing our jobs. Not surprising that we don’t like those, and that, consequently, we might bend over backward to try to look good on such tests. That’s why many schools sacrifice real reading instruction—that is, the instruction that could actually be expected to help kids read better—in favor of so much test prep and test practice.

But what of the formative assessments that are supposed to help us do our jobs? You know, the alphabet soup of inventories, diagnostic tests, screeners, monitors, and dipsticks that pervade early reading instruction like DIBELS, ERDA, PALS, CTOPP, TPRI, ISIP, CAP, TRC, NWEA, AIMSweb, and TOWRE.

None of these instruments are problematic in and of themselves. Most set out to measure young children’s ability to…well, to… do something relevant to early literacy learning. For instance, they might evaluate how many letters the children can name, or how well they can hear the sounds within words. Sometimes, as in your school, they ask kids to read graded passages or little books and to answer questions about them, or as in your previous school, they might gauge student ability to perceive correctly the sounds within words.

The basic idea of these testing schemes is to find lacks and limitations. If Johnny doesn’t know his letters, then his kindergarten teacher should provide extra tuition in that. If Mary can’t understand the first-grade text, perhaps she should get her teaching from a somewhat easier book. And so on.

That is all well and good… but how we do twist those schemes out of shape! My goodness.

As a result, educators increasingly have grown restive with the “instructional validity” of assessment. Instructional validity refers to the appropriateness of the impact these tests have upon instruction.

DIBELS itself has often been the target of these complaints. These tests shine a light on parts of the reading process—and teachers and principals tend to focus their attention on these tested parts—neglecting anything about literacy development that may not have this kind of flashlight. Thus, one sees first-grade teachers spending inordinate amounts of time on word attack trying to raise NWF (nonsense word fluency) scores, but with little teaching of untested skills like vocabulary or comprehension or writing.

Even worse, we sometimes find instruction aimed at mastery of the nonsense words themselves too with the idea that this will result in higher scores.

Of course, this is foolishness. The idea of these formative testing regimes is to figure out how the children are doing with some skill that supports their reading progress, not to see who can obtain the best formative test scores.

The reason why DIBELS evaluates how well kids can read (decode or sound out) nonsense words is that research is clear that decoding ability is essential to learning to read and instruction that leads students to decode better eventually improves reading ability itself (including reading comprehension). Nonsense words can provide a good avenue for the assessment of this skill because they would not favor any particular curriculum (as real words would), they correlate with reading as well as real words do, and no one in their right mind would have children memorizing nonsense words. Oops… apparently, the last consideration is not correct. Teachers, not understanding or caring the purpose of the test, are sometimes willing to raise scores artificially by just this kind of memorization.

And, to what end? Remember, the tests are aimed at identifying learning needs that can be addressed with extra teaching. If I artificially make it appear that Hector can decode well when he can’t (memorizing the test words is one way to do this), then I get out of having to provide him the instruction that he needs. In other words, I’ve made it look like I’m a good teacher, but what I’ve really done is disguised the fact that Hector isn't succeeding, and I'm delaying any help that may be provided until it is too late.

Another example of this kind of educational shortsightedness has to do with the idea of using the tests to determine who gets extra help, like from a Title I reading teacher, perhaps. In most schools, the idea is to catch kids literacy learning gaps early so we can keep them on the right track from the beginning. But what if you are in a school with high mobility (your kids move a lot)?

I know of principals who deploy these resources later—grades 2 or 3—to try to make certain that these bucks improve reading achievement at their schools. Research might find it best to use these tests early to target appropriate interventions in Kindergarten and Grade 1, but these schmos don’t want to "waste" resources in that way since so many students don’t stick around all the way to the accountability testing. Instead of targeting the testing and intervention at the points where these will help kids the most, these principals aim them at what might make the principals themselves look better (kind of like the teachers teaching kids the nonsense words).

Back to your question… your school is only going to test an amalgam of fluency (oral reading of the graded passages) and reading comprehension. If all that you want to know is how well your students can read, that is probably adequate. If all the first-grade teachers tested her charges with that kind of test, the principal will end up with a pretty good idea of how well the first-graders in his school are reading so far. Your principal is doing nothing wrong in imposing that kind of test if that is what he wants to know. I assume those results will be used to identify which kids will need extra teaching.

I get your discomfort with this, however. You are a teacher. You are wondering… if little Mary needs extra teaching what should that extra teaching focus on?

Because of the nature of reading, that kind of assessment simply can’t identify which reading skills are causing the problem. Mary might not read well—the test is clear about that, but we can’t tell whether this poor reading is due to gaps in phonological awareness (PA), phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, or reading comprehension itself.

The default response for too many teachers, with this test or any other, is to teach something that looks like the test. In first grade that would mean neglecting those very skills that improve reading ability. The official panels that have carefully examined the research and concluded that decoding instruction was essential did so because such teaching resulted in better overall reading achievement (not just improvements in the skill that was taught). The same can be said about PA, fluency, and vocabulary instruction.

I’d love to tell you I have a great solution to your problem… for instance, perhaps all the children could be tested in the way that your principal requires and then anyone who failed to reach a particular reading level could then be tested further using DIBELS or something like DIBELS to identify the underlying skills that are likely holding those kids back. That sounds pretty sensible since it would keep teachers from just focusing on the underlying skills (and then ignoring reading comprehension), and yet, I quake at those teachers who will now teach reading with the test passages or who will coach the kids on the answering the test questions so that no one needs to be tested further--in other words, hiding the fact that their kids are struggling.

The key to making all of this work for kids is: 

1. All teachers and principals need to know what skills are essential to reading success. There are skills and abilities inherent in reading comprehension itself (so testing comprehension is not unreasonable) but there are also enabling skills that make comprehension possible for young readers (and testing those skills makes sense too). Knowledge of letters, ability to perceive sounds, decoding facility, knowledge of high-frequency words, oral reading fluency, awareness of word meanings, and ability to make sense of text are all part of the reading process—and all of these should be taught and tested from the start.
2. It is also critical for educators to know that this list of essential skills is not a sequence of teaching… in which one starts with letters and sounds and ends up with ideas. In fact, good early reading instruction provides a combination of instruction in decoding, fluency, comprehension, and writing—from the very beginning.
3. Formative assessment can help us to monitor student progress in all of these areas, one is no more important than another. Because a student lags in one area, is no reason to neglect instruction in the other areas. If you find that a youngster does not decode well, I would provide added or improved decoding instruction—but I would also maintain a daily teaching regimen with all of the other literacy components, too.
4. It is essential that educators know what tests can be used to measure the various components of literacy and how these assessments work. A nonsense word test, for instance, isn’t trying to find out if kids can read nonsense words (but how well they can decode any words). A fluency test is not about speed reading, but about being able to read the text so that it sounds like language. A comprehension test score might reveal comprehension problems, but you can’t determine that without additional tests of the underlying skills—since low comprehension may be, and usually is at this point, the result of poor decoding or lack of fluency.
5. No educator should ever teach the test, nor should lessons look like the test. These kinds of tests are not competitive. They are there to help us identify who needs help and what they may need help with. Every screwy thing we do to make the scores look better than they are is harmful to the education of children.

So, a pox on both your houses… That your principal doesn’t care why kids are having reading trouble is a serious impediment for the boys and girls in that school. That you don’t recognize the value of a test of your students’ actual reading ability concerns me as it might indicate a willingness to go off the deep end, teaching some aspects of reading to the neglect of others. Teach it all, monitor it all... and help these children to succeed.

I came across your article Informational Text: Or How Thin Can You Slice the Salami and wanted to reach out to you. I'm analytical and I work with other analytical thinkers. But I am also surrounded by reading specialists, literacy coaches, etc. who think differently. When I visit schools, I observe students who are analytical. They're interested in facts and the world. They prefer expository books to narrative nonfiction or fiction.  I'm concerned that young analytical thinkers are being underserved by literacy educators, who are more comfortable with narrative writing. 

Shanahan responds:

Your letter came at a very good time.

Recently, I’ve been working in some school districts where the question of how to manage pullout instruction has arisen. Some extra tuition in reading can lead to improved reading achievement for the strugglers, and reading is the elementary skill with the greatest generalizability.

What I mean by the latter is that if a student lacks science knowledge, he can still do well in math; if he lacks math skill, he can still excel in history. But kids who lag in reading tend to struggle across the curriculum—since reading tends to play an important role in content learning. To me, don’t let kids lag in reading. If you have to pull them out of another class for the extra help in reading, it’ll be well worth it in the long run.

And, yet…

Doesn’t pulling kids out of social studies, science, math, music, health, physical education and so on have a damaging cost? Perhaps even to learning to read?

I’m not willing to back off of the idea that an extra dose of reading is needed by some kids, or from the idea that the extra reading class should really be extra. It is not a good idea to pull Janie of Johnnie out of reading class for reading class!

But your letter serves as an important reminder. Kids don’t only learn to read in the reading class. If things are going the right way in social studies or science, there should be a good deal of reading going on there, too (and by that, I don’t mean the tedious round-robin oral reading of such material paragraph-by-paragraph that is so often what masquerades for content instruction or content reading).

Let’s face it, even with the Common Core State Standards or other newer standards that emphasize “informational text” or “expository writing,” there is still nothing like a balance in exposure to such texts.

One of my early mentors and a dear friend was a man named Richard Venezky (an electrical engineer, computational linguist, lexicographer, psychologist, and teacher). Thirty-five years ago—long before the current widespread fascination with informational text—he wrote the following:

“…a separation has developed between literacy instruction in the schools and the literacy needs of the competent citizen. Formal reading instruction today is primarily oriented toward understanding and appreciation of fine literature. Non-fiction materials are treated as unpleasant and boorish intruders into the otherwise serene, romantic kingdom of plot, character, and author’s viewpoint.” (Venezky, 1982, p. 113)

Dick not only decried the lack of inclusion of such materials in reading instruction, but the fact that even when such texts were there the reading instruction was not supportive. In other words, kids might be reading history, but not in a way that would support a vicarious reliving of the past; or they might be reading about other cultures but not in ways that help them to analyze those cultures in ways that would allow them to understand and appreciate another way of life.

Dick tried to explain this odd omission by suggesting a continuation of the Nineteenth Century’s romantic commitment of schools to fostering recreation over work. The idea was to refine children through literature, rather than to coarsen them through science and the like. The idea is that American society—so practical in so many ways—wanted to protect its children from the practical. Children’s libraries, yes; children’s workshops or labs, not so much.

I don’t know, but I like your explanation better… the folks who have been drawn to teaching are just more likely to belong to a Literature Club than to one devoted to the study of snails, sun prints, or tree-ring growth patterns. Reading books—the books we use to teach reading—are sold not to children but to teachers. If most teachers prefer stories or see their role as one of protecting children from those “unpleasant boorish intruders,” then not surprisingly the model reading text will be a literature anthology (no matter the preferences of the kids).

Those anthologies may be punctuated with informational text these days, but a true accounting of the numbers of pages devoted to narrative or information is likely to make those “narrative thinkers” very comfortable. (This imbalance is usually even more marked in schools that teach reading with trade books.)

A quick review of recent research suggests that different kinds of texts include different linguistic affordances and barriers (Bieber & Gray, 2016) and that reading informational text requires different skills and abilities than narrative text (Davis, Huang, & Yi, 2017). If schools are to prepare kids to do the reading of the “competent citizen” they’ll need to provide much more exposure and instruction in such abilities. Unfortunately, despite the increased emphasis on informational text in standards the majority of read-alouds, classroom libraries, instruction, and book recommendation lists continue to be dominated by narrative (Dreher & Kletzein, 2016). Studies also show that reading instruction focused on social studies or science content can be effective in improving reading achievement and content knowledge (Ciullo, Lo, Wanzek, &Reed, 2016; Herbert, Boharty, Nelson, & Brown, 2016).

I’m not backing away from where I started this… some kids do need reading pullouts and those pullouts should not come during reading class. However, can these kids really afford to be pulled out of science on a daily basis?

 I’d suggest the following:

1. Schools should strive to achieve a much greater balance between the analytical and the narrative within the curriculum. This means using a better mix of texts, but also providing instruction more supportive of expository reading and writing.
2. Reading textbooks should greatly increase the numbers of pages (pages, not selections) to content drawn from science, social studies, and the arts. And, a similar restock is called for in book rooms and classroom libraries to offer kids greater balance and opportunity.
3. When hiring elementary teachers, principals should pay more attention to the idea of narrative and expository thinking. It would help a lot to have a teaching corps that reflected a wider range of passions and experiences… hire that teacher candidate who hurt her GPA by taking the premedical biology classes, hire the one who has read Faulkner’s entire oeuvre, hire the one who spends weekends volunteering at the local historical society.
4. When we decide to pull kids out of content classes for reading interventions (and this practice should be minimized when possible), the plan should include specific strategies for preserving content knowledge. These plans should consider including content texts in the intervention or regular classroom reading instruction. Perhaps mom and dad can guide kids through missed materials or the school to do this can provide audio-guides. Protecting kids from lost science classes may be easier than you think—and it sends a much better message to teachers, students, and parents about what matters.

I think you are correct that individuals tend to lean one way or the other when it comes to narrative and analytical thinking—and to preferences for storybooks or informational ones. I may, however, be less interested in playing to those preferences or motivations. In last week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik made the following statement with regard to child-rearing:

“Character may not be malleable, but behavior is. The same parents can raise a dreamy, reflective girl and a driven, competitive one—the job is not to nurse her nature but to help elicit the essential opposite: to help the dreamy one to be a little more driven, the competitive one to be a little more reflective. The one artisanal, teachable thing is outer conduct. You can’t restructure a genome, but, as Mr. Turveydrop, in “Bleak House,” insisted, you really can teach deportment.”

I don’t believe our job is to make the science- or literature-preferers comfortable. I think we do our jobs best when the science kid discovers he can enjoy a story well told or when the math whiz is moved by poetic expression. We are most on our game when Little Miss Literature realizes that she has the chops to pick apart Algebra problems or that she can describe incisively in writing the structure of a cell.

We certainly will never achieve anything like that if our schools stay dedicated to the idea of the children’s garden as a place to be protected from informational text.

https://www.fatherly.com/play/books/best-books-for-babies/

https://www.fatherly.com/play/best-books-for-toddlers/

https://www.fatherly.com/play/books/best-books-for-your-kindergartner/

 What is the ideal form of baby books?

Babies very early on exhibit what is called the palmar reflex… that is if something touches or grazes their palms, their little hands lock on it. I guess that keeps them from falling out of trees or something. Try touching a finger or your hair to a baby’s palm and it will be gripped tight. They maintain this reflex until about 4-5 months of age, and after that, their natural inquisitiveness takes over, and they will then grab almost anything within reach including books, and by about 9 months many babies want to turn the pages themselves. What all this means is that the typical paper-paged book is not ideal for reading to babies—unless you don’t mind the almost certain wrinkling, tearing, and even eating of pages!

These days that isn’t much of a problem: there are board-books (with cardboard thick pages, ideal for baby’s tiny but fumbling fingers), and cloth books, and even rubberized plastic books for bathtub reading. For the first year of so of a child’s life, these books with indestructible pages are the way to go. Babies love them, and parents don’t have to worry about hurt books.

The best of these imperishable books will be those that fit not just your baby’s grasping hands, but their budding minds as well. Research shows that reading to infants improves their attention spans, ability to share a focus with others, and language abilities; recent studies even claim that such sharing improves infant problem solving and communication. Some books are better for supporting these things than others.

Certainly, any book that captures your baby’s attention is a keeper. For infants, that usually means bold simple (not too detailed) artwork with bright colors, faces, and simple objects. These kinds of books intrigue children and get them to look longer. They also provide a great opportunity for learning the names of objects and people.

Research says that this kind of naming activity should eventually be more than just category labeling—"this is the monkey” and “this is the cow”—though early on that helps. Eventually, the best books for a baby should include multiple instances of, say, monkeys or cows—each with their own individual names or sound effects, and human characters should have names, too. (If the book doesn’t provide such names, you can always add your own.)

Babies enjoy simple language and simple rhymes. Books like “Pat the Bunny” both sound and feel good (books with flaps and buttons and different textures and sounds make books into a kind of toy for babies). Some others that fit the bill are “Shhh! This Book is Sleeping” and “Llama Llama Red Pajama”

 What makes a book great for a toddler?

This is a wide-age span: from 1 year or 18 months to 5 years. The best books, early in this age span, will closely resemble the baby books just described. By the conclusion of these pre-K years, the best books will be pretty similar to what I’m going to describe for kindergarten. Even when a two-year-old is capable of sitting alone and turning paper pages, she’ll still usually be interested in her old board books; I know my granddaughters are.

Generally—and we’re talking about little kids here so there are going to be lots of exceptions—younger kids in this age range will want to go through a book with someone else and as they get older they become more independent, able to engage with books productively on their own.

During these years, the benefits to be derived from books divides. That means there will be books for your child to read on his or her own and a different, though overlapping, set that you can read to your young child.

Toddlers begin to love real storybooks, stories with simple plots that focus on familiar experiences or characters (“Make Way for Ducklings,” “The Little House,” fairy tales). Toddlers often enjoy following a particular character from book to book—whether Grover from Sesame Street, Babar the elephant, or Curious George; the familiar is both reassuring and joyfully enticing.

Of course, toddlers continue to appreciate toy-like books: with flaps to flap and buttons to push. Books like, “Can You Make a Scary Face,” are such a hit at this age because children enjoy acting out the funny faces every bit as much as listening to the reading. They enjoy the humor of odd sounds and strange names, and repetitions and language patterns that capture their attention. Whether we’re talking about hands-on treats for the fingers or funny farty sounds, infective patterns, and catchy rhymes for their ears, the toddler seeks to experience books actively.

A three-year-old I cherish sleeps every night with a well-worn copy of “I’m a Little Teapot.” This devotion is likely due to the fact that she “knows” that song and can sing it herself.

Wordless books can be fun at this age, too, because kids can make up their own stories or name the pictured objects themselves.

Finally, toddlers are nothing if not silly, so it should be no surprise that their tastes often turn towards the absurd… they adore books like “Don’t Let Pigeons Drive the Bus” and the “Book with No Pictures.” The latter was my kindergarten grandson’s favorite book when he was a preschooler and it’s his favorite book still, though his reasons have changed. When he was a 4-years-old the silly sounds and funny names tipped the balance;

I mean, come on, even William Shakespeare would have to go a way to beat a euphonious locution like “BooBoo Butt.”  

All my suggestions up to now have been for the types of books that children can interact with on their own or in the lap of a favorite adult. However, I’m a big believer in parents introducing more formidable chapter books to their toddlers, books that young’uns couldn’t enjoy without an adult doing the reading.

Here I’m talking about reading classics like “The Wind in the Willows,” “The Hobbit,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Charlotte’s Web,” “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” “Peter Rabbit,” and “Charlie and Chocolate Factory.” These extended reads expose preschoolers to big ideas, complex language, and place extended attentional and memory demands while emphasizing the precedence of language over pictures in reading. These kinds of texts are remembered long after briefer picture books have fallen from memory.  

My tendency as a father and grandpa has been to read storybooks to kids, but that can be a big mistake. Kids, even very young ones, may be interested in pirates, trucks, bugs, drones, dinosaurs, and almost anything else you might think of.

When my youngest daughter was about seven she asked, “Why do you always pick the books that we read?”

I was a bit surprised and asked if there was something that she wanted me to read to her. She didn’t really have an idea, but perused the shelves and picked out, “In the Shadow of Man,” by Jane Goodall. That was more than 20 years ago, but she is still a big Jane Goodall fan (and chose a STEM career).

For appropriate informational texts that I would suggest books by authors like Gail Gibbons (on topics like ladybugs, plants, seasons, tornadoes, frogs, etc.) and Bobbie Kalman (e.g., penguins, koala bears, butterflies, communities).

What are the characteristics for a good kindergarten book?

When in kindergarten, kids will still like a lot of the same books and same kinds of books they have already been enjoying. However, at this point, it may be dawning on them that they could possibly read some of these books themselves. That means that the new stars of the show will be books they can pretend to read, books that can help them to read, and books that they really can read.

In that first category, books they can pretend to read, I’d include wordless picture books that allow kids to make up their own stories; that give them a chance to stretch their narrative muscles. “The Giving Tree” is a good example of this.

I’d also include any books that might have been memorized or that can be memorized easily. Books that present song lyrics (Happy Birthday, The Itsy-Bitsy Spider) or nursery rhymes are great for this purpose. So are books with strongly repetitive patterns (“Brown Bear, Brown Bear what do you see, I see a yellow duck looking at me.”). These memorized books allow children to engage in finger-point reading, trying to touch each word as they say it or sing it from memory and having to figure out when to turn the pages. Such activities help them to develop print awareness, but many children even start to learn to read words from this as well.

One of the big things that kindergartners need to figure out in order to read is how to sound out simple words. Books that draw their attention to letter sounds, alliteration (e.g., Chicka-Chicka Boom, Some Smug Slug), and rhyming can be a big help with that.

Finally, the various “beginner books” and “I can read it myself” books are real hits during this period. I admit that these are rarely great books (The Cat in the Hat would be a wonderful exception to this rule). These easy readers tend not to be fine literature, nor do they present the best-drawn characters or the highest quality language… and yet, 5-year-olds often consider them to be favorite books. I guess it shows that a magnificent book that you can’t read isn’t worth as much as a vapid one that you can.

Earlier I noted my grandson’s love of The Book with No Pictures. He loved it when he was four because it was silly and he still loves it for that (don’t tell, but BooBooButt is his password!). However, now that he is all grown up at the age of five, the big thrill is that he can read the book himself (where else are you going to learn to read a word like, “Bluurf”). In other words, though the book has stayed the same, his relationship with the book has changed—and that makes all the difference when it comes to loving books.

Another grandson advises that anything by Chris Van Dusen is going to be wonderful for the fives (especially “Randy Riley’s Really Big Hit” because it includes the best of everything… baseball, robots, space).

Of course, children at this age still love to be read to—and such reading can include both those storybooks and informational texts that are just out of reach of the children’s own reading, and those more challenging factual and fictional extended reads that can really give them a chance to stretch. I’ll add to those earlier classics books like “Treasure Island,” “The Secret Garden,” “Peter Pan,” “Little House in the Big Woods,” and “Mary Poppins.”

As for informational books, the National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book Series (“Big Book of Why,” “Big Book of Space”, “Big Book of Dinosaurs”, “Big Book of Animals”, etc.). For kids into science, facts and non-fiction, those (and the Time for Kids series) are real winners, presenting such information in ways that kindergartners (and other ages, too) can understand and learn.

How should a parent ensure that a book meets educational criteria for their child?

1. Don't worry too much about this. Books should be everywhere in the nursery. If one book doesn’t foster your child’s learning, another likely will. And, even if a book isn't the perfect one for your child right now, that book may not help much, but it certainly will do no harm.
2. Pay attention to your child. If one book is preferred over another, try to follow the child’s interest rather than your own. Include your child in picking out books from the library or bookstore.  
3. How you interact with your child and the book can be as important as the book itself. Babies benefit from objects and characters being pointed out and named. So, if the book focuses on a little boy, but doesn’t name him, why not name him yourself when sharing this book with your child?
4. Keep it fun. If the child’s attention flags put the book away and come back to it in a little while. You’ll both be happier with that and a lot more learning is likely to take place.
5. Be persistent. Just because a child rejects a book (or reading together) at one point, doesn’t mean she won’t be interested in it later. With toddlers, you might get them to sit with you for as little as 20-30 seconds—but if you keep at it, those shared times will get longer and more profitable.
6. If you are worried about picking the best books for your kids, there are wonderful recommendations from the Children’s Book Council (http://www.cbcbooks.org/). American Library Association (http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/notalists), and the Children’s Choices of the International Literacy Association (https://www.literacyworldwide.org/get-resources/reading-lists/childrens-choices-reading-list), and many preschools and schools participate in book clubs that can provide some guidance, too.

What are your thoughts about writing in Kindergarten? Is there a scientifically-researched instructional methodology that we should implement. We’ve been trying to embed writing opportunities within the literacy block related to the whole group listening comprehension text. Should students draw in relation to the prompt or question and then label, dictate, and/or write? Should teachers model phonetic spelling of words or the correct spelling? Any help would be appreciated.

Shanahan response:

Indeed, kindergartners should be writing, and kindergarten teachers should be facilitating and teaching writing.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a particularly rich scientific-research base on beginning writing instruction. There are many observational studies that give us a sense of what may be possible (that is what kinds of instructional routines and environments have successfully existed in at least some kindergartens). And, there are a number of correlational studies that suggest what may be valuable (because of the relationship of certain early writing skills and students’ later literacy development).

But there are not a slew of studies that have tried out various writing routines and compared their relative effects with each other. That means I can recommend some reasonable approaches, activities, and routines—but it is certainly possible that over the next few years someone might be able to prove that there could be better choices than what I am recommending.

Time/Opportunities for Writing

No matter how you go about teaching or facilitating early writing, it is essential that time be set aside on a daily basis for this kind of work. In my framework, I have long required teachers to devote 20-25% of the language arts time to writing, and that is true for kindergarten classes, too. Since I think the total time allocation for language arts should be 2-3 hours, that means 24-45 minutes of writing time per day in a kindergarten class.

The rest of the time should be aimed at teaching decoding (e.g., phonological awareness, phonics); oral reading fluency (if they are just starting out, then finger-point reading and choral reading); reading/listening comprehension; and, perhaps, oral language (e.g., vocabulary, listening comprehension, presentation, conversation).

The time for writing would include student-writing time, of course, but also the time spent preparing to write (prewriting) and the time spent sharing these compositions. It would also include any instruction aimed at fostering manuscript/printing skills or early spelling ability. But no matter what it includes, kids should be engaged in writing pretty much everyday in kindergarten.  

Oral Composition

I have always begun children’s writing with oral composition. This was true when I was a first-grade teacher; it was true when I was working with my preschool daughters and grandchildren; and, it has been true over the years when I’ve consulted in kindergarten classrooms.

Oral writing tends to be easier for young kids than writing by hand is and it helps them to gain the concept of writing—which very quickly bears fruit in guiding them into creating their own writing by hand.

The so-called “language-experience approach” (LEA) has apparently fallen out of favor, which is a shame.

In a kindergarten, I would usually start language experience out on a whole class basis. The first step is a shared experience… some hands on activity or observational event in which everyone is engaged. That could be an art project or a science demonstration or a cooking experience or whatever.

Then gather kids around a chart and ask them to tell about the experience. Get them talking about the experience. Some of this can be “turn and talk,” some of it might be students responding individually to teacher questions. The idea is to help kids to see that language allows them to relive experiences and to think about them.

Now that you have them buzzing, tell them that you want to write an article about the experience. Ask who has something they would like to say about the experience. Then help that child construct a sentence about it. This might be simply transcribing what was said, or it might be helping the child to expand a thought (S: “Chocolate.” T: “The cake was chocolate?” S: “The cake was chocolate.”), and then transcribing.

Print the students’ ideas to get 4 or 5 sentences.

I continue with this kind of thing regularly until students are able to do it easily.

Once they can then I start doing the dictation and transcription part of the activity in small groups and sometimes even individually (the experience is still shared by the whole class). Small group dictation means that more kids get to dictate their sentences.

By the time you are done with language experience approach the children should have a clear idea of the nature of book sentences, that print (the ABCs) is used to record one’s words, that print moves from left-to-right and from top-to-bottom. They should know the difference between pictures and writing, too.

Writing Environment

We often make a big deal about a supportive reading environment in which kids have lots of opportunity to see print and to get their hands on books and magazine… to pretend to read and to read.

It is just as important that there be a plethora of writing resources for kids, too. Many kindergartens, for example, have a writing center… with different kinds of paper and writing implements. Back in the day, I had a typewriter (not even a bad idea now) in my classroom-writing center. You asked about labeling pictures, so having opportunities available for those kinds of labeling activity makes sense here.

It also makes sense to have writing components in other classroom centers, too. If you have a classroom restaurant, you want to have pencils and order pads. If you have a classroom post office, it is important to have paper, envelopes, and the like. Perhaps my writing center is too mundane; perhaps it would be better to have a book publishing company that allows kids to “publish” their work. Or maybe a sign making company would make sense.

Basically, the point is to create lots of opportunities for kids to write.

Pretend Writing

When I start kids off writing on their own, I tend to start with individuals and small groups (just the opposite of what I did with dictation). You might sit down with two or three children at a table, providing each with a piece of paper and a pencil or crayon for writing.

I then talk to the group about writing something and we talk about their ideas. Similar to the earlier LEA stories, but now I’m not going to provide a shared experience, I’m going to ask questions about what is interesting them right now to try to get them to write about those personal ideas.

Sometimes kids launch right in and start writing… other times it takes greater amounts of support to get them started. I’ve had children laugh and tell me that I was crazy because they are only 5 and can’t write yet, too.

When that happens I encourage them to pretend to write. Those pretend writings range from pictures and scribbles, to random uses of letters, to actual attempts to write words or to try to make their combinations of letters look like words.

I accept it all.

Usually, when a few kids start writing like that—especially if you make a big deal about it—the other kids want to try their hands at it too.

Initially, I’m not too worried about things like spelling. I ask kids to spell words as they think they are spelled.

Initially, it might be difficult or even impossible to know what the children have written. I make my way around the group to transcribe what they have tried to write. I usually add a date, too, that can be useful when you are reviewing children’s folders of writing so that you can see what kind of progress they have made.

As a teacher you are always trying to salt the mine. That is, you are always suggesting directions to kids that they might not think of on their own. For instance, let’s say one of your students is using his letter sounds to try to figure out a spelling. That’s the kind of thing worth a bit of public attention. I might point out to everybody what a smart thing little Johnnie or Suzi did using his sounds like that. You’d be surprised how many students all of a sudden can use their sounds to write words.

Once you have a bunch of kids writing like this, the language-experience dictation goes away and your attention needs to be focused on encouraging more actual writing.

If you decide to do something like this, it is important to let parents in on the secret. Invented spelling—that is, kids trying to spell words based on what they know about letter sounds—is very helpful in building phonological awareness and in giving kids productive practice with their decoding skills. But some parents might think that your lack of initial concern about spelling means that you either can't spell yourself or don't care whether your students can. Neither is the case, so head off the problem.

Next week:  More on kindergarten writing… including information on spelling and printing instruction; prewriting supports; the role of revision; peer interaction; and more.

 What are your thoughts about writing in Kindergarten? Is there a scientifically-researched instructional methodology that we should implement. We’ve been trying to embed writing opportunities within the literacy block related to the whole group listening comprehension text. Should students draw in relation to the prompt or question and then label, dictate, and/or write? Should teachers model phonetic spelling of words or the correct spelling? Any help would be appreciated.

Shanahan response:

Last week I provided a partial answer to this question. My response emphasized the importance of kindergarten writing and the value of kindergarten teachers facilitating and teaching writing. I suggested amounts of time to devote to beginning writing instruction and where it fits in the language arts curriculum. I also argued for the use of oral composition—with the teacher taking dictation from the kids—as a good starting point, and that it was important to create a classroom environment that encouraged kids to write, to pretend to write, and to use and play with writing.

This week I want to go a bit further.

Once you have kids writing—not just scribbling on a page or drawing pictures, but really trying to write messages using letters (albeit with invented spellings), then things get really interesting.

Printing Instruction

Many children are willing and able to write with almost no tuition in printing. They are able to copy letters easily, and while those letters might be a bit shaky or misshapen you can easily discern which letters are being represented.

However, there are also children who are much tougher self-critics, and much less certain about following models and the like. Studies show that kids generally will write more and better if they are provided with some explicit instruction in forming letters and words. I’m not suggesting waiting until kids can form letters perfectly before getting them to compose, but certainly a portion of the writing time could profitably be devoted to showing kids how to form letters and giving them practice with this skill. It is not uncommon in kindergarten classrooms that a child will perseverate over the writing of a single sentence for a long time. Printing instruction and practice can reduce this frustration and can move things along a bit.

The outcome of such practice should not only be that their printing quality improves (though that should certainly be the case), but that they write more and their compositions improve, too.

Role of Drawing

Unlike most older kids, kindergartners tend to use drawing less to illustrate what they are writing and more to figure out what they want to write about. A 7-year-old might write a story about going for a bike ride with Mom, and then will draw a picture of two people riding bikes. While the 5-year-old will draw pictures before hitting on the idea that he/she wants to write a story about a bike ride. 

I often guide kindergartners in this process. First, I’ll have all the boys and girls drawing a picture of something (their choice), and then I talk to them about turning pictures into stories.

I’ll have each child present his or her picture to the class, explaining what it is and why he/she drew that. Then we—the boys and girls and I—will ask questions about the picture to try to find the story. So, if Junior has drawn a picture of a bike and explained that he drew that because he is getting one for his birthday, then we might ask questions like: Who is giving you a bicycle? What will you do with your bike when you get it? Who will you ride with? Where will you go? What do you like about riding bikes? 

Once everyone has a chance to think about their drawing in that way, I have the children write their stories. Over time, kids get better with this process and it goes faster (and at some point, you don’t even need the pictures).

Spelling

I’ve never been real big fan of explicit beginning spelling instruction. My reason is that I believe that when young children try to write they have to think hard about phonemes (the sounds of the letters) and they need to think hard about which letters represent which sounds. In other words, their writing practice helps them to practice their phonemic awareness and phonics in ways that both directly improves their reading achievement, but also in ways that reveal to the teacher what they know (and don’t know) about letters and sounds (which should shape subsequent teaching).

However, for some kids spelling instruction operates like the printing instruction noted above—it gives kids some come confidence that they are doing it right. There are various ways that young children’s spelling can be addressed effectively.

Initially, I’m going to encourage children to write words the way they think they should be written. And, I’ll show them how I use the sounds to figure out the letters to include.

Sometimes, if there is a class writing assignment, say we’re writing thank you letters to the fire department for bringing a firetruck to school for us to see, then I might start the assignment by asking boys and girls to tell me words that they think they will need to write their papers. The words they provide will then be written on the white board… ladder, hose, firemen, truck, thank you, helmet, coat… They then have those words spelled for them (they just have to figure out which is which and copy them into their paper). That can help some kids to get going.

I noted last week the importance of teaching phonological awareness and phonics to children and that instruction clearly plays a role here. I would start to include some spelling work in these lessons, having students not only trying to read words and nonsense words, but trying to spell them too (staying to the simplest and easiest to learn patterns initially, like regular CVCs, and not very many new words per week).

Peer Support

Last week I said the research on beginning writing was pretty limited. But there are studies on the value of invented spelling, spelling instruction, print instruction, as well as on the importance of peer support in early writing.

I noted earlier how I involve children in questioning each other about their pictures to help the drawers to find a story in the pictures. And, it is just as important to involve the other children in responding to writing.

Boys and girls write more and write better when they are giving regular opportunities to share their writings with each other. Children are motivated by their peers’ interest. Children gain ideas from each other, ideas that they, too, can write about. Children perform for others—they like writing not just to write but because other people will be interested.

When I start children out on writing, I often start only with a few kids. But that changes quickly as soon as I make a big deal out of those first writings… posting them by my desk or reading them to the class or pointing out what a great thing little Maria or Fredrico did for me… all of sudden all the 5-year-olds want paper to write with, too.

Part of the writing instruction time should be devoted to sharing and talking about (and praising) the children’s writing.

Text Structure

A big part of kindergarten writing is just getting the ideas on paper. However, there can be some useful shaping of these ideas into communicative forms. What I’m talking about is encouraging young children to structure their texts in particular ways.

For example, I taught my own children to write stories initially using story maps. We talked about how stories start out (introducing a character in a time and place), and about characters facing some kind of problem (e.g., Little Red Riding Hood is trying to take a picnic basket to her grandmother’s house, and Hansel & Gretel are trying to not get left alone in the woods).

The characters take some kinds of actions to try to solve their problems, and then the story ends with everyone happy or somebody punished and so on.

They would then try to write stories in which the characters had problems and tried to solve the problems, etc.

The same kind of thing can be done with writing opinion pieces about books that are read. Perhaps you can provide kids with a structural template like this one:

I read _____.

It was about______.

I liked (didn’t like it) because_______.

My favorite (The worst) part was_____.

This book would be good for ________ because ________.

Something similar could be done to guide students to summarize science content or art activities.

Revision

This will shock some of the writing honchos who encourage lots of writing revision to improve writing quality, and revision definitely has a place in writing instruction. However, I rarely devote much time to it in Kindergarten or Grade 1.

The reason for this is that I think, initially, it is most important to build writing fluency than some kind of high level communicative competency. Revision is a way of shaping language and ideas into more powerful and communicative forms. But it assumes that there is enough language and ideas to shape.

It is not uncommon that a five-year-old who is just starting with writing to write a single sentence: “I have a baby brother.” (No, it would not be spelled like that and that composition might have taken considerable time and tired the writers little fingers considerably). Instead of spending a lot of time trying to rewrite this piece, I would suggest devoting the time to building up this child’s ability to write more and more; to get more ideas on the paper in a shorter amount of time and with less arduous effort. I would hope by the close of the year, that all of your kindergartners could write several sentences on a topic. The major emphasis of our very limited revision efforts would be on "adding," that is adding more information. (What is your baby brother's name? How old is he? Do you like him? Do you help your mom with him? How?) 

That doesn’t mean that we would never revise, but revision would be limited to those occasions when it matters. (My earlier example in which the children were drafting thank you notes to the firemen might require a bit of polishing and recopying since those are to be shared socially outside the classroom.)

Goals   

By the end of kindergarten children should be able to write several sentences with ease (in other words, this should take inordinate amounts of time or should not require a great deal of adult intervention to elicit the writing) on a topic that they have studied, a book that they have read, or an experience that they have had. They should be able to use the letters and sounds to spell the words in ways that allow others to read the text, including spelling some of the words correctly—such as words with simple and consistent sound-symbol relations or those words that were taught specifically. They should be able to form the letters and words in a manner that is readable by others.

Useful Resources

The Beginnings of Writing by Charles Temple and Ruth Nathan

Breakthrough in Beginning Reading and Writing by Richard Gentry

Teaching the Youngest Writers by Marcia Freeman

Can you explain the difference between central idea, main idea, and theme? There appears to be a lot of confusions with these terms. 

 Shanahan’s response:

You’re correct. There is much confusion and disparity in use of the terms central idea, main idea, and theme. And please add topic and topic sentence to that list, too.

Part of the problem here is that these are old colloquial terms. They didn’t arise from the sciences (e.g., psychology, linguistics), so, perhaps, we shouldn’t expect too precise a meaning for each.

Back in the early 1980s, Jim Baumann conducted a series of studies on the “main idea” concept and the steps needed to teach students to identify main ideas. He found that professional books and teacher’s manuals were all over the map when it came to main idea. The term was used in lots of disparate ways and the teaching steps evident in various programs were unlikely to lead kids to be able to identify main ideas. His work is still among the best on how to teach kids to do this.

The term “main idea” has been used in a variety of ways for over 200 years… Sometimes main idea has been limited to summary statements about briefer portions of a text like paragraphs (e.g., main idea is often used as a synonym for topic sentence—and topic sentence instruction is often used as the route to teaching main idea). But there are scads of examples of main idea with regard to entire texts, too.

Sometimes the term “main idea” has been reserved for summarizing the major thought or point behind expository or informational texts only. But even a quick perusal of the educational literature reveals a great deal of inconsistency in that approach. The earliest mentions of “main idea” that I have found refer to the major lessons to be learned from religious stories in the 1850s.

The only consistency evident in main idea is its focus on the big idea that a text is expressing. 

The term “central idea” has been used just as long, but a bit less often, and its use seems even more general. I suspect it has become popular as a synonym for main idea since Baumann’s eye-opening work in the 1980s.  Users, perhaps eager to avoid these confusions, employ central idea in the hopes that we’ll understand it better than we would have if they’d used main idea. If so, they have failed. Whatever main idea means in reading, central idea is its synonym—no more and no less.

Theme, on the other hand, is a term that arises from literature, and it is usually incorrect to apply it to most informational texts. A theme is the point or central idea of a literary work… it may be stated in terms of a point of view (e.g., unchecked ambition is dangerous to all) or as a single word (e.g., love, death). Usually literary works express multiple themes—sometimes even conflicting themes--and readers have to learn coordinate, synthesize, or choose from among these thematic expressions to arrive at a rich interpretation of a literary work.

It might be okay to sometimes use terms like main idea or central idea to refer to this overall thematic interpretation, but it wouldn’t work to apply them to the conflicting themes underlying this overall theme of a work.

If these terms are confusing, instruction often makes matters worse. For example, kids are often taught that the first sentence of a paragraph states its main idea. This is true, of course; except in those instances where it is the last sentence, or one of the middle sentences, or it isn’t stated explicitly at all.

Or, students may be taught that a text has a single main idea… Again, a notion that is correct, except whenever it isn’t. Think of reading an encyclopedia entry on Japan. Perhaps one could say “the main idea is Japan” (the topic) which is not particularly satisfying (most reading teachers would rightly reject that one—main ideas and topics shouldn’t be used interchangeably), or that “it is an article that tells a lot of facts about Japan, a country in Asia” (which is a reasonable description of the purpose of the entry, but which seems a bit thin on substance). My hunch is that the problem here is that we are trying to state a single main idea when this kind of text is a slew of main ideas. “This entry tells facts about Japan, a country in Asia. It describes Japan’s history, politics, military, economy, science and technology, infrastructure, demographics, and culture.” Maybe not entirely satisfying yet because it is little more than a string of topics, but I think you’ll agree that it is a whole lot closer than those previous attempts.

There has been interesting research done--both with human readers and computer readers—to try to come up with an operational definition of main or central idea that would be a bit less squishy. That work has focused on expository/informational text alone and usually homes in on main idea by how often they are referred to throughout the text. The more the various sentences connect to a particular idea, the more likely it is integral to the main idea that the author is trying to put across.

(I wonder if the term “central idea” has been latched onto recently as a way of trying to capture this perception that all of the other ideas connect up to some central idea. For instance, my wife, Cyndie, says she prefers to think of the main idea is being at the top of a hierarchy, with all of the other ideas connected below it.)

Look, for instance, at these paragraphs from a Newsela article (https://newsela.com/read/elem-national-park-sled-dogs/id/40708).

In the winter, thick snow blankets Alaska's Denali National Park and Preserve. It is one of our nation's most incredible wild places. The wilderness stretches over 6 million acres. That's bigger than the state of New Hampshire. It's home to North America's tallest peak, as well as wolves, moose, snowshoe hares and grizzly bears.

Denali is also home to a one-of-a-kind team of canine park rangers. Alaskan huskies, 31 in all, pull sleds, helping transport park rangers and loads of heavy equipment in the snow.

It's an important job. With temperatures regularly as low as -40 degrees in Denali's winter, "mushing" with sled dogs is a much more reliable form of transportation. Motorized vehicles or snowmobiles might not start in the cold. Plus, the dogs can keep their human rangers' feet warm at night.

In February, kennel manager and park ranger Jennifer Raffaeli is out on the trail for a month-long trip in the park. The dogs will haul sleds packed with equipment. The rangers will patrol and collect data for scientists at hard-to-reach sites near the park's glacier-fed Wonder Lake.

What’s the main or central idea of the first paragraph?

It certainly isn’t the first sentence.

In fact, I don’t think it would be possible to select any sentence in paragraph 1 as a main idea. Perhaps one could craft a main idea statement by combining sentences 1 and 2, though that certainly skips a lot of important information.

From a paragraph like that, it’s easy to see why someone might conclude that topics and main ideas are the same thing. But I don’t buy that the paragraph’s main idea is “Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve.” Perhaps this is like the encyclopedia entry: the main idea is how incredible Denali National Park is in terms of its size and what’s found there.

In Paragraph 2, it might even help to ignore the first sentence. A good main idea for this one could be:  In Denali, the park rangers depend upon sled dogs for transportation.

The main idea of Paragraph 3 seems to be placed right in the middle: Sled dogs are more reliable transportation in Denali than machines because they handle the cold weather better than machines do.

And, finally, Paragraph 4, the dogs help the rangers to get to hard-to-reach parts of the park.

Though it is possible to come up with “main ideas” for each of these paragraphs, one also could say that the complete text has an overall point or main idea as well.

Here is where it can help to notice which ideas get repeated and referenced most.

The challenge of Denali (its size, climate, transportation problems, etc.) comes up in all four paragraphs. The dogs’ ability to conquer these problems is noted in paragraphs 2, 3, and 4, as does the notion that these dogs’ abilities are relied upon by Denali’s rangers.

A main idea for this—because of the number of repetitions of each of these ideas and the linking of them to each other—might result in something like: “The Denali National Park is very large, cold, and snowy so transportation is difficult. Because of that, the Denali rangers need to rely upon sled dogs for transportation.”  

The big take away (or, my main idea)?

Despite all the messiness of this terminology…

Everyone agrees that good readers must make these kinds of summary statements about the major, chief, main, key, foremost, or central ideas of informational and argumentative texts.

And, good readers also can identify multiple themes from literary texts. See my earlier blog entry on what it means to teach theme, http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/teaching-kids-to-interpret-theme-the-limits-of-practice#sthash.q5ClgDXB.rOnpeI8Z.dpbs

Good readers have to be able to identify these major ideas—the ones that state the point of the text or that are the most repeated or referenced ideas of the text—with paragraphs, sections of texts, and entire texts.

These main idea statements can be dinged for being too general (such as just stating the topics Denali or Japan) and they can be too specific (citing too many of the specific details instead of some generalization that captures the whole set of ideas). In other words, they need to learn to identify the Goldilocks main idea, the one that is “just right.”

Textbooks and state educational standards use these terms somewhat inconsistently and interchangeably. That just reveals the imperfections of language when addressing such abstract ideas that vary so much by context (think of my various examples above).

Don’t get misled by these linguistic inconsistencies. There are no fine distinctions that are being hidden from you. You just have to nurture the ability to capture these big ideas from a wide variety of texts across a wide variety of genres.

We are trying to figure out how to help our grade 2 students. Currently, we see a big gap in the percentage of students who are meeting standards in Grade K and 1 compared to the same student results in Grade 2 (more than 90% in Grades K and 1 but only 55% in grade 2) In our assessment. We allow students to have questions read in Grade K but not at the end of grade 1. Why might we see this trend consistently across cohorts? Would you be able to recommend 1 or 2 strategies that we could implement as a district (~74,000 students) to influence these data? 

Shanahan response:

Your question seems to be based on the premise that the problem is in the testing. And, that very well may be.

Scaling texts, questions, and tasks so that a second-grade test is the equivalent of a first-grade test one is a lot of work—work that few school districts usually do. It involves calculating local norms and scaling items across years so that cut scores can be set. That gets so involved that I’m curious about your purpose in doing this. If you are just trying to make sure that grading is consistent or that decisions about retention or placements are equivalent that is what it would.

The more usual purpose is that a district is trying to identify kids who are struggling so that they are on track to do well on an accountability test in Grade 3 and above. In those cases, it is important to follow kids across grade levels to determine what levels of performance are needed in the lower grades to assure later success. If you find, for instance, that 90% of the kids who are meeting standards in grade 3, had scored 75% or higher on the first-grade assessment, then that may be a good cut score to set.  

I would not at all be surprised to find out that your tests aren’t equivalent. That might be fixable by changing an administrative procedure (like whether the teacher will read directions or questions aloud or whether kids are expected to do that themselves). Test passages are more likely the issue if it is a comprehension test—how well do text selections represent different increments of performance… are the second-grade texts as much harder than the first-grade texts as the first-grade texts are above the kindergarten texts?

You definitely could spend a lot of time and resources calculating norms, adjusting tasks, and conducting cut-score determination studies to make sure that the tests are telling you what you want to know.

But you might be wrong about all of that… maybe it isn’t actually a testing problem. Maybe your tests are more equivalent than you think.

Maybe it’s the teaching.

Maybe your second-graders really aren’t doing as well as the younger kids. A lot of districts make a big deal out of giving kids a good start (e.g., beginning reading programs for phonemic awareness and phonics, early interventions like Reading Recovery, efforts to place the best reading teachers in those grades). Second-grade, not so much.

It may be wise to task (and fund) someone in your district with developing better norms and cut scores over the next couple of years. But even if you go that way, I’d strongly encourage you to hedge your bets. While resolve your testing problem—making sure that your assessment plan provides what you really want, whatever that might be—it would be sensible to try to improve achievement. Maybe 45% of your second-graders really aren’t reading well enough.

If you want to do that there are only three things you can do to improve students’ reading achievement:

1.  Increase the amount of literacy instruction and experience that your children receive.

How much reading and writing instruction do your second-graders receive?

Many schools budget a 90-minute block for reading instruction in grade 2. Is that enough? Probably not, given your results. Not all schools necessarily have to spend the same amount of time on reading instruction. Some kids are more challenged than others. I would definitely spend more than this if I were teaching kids with disadvantaged backgrounds, or second-language learners, or kids with certain disabilities. I’d spend more time because it takes them more time to get to the levels they will need.

Even when schools schedule enough time for reading instruction, teachers may not use that time as well as they could. The teacher might be reducing this instructional time by using it to read to kids or to give kids a period of time to read on their own or by just by inefficient teaching (like teaching the same lesson over and over to small groups of children).

I’m not saying that teachers shouldn’t read to kids—I would—but it shouldn’t be considered to be “reading instruction,” since we have no research that it improves reading performance for kids at this grade level. I’m not a big fan of having kids read on their own (without close involvement of teachers whose guidance can increase the amount of learning), but I wouldn’t ban it; I just wouldn’t count it as part of the 90 minutes (same reasoning here—the learning payoffs are just too small to go this way).

One of the things I don’t like about the 90-minute reading block is that it is not a 120-minute reading and writing commitment. Kids can learn a lot about reading from writing instruction and omitting writing can undermine your reading instruction efforts.

In my schools, I’ve argued for 120-180 minutes per day of reading and writing instruction. However much time you agree upon for that, I’d encourage your teachers to try to expand beyond its boundaries, by having the kids reading as part of their science and social studies classes (and by that I don't mean round-robin reading).

2. Make sure instruction focuses on teaching those things that improve children’s reading achievement.

Research has identified a number of abilities that can be taught to second-graders that can improve the children’s reading ability.

I think you need to ask yourselves the following questions:

            Are your teachers teaching decoding?

            Are your teachers teaching oral reading fluency?

            Are your teachers teaching reading comprehension?

            Are your teachers teaching vocabulary?

            Are your teachers teaching writing?

Second-graders should receive substantial amounts of instruction in each of these areas. Again, I have usually argued for devoting roughly equal amounts of instruction for decoding, oral reading fluency, comprehension/vocabulary, and writing. If that isn’t happening—if your teachers are minimalizing some of these because of their philosophies or beliefs, or because the district hasn’t adequately supported them—then I would focus district efforts on correcting these oversights.

Often teachers and principals will downplay one or another of these because they don’t match well with the tests that are to be given. If your reading test doesn’t include decoding, then perhaps they de-emphasize such teaching. The same thing happens with oral reading fluency; “if second-graders are going to be tested on silent reading then why teach oral reading?” the thinking goes. And, that can be the reason why writing gets elbowed out the picture, too. (All of those choices may serve to lower reading achievement.)

3. Make sure the instructional quality is high—that means efficient and effective.

There are many general points that can be made about quality. For instance, studies have shown how critical it is that lesson have clear purposes—purposes that both the children and the teachers are conscious of (that way kids can try to learn, and teachers can be more diagnostic, noticing whether the purposes are being accomplished). Another general example would emphasize the importance of being motivational or encouraging.

There are also quality issues that are specific to each of the instructional components noted above. Teachers may claim, for example, that they are teaching oral reading fluency, but what they actually mean is that they are engaging kids in round robin reading (taking turns reading aloud short segments of text). But that approach usually means children aren’t working with texts that are sufficiently difficult, that no one gets much reading practice, that there is no rereading to try to improve performance.

Similar points could be made for all of the areas noted above. How well are they teaching reading comprehension or decoding or vocabulary?

A careful review of current second-grade instructional practices might suggest actions that the second-grade teachers can take. However, there are things that the schools should be doing as well. For example, is student learning being monitored in the areas noted above, and if so, is extra instruction available to the kids who are not performing well? What are the schools doing to involve parents in their kids’ progress (getting them to listen to their kids read can be a big help, for example)?

I’m certainly not arguing against improving the accuracy of your testing scheme, but I would take this opportunity to give all of your students the best chance to become successful readers. That is more likely to come from increasing the amount of teaching, focusing that teaching on key areas of literacy development, and improving on the quality of that teaching.

Good luck.

Of course, if everybody says independent reading, but no one means the same thing, there is a communications problem.

I proposed reserving the term independent reading for situations that are truly independent: in which readers choose to read, choose what they want to read, and are accountable to no one for what they read.

I said that I’d use “required self-selected reading” for those instances when teachers insist that kids read but allow them to choose the texts, and “required limited-choice reading” when the students have text choices, but ones are regulated by the teacher in some way. Finally, “required reading with accountability” would be reserved for those cases in which students are required to do self-selected reading that is to be monitored in some way (e.g., assignments, conferences).

With those terms, at least we can be sure that we are talking about the same thing.

Is reading valuable—that is, does it matter if kids read?

This one seems like a no brainer. Practice is important if someone is going to get good at a skill. I know one can learn from reading—new vocabulary words, the information about the world that an author shares—because I’m a reader. Recently, I read a book on relativity theory by Albert Einstein. I had not understood relativity my entire life until I read that book and I read it without the assistance of a teacher. We can learn from reading!

Logical analyses (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998; Nagy & Anderson, 1984) of children’s vocabulary development make a pretty good case for text reading as an important source of vocabulary growth. We can incidentally gain new vocabulary from conversation and media too, but some words are only likely to come from reading. Descriptive analyses of brain activation during reading (Nestor, 2012) also underscore the value of reading practice in the activation and paring of neural network responses to words (practice makes us faster decoders).

No question about it. Reading can lead to learning and that is true if the reading takes place independently, socially, or under the supervision of a teacher. It is true whether the reading is oral or silent, self-selected or assigned, done at home or at school. It is a good idea to require children to read. It is a good idea to encourage children to read on their own.

Does that mean that all reading practice is equal in terms of learning?

No, I’m not saying all reading practice is equal. I’m just saying that all reading practice has some potential for stimulating some amount of learning. In fact, I think it’s fair to conclude that some forms of reading practice are likely to be more supportive of learning than others. That’s why these distinctions among different kinds of reading are so important: some kinds of reading practice are more effective in benefitting kids. That’s the real issue.

How effective is independent reading?

Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to provide sound estimates of that from existing experimental studies. We only have correlational data about independent reading, and these studies are not very thorough.

Think about it. If we’re really talking about the impact of freely chosen, voluntary reading (as opposed to required reading) then we can’t simply assign kids to an independent reading condition or the research assignment itself becomes an externally imposed reading requirement. Under those circumstances the reading would no longer be independent.

Correlational studies consistently reveal a positive relationship between the amount of independent reading and reading proficiency. Simply put, the best readers tend to read the most.

The problem is that correlations can be read either way: it could be that the kids who practice the most become better readers, but it is just as likely that the best readers enjoy reading more than the kids who struggle to read. And, of course, both of these variables are related to socioeconomic status and that could explain all or a big part of the correlation.

What about the effectiveness of required self-selected reading?

While there is a dearth of experiments on independent reading, there are a slew of such studies on required self-selected reading. I’ve been critical of the quality of such studies in the past, though recent ones have been more rigorous and better reported (though their results haven’t been that different).

Meta-analyses have examined the average impact on reading achievement of summer reading programs (in which kids are encouraged to read on their own during the summer) and sustained silent reading programs (in which kids are encouraged to read on their own during the school day). They have found positive impacts on reading achievement, though the average effect sizes have been pretty low (.14 and .05, respectively—Kim & Quinn, 2013; Yoon, 2002), meaning that such reading leads to learning but not to very much learning.

In contrast, when one looks at instructional interventions in reading—interventions in which kids are taught skills like phonics or fluency or reading comprehension strategies—the average effects tend to be in the .40s (three to eight times higher than the impact of mandated self- selected reading). Reading on one’s own leads to reading improvement, but not to as much reading improvement as usually results when kids read with a teacher.

These are averages. Some teachers may do a lot better than reading alone does, while others might not add as much advantage. Kids differ too. Some are likely to be better learners when left to their own devices, while others might lack the same degree of focus or ability.  

Why is teacher-led reading usually more effective than reading independently?

There are several possible reasons why teacher-led reading is more effective than these more independent forms of reading. It may have to do with text choice or with what happens before, during, and after reading.

Not surprisingly, some books stimulate learning more than others. Some may present information that society judges to be of greater value (that’s why we assign texts on science, but not about sticker collections or Boss Baby).

Some texts are likely to be more supportive of reading development, too. Maybe they use words with particular spelling patterns, academic language, or organizational schemes. Those kinds of texts allow teachers to draw kids’ attention to particular features and to show them how to negotiate them effectively.

When it comes to learning the content of the texts, one usually does better reading with social support than on one’s own, and that advantage is heightened when the texts are more difficult, the content less familiar, or an individual’s internal motivation is attenuated.

Social interactions about texts tend to sharpen our game: having someone to talk to about a book improves comprehension (whether those others are book club buddies, or a teacher hired for that purpose). Social partners can push a reader to reflect more deeply or more thoroughly about ideas, or to notice things that may have escaped them if left to their own devices.

Basically, kids definitely can learn on their own, but we put them in schools and provide them with teachers to try to do better than what the children could do for themselves.

Can required self-selected reading be made more effective?

That was one of the interesting things about those Twitter arguments. Many of the instructional practices that teachers described as “independent reading,” didn’t sound independent at all.

Their descriptions sounded like they were arguing for required self-selected reading or required limited-choice reading, sometimes even required limited-choice reading with accountability. In other words, they were touting the importance of independent reading in their classrooms but not actually providing it.

I suspect that their claims (or their actual practices) leaned hard away from independent reading and towards more instructionally advantaged approaches for a reason, and I think their hunch is right.

The more “independent reading” practices are like effective reading instruction the more powerful they are likely to be. The teacher who said his students were selecting their texts from a teacher-curated collection is likely to be more effective than those who give the kids free reign to read whatever they want during class time.

His approach both increases the chance that the reading will provide an opportunity to learn (if he chooses well) and improves the possibility the teacher will know enough about a text to provide useful reading guidance or to question deeply.

The same can be said for the reading leader who’d provided questioning guides for the approved text choices. Reading conferences based on those guides would probably be better than the shallow improvised ones that I often observe in the laissez-faire classes.

Research is supportive of instructional techniques that encourage students to read texts deeply and thoroughly and intensively (Fisher, Fry, & Hattie, 2016). The question is whether having a student read a self-selected text on his or her own with a brief weekly reading conference (3-5 minutes) with the teacher is enough to inculcate that kind of deep, thorough, intensive reading. Despite the popularity of that conference approach, there are still no research studies supporting its effectiveness.

My personal observations of those one-on-one conferences is that they tend to be pretty shallow and repetitive; more like the teacher is checking to make sure the students read the text or that they could answer a certain kind of question (supposedly practicing a reading skill) rather than trying to take them to a deeper level of interpretation or to identify what text feature may be blocking their understanding.

My point isn’t that one-on-one conferences couldn't possibly lead kids to the type of depth they need to aspire to, only that they usually don’t, and that they tend to be so brief that they rarely will work that way—except perhaps for the best readers. I know that can happen in group reading discussions, too, but the difference in those cases is that the less able readers are included in the discussion and get to observe what the better readers accomplished.  

The conferencing approach to reading is just too inefficient compared to something like a Great Books discussion group or an analytical or synthetic essay written about a text.

If the point is to help kids become better readers, everyone agrees it is important that they read. The only issue is whether kids should be reading on their own when they have a skilled teacher available to guide them to read better. Research, and common sense, suggest keeping teachers more deeply engaged in the instructional process and every reading lesson (and most science and social studies lessons as well) should involve kids in reading texts for substantial amounts of time.

Next Week

That leaves us with one more issue: what about the role of these different kinds of reading in teaching kids to love reading? Does requiring kids to read on their own at school create lifetime readers? Does it encourage them to read more away from school? That’s for next week.

Independence is obviously a gradient; the independence teachers often refer to isn’t about whether kids must read or not (it is usually required in these schemes), but it is about who picks the texts and whether there is any accountability for the reading. By “independent reading,” these teachers really are talking about self-selection of the texts.

Given the importance of literacy in our society it is essential that we teach students to read well. With regard to the learning impact of independent reading, the research findings are pretty commonsense: Kids learn something from practicing reading on their own, but they usually learn more when reading under teacher guidance. If kids really learned as much or more from reading on their own as they do from instruction, then we wouldn’t need teachers.

Many teachers say they devote valuable class time to independent reading not to make kids better readers, but to engender a love of reading. Let’s explore that idea.

Is “love of reading” a legitimate education goal?

Love of reading is kind of a slippery concept.

Some teachers, for instance, seem to advance “love” less as a goal, and more as a long-term strategy for improving reading achievement. Their reasoning is that if kids like reading, they’ll practice it more and this will boost learning (an idea shared by many parents, including those who aren’t big readers themselves).

There is a bit of a philosophical morass surrounding this goal, too. In a democratic society should public institutions, like schools, decide what it is that we should like? Centrally determining that everyone is to share our cultural tastes seems a bit authoritarian. If there is doubt that teachers are judging kids on some kind of “love of reading” continuum, I’d suggest reviewing many of the tweets over this issue in the past several weeks.

Not surprisingly no state has adopted “love of reading” as a public education goal (a couple have said kids should be doing independent reading, but with neither definition nor criteria for demonstrating compliance, suggesting their hearts may not have really been in this one).

If love of reading is an educational goal it is a decidedly personal one adopted by individual teachers, which is fine—but one would recommend caution about prioritizing personal ambitions over publicly agreed upon ones. When teachers say it doesn’t matter whether their approaches raise achievement because they are making kids love reading then things have gotten out of whack. Teaching kids to read well ultimately must trump a teacher’s personal desire to get kids to like what the teacher likes; in other words, feel free to try to get kids to enjoy reading as much as I do, but don’t do it at the kids’ learning expense.

My wife tells me teachers always want their students to “like” whatever they are teaching, and that makes sense to me, though it argues for at least an equal emphasis on making kids love science, math, history, literature, the arts, and so on (one admired colleague tells me he doesn’t want his kids to be passionate about reading, but about some subject that they can read about).

Does required self-selected reading at school lead to greater motivation or a lifelong love of reading?

Who knows?

Some proponents of independent reading argue that kids should have an abundance of texts to read, that they should have unfettered free choice as to what to read, and that this reading should not require accountability. Others reign these freedoms in a bit, limiting text choices or requiring that students talk to the teacher about what they’ve read.

The only one of these practices that anyone has bothered to study in terms of motivation or impact on outside of school reading is the sustained silent reading or drop everything and read model). Those studies have not been particularly positive in terms of motivation: in some cases, the self-selected reading times actually reduced kids’ actual independent reading. Not a surprising finding that: if you want kids to enjoy something, requiring them to do it by themselves and then showing no interest in what they are doing as required by SSR/DEAR is not especially inspiring.

But of those more recent practices like conferring one-on-one with kids about what they read, no one has even bothered to evaluate their impact. The assumption has been that since reading is good, any approach that encourages reading must be good too. But just because the goal is affirmative, does not mean the approach to it is necessarily effective.

When teachers tell me that they are having great success with free reading time and conferencing because their students are reading so much more than they used to, I ask “How much were they reading before and how much are they are reading now?” And the response is always the same: I don’t know how much they were reading before, but some parents tell me their kids are reading more.

In other words, they have no idea whether it is helping or not—or who it is helping—or whether they could do it more effectively… (Currently, anyone in education who dares question the effectiveness of these instructional practices is going to be treated as a bad person who must be shouted down; this discourages any kind of careful consideration of whether the favored practices are benefiting kids or not.)

Then we shouldn’t try to motivate kids to read?

No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that the ways many teachers are trying to get kids to read are unlikely to be effective because they ignore important realities about learning and motivation.

Starting with the obvious: if kids are to love reading, then the better they can read, the greater the chance they’ll find something to read that would be enjoyable and that they could read with ease. Instructional practices that prioritize enjoyment over learning may be as stultifying as helpful. The oft cited statistic that better readers read more suggests that the most powerful enabler of love of reading is effective and efficient reading instruction.

When science or social studies educators try to make kids love their subjects, they seem to aim at improving their teaching practices in powerful ways rather than reducing the teaching (no one has advanced “free science time,” “drop everything and math,” or “social studies conferencing.” Of course, there are experts in reading education with proven records of improving kids’ motivation (John Guthrie), but his approaches don’t fit the Rousseauian philosophy that kids are best served when they receive the least teaching.

Also, it seems evident that you are not going to instill wide reading without the easy availability of texts. Programs that provide texts to kids—especially at home, especially for younger kids—tend to increase the amount of reading (Lindsay, 2010). That’s why classroom libraries, school libraries, and public libraries are so important. That’s why book-providing programs like First Book, Reach Out and Read, and Reading is Fundamental are so important. That’s why book mobiles and other efforts to raise the quantity and quality of books in communities are important.

Choice is important in motivation, too, so proponents of independent reading are definitely on to something there. Theories of motivation have long held that choice matters, and empirical studies show that one can stimulate both better motivation and better achievement through the wise orchestration of choice.

That doesn’t mean that such choice needs to be as wide open as it is in some classrooms. Guthrie and his colleagues set learning goals and raise inquiry questions and then allows kids to freely select the books that will allow them to pursue those questions (which creates a meaningful standard for evaluating the quality of student choices). In other cases, a teacher might have units of study that include a small set of carefully curated texts that students may select among. And, choice within a lesson does not always have to be about which text to read; in many cases, the teacher or curriculum would best determine that, but the kids still can choose the order of the reading, who to read with, how to report out the results of the reading, or even where in the room the reading is to be done. (Those choices are motivational, too.)

Social interactions around text are extremely important, hence my antipathy for approaches that just send kids away to read. Approaches like cooperative learning and “book clubs” where groups of kids work together with varying degrees of supervision to figure out common problems or to pursue socially-determined goals can be both effective in teaching and in arousing student interest and motivation. I think that is the reason for the one-on-one conferencing, a practice that I wouldn’t forbid (it definitely helps kids to make a social connection around reading with the teacher), but I would use it more sparingly because of the obvious efficiency problems inherent in it.

Psychologists have studied the importance of “stimulating tasks” in arousing interest, and I’d pay attention to that. For instance, in science kids might start with hands-on experiments and live observations which raise questions and interest, that then may be pursued through reading. In social studies or literature, the stimulating task might be a social problem that is examined or a video that is observed. This approach assumes that reading itself isn’t the attraction; reading gains its value by allowing us to pursue ideas of interest (thus, “I love dinosaurs so am interested in books about dinosaurs”, rather than “I love reading, so maybe I’ll read these books about dinosaurs”).

What I am saying is that instead of reducing the amount of reading instruction by sending kids off to read on their own—or instead of rendering reading instruction inefficient by conferring with each kid one-on-one about a different book—why not just try to make reading instruction itself more dynamic, interesting, valuable, and social?

But my kids live in poverty communities where they don’t read? What about them?

I object to and disagree with the premise both on personal experience and from studies like those of Denny Taylor’s (“family literacy”). That said, there is no question that in poverty communities, families are less likely to have books available and parent education levels reduce the likelihood that reading will take place frequently in those neighborhoods.

Free reading time at school is not likely to make such kids into lifelong readers. The reason I say that is the problem of transfer. Kids will definitely read when a teacher requires it in class. But when they go home the circumstances are often so different that they are not likely to transfer the behavior across conditions. Pleasure reading becomes something that one does at school not in life.

Instead of writing the community off, why not reach out to parents themselves (Willingham, 2015)? I’ve run successful parent education programs that increased the amount of reading activity in immigrant homes (Project FLAME), other researchers have created programs that pose reading challenges that involve parents in their kids’ out-of-school reading (Colgate, Ginns, & Bagnall, 2017), there are summer reading programs that have had success (e.g., Kim, Allington, McGill-Frantzen). I know of teachers in the Chicago area who do things like have book discussions with kids at lunchtime or who run father-son book clubs outside of the school day.

If you want kids to read beyond the school day, having kids read on their own at school is not the surest way to success.

Requiring kids to read on their own—even if you call it independent reading—is not likely to make kids into lifelong readers. Certainly, some of the practices engaged in by teachers who are going down this road make sense (increased book availability, choice, social connections with teachers), but for the most part their effectiveness and costs (to learning) are unknown. Hedge your bets… make effective instruction motivational instead of assuming that if it’s not instruction then kids will like it. Adopt practices that encourage kids to read on their own—even when you are not requiring it.

I wonder if you could comment on your blog about this crazy idea that the reading specialists should change the program every 12 weeks if a student is not showing growth on the one-minute reading fluency measure. I have second grade student who reads 80 wcpm with 97% accuracy. She made great growth in the fall but has leveled out this winter. She is being removed her from my “program” to Wilson because an outside evaluator said that is what she needs. What do you think?

Shanahan response:

One thing is clear: No matter how I answer this question, somebody is going to be mad at me.

That’s okay with me, I’ll find some way to get out of bed in the morning anyway.

However, the reason these kinds of questions are tricky is because the questioner, from his/her point of view tells me the critical information (critical from his or her point of view)—and the folks on the other side of the argument would have provided me with other information that they think matters.

One time a teacher wrote asking my opinion given the “facts” she had provided. I answered, and she apparently took the answer to the school board. Then the superintendent wrote to me adding some information, and I replied with a somewhat different answer. I’ll do my best to make sense of this question, but don’t be surprised if up the road there is more information that might change my mind.

Should reading specialists change their program every 12 weeks if a student is not showing growth?

I guess that depends on what you mean by “program.”

  If I see that a child is not learning from a given lesson, I’ll make changes to try to correct the problem, adapting my teaching to make sure that it works. That might entail adding explanation or examples or extending the lesson longer. Maybe I’ll come up with a new approach and try the same lesson again tomorrow.

  In this case, you are talking about larger changes than that. If I’ve determined that a young child has a fluency problem and have developed or selected a program to address that need, I’m not going to stop focusing on fluency instruction just because I have a lesson go belly up on me.

  How much time and how much information I’d need to determine whether to make a program change will depend. (By a “program change” I mean moving a youngster from a Title I reading program to a Special Education based intervention; or moving from one commercial program to another; or deciding that a phonics intervention might be better than a fluency-oriented one).

  It will depend on whether I have gained new information about the child that I lacked when the original decision was made. That could be because I’ve worked with the child for a significant amount of time and have seen responses that don’t match with my original decisions or it could be that we collected more test data on the child which changed my mind.

  When it comes to foundational skills decisions with primary grade students… 12 weeks should be a sufficient amount of time on which to make this kind of decision. If a student is not making progress for 12 weeks, I, too, would be concerned and would consider a change. Making program changes of these types once or twice or even three times in a school year is not crazy. (Some folks try to make such decisions more often than that—testing kids weekly, for instance—but that’s foolish, since these tests aren’t refined enough to allow for such fine learning distinctions.)

Should consequential educational decisions be based upon 1-minute oral reading fluency measures?

  If students aren’t making learning progress, it is important to adjust instruction to meet their needs. The idea that kids may be doing poorly now but that they’ll mature and do better later is unwise and has hurt a lot of kids. Kids should not be allowed to languish with no or low learning for extended periods of time.

  However, I’m puzzled about the use of a 1-minute oral reading fluency measure to make this kind of decision. A one-minute oral read won’t provide a reliable estimate of how well a child can read a text fluently. And, if such a test is unreliable, then it is also invalid—since validity depends, in part, on reliability.

  One of the more popular oral reading measures is DIBELS. To estimate kids’ oral reading fluency, DIBELS requires that children perform two one-minute reads; two readings, two passages. That’s where their reliability comes from — from the two minutes of reading performance. The levels of reliability that DIBELS and DIBELS-like testing procedures can obtain are probably sufficient for many instructional decisions.

  In 2001, Sheila Valencia and her colleagues put these kinds of testing procedures to the test. They found big problems with one-minute reads. Significantly more reliable and valid outcomes on such tests required three-minutes of oral reading.

  So, I’m willing to test kids every few months to determine if their foundational reading skills are improving and to make instructional changes if they are not.

  But I wouldn’t make such changes on the basis of a one-minute oral reading. Malpractice!

Should second-graders be assigned to special phonics instruction based upon an oral reading fluency measure?

Typically, one would not make consequential reading decisions based upon any single measure. If I were sending kids to special education or a reading specialist I would want to be both certain that the child was experiencing difficulty in reading and I would want to have some idea of the pattern of reading skills and abilities the child had so we could make sure he/she would learn.

  To accomplish that, one would usually need more than a single measure (even if that were a reliable measure).

  More specifically, if a youngster were struggling with oral reading fluency (as measured by a reliable, valid measure), I would not just assume that the student had a fluency problem requiring explicit fluency instruction—and that is especially true with young students.

  I would, in such a case, want to know about that student’s ability to decode. Some kids with fluency problems really struggle with phonics and their low words correct per minute rates may be due to phonics difficulties. Other kids who don’t read well orally may be pretty accomplished when it comes to phonics (see work by Carol Chomsky, for instance). I would need to know more than that reading accuracy and speed were low before I could determine a sound instructional response.

  If someone assigned students to the Wilson phonics program because of an oral reading fluency test alone, I’d have concerns. Don’t misunderstand, I like the Wilson phonics program and I use oral reading measures. Those aren’t the problems here. The only issue should be about what approach would most likely benefit the student, and even a reliable oral reading fluency test on its own would not be adequate to make such a decision. I’d certainly want to know about this student’s decoding skills (and comprehension, too).

  You evidently don’t agree with the decision made for this student. From my vantage, I can’t tell if it was a good or a bad decision, but if were made on the basis of the information that you provided, there is a very good chance that they have erred.

What would you do with a student who performed at this reading level?

I don’t have a clue.

  I’m very puzzled about the information you provided, and my puzzlement is part of my skepticism.

  You say this student reads at 80 wcpm in the winter of second grade. While I don’t trust that assessment, for the reasons, given above, if I take this score at face value, it would mean that this student is reading at a rate and accuracy only slightly below what an average second-grader would be expected to obtain (Hasbrouck & Tindal, 2016).

  I wouldn’t put an average reader in a special intervention, no matter which department was providing it.

  I wouldn’t put a second-grader with average reading scores in a special phonics program, especially this late in the year. I wouldn’t expect that to improve his/her reading accuracy or rate and if phonics instruction isn’t going to boost those, it certainly won’t facilitate comprehension.

  If a student reads fluently (and a mid-year second-grader who can cold read a second-grade text with 80wcpm is reading fluently), then my concerns would be with reading comprehension and vocabulary instruction, not phonics.

Dan, when asked what could be done to break out of these doldrums, explained the importance increasing what our kids know about the world. Atlantic summarized his point: “whether or not readers understand a text depends far more on how much background knowledge and vocabulary they have relating to the topic than on how much they’ve practiced comprehension skills.”

Research has long shown the importance of knowledge in comprehension. If a reader knows much about a topic, his/her reading comprehension rises.

Studies of what American kids (and adults) know about science, geography, economics, technology, and history suggest that Professor Willingham has a point. Our kids simply don’t know enough. (There are great inequities in knowledge distribution, just as there is great inequality in reading attainment.)

Observations of preschool and primary grade classrooms reveal a rather limited amount of attention to building world knowledge in these early years.

No one has argued more strenuously than I for devoting scads of time to reading and writing instruction. But even I agree that content knowledge is important in reading and that time is also needed to develop such knowledge. Unfortunately, time for reading instruction all too often comes at the expense of content learning.

What can be done to turn this around? Here are 10 suggestions. I wonder which ones will be most controversial in your schools.

 1.     Make sure reading texts present high-quality content (including excellent literature, as well as informational texts that explore our natural and social worlds).

It is often asserted that, “It doesn’t matter what they read, just that they read.”

Poppycock!

As a student, father, grandparent, citizen, scientist, member of the human race… I couldn’t disagree more. It’s like claiming, “It doesn’t matter what they eat, just that they eat.”  

Just as a steady diet of potato chips, ice cream, and soda pop is not nutritious (God knows I’ve tried it), reading forgettable drivel is nothing but empty calories. Nothing wrong with the occasional guilty pleasure, but for heaven’s sake it matters what our kids read.

Whether you teach from a textbook (core program) or an assembly of little books from the bookroom it is critical that kids read literature worth knowing, along with substantive content drawn from the sciences, the arts, social studies, and so on.

Quality and content considerations are important, too, when one is stocking a classroom library. 

Teaching kids to read with texts rich in content distracts from reading nary a jot, but offers kids a chance to explore spiders, forensic science, or how and why different languages punctuate or capitalize.

 2.     Set content learning goals along with the reading goals for reading lessons.

No matter how rich the texts may be, they won’t much increase knowledge—unless teachers emphasize the content.

Decades ago the late Michael Pressley used to fume over the wrongheadedness of so much reading strategy instruction. For those who don’t know, Michael was a grand supporter of strategy teaching. But, for him, such teaching had to provide more than strategy practice. A strategy lesson wasn’t sound unless the kids were learning the content of the texts that the strategies were practiced upon.

I’ve long argued that core reading programs should pose both reading objectives (e.g., students will learn to identify a main idea) and content ones (e.g., how does soap make you clean, what role does loyalty play in human relations).

Make sure your kids learn from what they read—even during the reading class.

3.     Read multiple texts on a topic.

I’m a proponent of having students (second-grade readers and up) reading more complex—and, yes, even more difficult—texts. To make that work, teachers need to scaffold kids’ reading.

One effective scaffold is to have kids reading multiple texts on a single topic. As they learn information from one text, that can serve as a useful support for making sense of another.

There are wonderful schemes out there for creating text and media sets that can provide this kind of support, for integrating science and literacy through multiple texts, and for project-based learning.

Such approaches build both reading ability and world knowledge.

4.     Include content texts in your read aloud work.

Let’s leave no rock unturned.

Even if teachers buy what I’m saying about presenting richer content within reading texts, this idea seems to evaporate if we are talking about teacher read alouds or kids’ oral reading fluency practice.

But these activities provide worthwhile content learning opportunities, too—even with young children.

Teachers often go out of their way to have kids practice oral reading fluency with poetry. But there is no reason why this can’t be done well with a social studies or math book--I’ve seen big benefits from such practice.

5.     Break the reading block.

Many schools have a set “reading block.” They’ve scheduled a specific 90-minutes when teachers must teach reading. God forbid if the reading gets out.

I’m not a big supporter of reading blocks (a subject for another time), but every good designer learns there is art in “breaking the border.” The best teachers find ways of taking reading over the reading block border.

Most reading skills can be taught as well with a science book as with the assortment of texts relegated to the reading block.

Sadly, many schools, in an effort to enhance reading, curtail the arts and sciences.

Instead of dropping your music program or elbowing social studies out of the curriculum, it makes more sense to bring text into those subjects. Not for the kind of round robin reading that so often is reading’s “place” in such classes (no wonder they get dropped), but for real reading.

Ask yourself, if I want kids to know about timbre in music, how can text best support this learning? What should kids read in addition to the ear training I’m going to provide? How should they read those texts? (A paragraph at a time aloud in a group of 25? I don’t think so).

The time devoted to learning how to read about timbre should count as much as the time used to read a story about a boy who looks like a mouse—just because we go out of our way to ask “inferencing” questions about one of these texts doesn’t distinguish.

6.     Try not to pull kids out of science, social studies, or the arts for interventions.

If you read this recommendation, be sure to read the one that follows, too.

When kids are falling behind in reading we often pull them out of class for extra tuition in reading. Yep, RtI intervention time.

Some schools protect content teaching by expanding the reading block to include intervention time, which means that Johnny or Janey get their extra phonics then, rather than instead of social studies. Some clever interventionists even rotate their instructional times so that kids don’t always lose out on the same content (limiting the damage). My favorite schools have even found ways to provide interventions beyond school days and school years, so that the subject content can be protected--hooray.

I get it. School days are complicated, and reading is important. If we let kids fall back in reading they will eventually lose out in science, history, and math anyway. In many situations there is no other way than to pull kids out of those knowledge building classes.

Nevertheless, you need to do whatever you can to protect content instruction. It matters.

7.     When it is necessary to pull kids out of content courses for reading interventions (and sometimes it is), build that content into the IEP.

I rarely see an IEP (or more informal learning plan) that provides any intention of replacing the content learning that the intervention is going to countermand.

Let’s say you have a struggling reader whose intervention is going to take the place of his social studies class.

What about the social studies content? Can any of the reading work be done with the social studies book (in class or in the intervention)?  Can/will mom or dad help? Do we have any afterschool options there? What can be done with our audio and video resources to sneak this content back into this student’s learning?

Let’s be as diligent about that part of the problem as we are about the reading deficit.

8.     Write about content.

Remember recommendations 2 and 4? Writing, too, belongs in content area classes. Having kids write about content that they have read about increases content learning. ‘Nuf said.

9.     Establish content clubs—even in elementary schools.

High school academic clubs are common: French club, Red Cross, United Nations, Debate, etc. Those clubs give kids a great chance for increasing knowledge beyond the school day. (Such clubs are most available to our most advantaged and knowledgeable students and are less prevalent in economically depressed communities; something I hope foundations and community groups will try to address.)

Wouldn’t it be great to have such clubs in the elementary schools, too?

In fact, some elementary schools do this, something I recently learned from Tyler, my kindergarten grandson. He is a proud member of the science club and is learning all kinds of cool things about science in this multi-age club (getting to work with the older kids is a real attraction for Tyler).

Again, look for opportunities for expanding kids’ academic knowledge.

10.  Use technology to break the borders of content classes.

I’m not a tech geek, but I’m a big fan of Catlin Tucker… and she manages to be very techy without being geeky at all. Just as I put in a pitch for reading within content classes, she argues the importance of discussion in learning content.

She’s not wrong, but where will all this reading and discussion time come from?

One solution is to use tech platforms like Schoology to expand class discussions about content beyond the classroom. Caitlin provides some sage advice on how to blend online and in-class content discussions.

Again, an example of expanding the opportunity to build knowledge—without undermining reading instruction at all.

Good readers know a lot about their world. Let’s not let reading instruction be the enemy of knowledge.

I am a reading specialist and a parent. My daughter is in first grade. Her classroom teachers have all the books in the classroom library leveled, and students are not allowed to go beyond their reading level during "Independent" reading. If the teacher assesses a child inaccurately then that child is stuck reading texts that may be too easy or too challenging. Also, every child knows what reading level they are on as well as everyone else's reading level; this Talk creates competition and negative feelings toward reading! Reading turns into a contest and inevitably some kids are going to feel bad about themselves. What if a student really wants to read a higher-level book about, say, cats. Maybe the child knows a ton about cats, and really loves them so she is very motivated to read this particular book. The teacher then says, "No, that's not your reading level. You have to wait until you are a better reader before you can read that book." You’ve written a lot about problems with the instructional level, what about the independent reading level and these crazy instructional practices?

Shanahan responds:

I hate to hear this kind of thing. The teacher is trying to do a nice thing for your daughter—to make sure she spends her time reading books that she can understand and get good reading practice with—but her approach is not likely to be successful for all the reasons that you give. I feel your pain.

Research has suggested that “independent level” idea is problematic for more than 50 years.

Every reader is supposed to have an independent level… that is, since books can be arrayed on a continuum of difficulty of text levels then a given reader is supposed to have the ability to understand, enjoy, and learn from some levels, but not others. Since the 1940s reading experts have told students and their parents that kids had to be able to read 99% of the words accurately and be able to comprehend 90% of the content to be able to read such a text on their own. (Indeed, there are problems in testing this kind of thing accurately. Burns et al, 2015 found that more than half the students with the lowest reading skills were reading texts at frustration level, even though the teacher had tested them and placed them in “instructional level” texts.)

Of course, we test reading levels with general passages… they are on various topics with no particular match to any one child’s tastes, interests, or background experiences (even well-known ones such as gender differences).

But independent reading—if it is really independent—is driven by reader interest. I’m more likely to read about presidents of the U.S. than prime ministers of Great Britain; baseball than soccer; Bob Dylan than Amy Winehouse. I choose to read about those topics because I’m interested in them.

Studies have shown for decades that interest has an impact on reading comprehension, and oral reading accuracy, too (e.g., Asher, Hymel, & Wigfield, 1976; Baker & Wigfield, 1999; Bray & Barron, 2003-2004; Scott, et al., 1985).

One explanation of that impact is bound up in the relationship between interest and knowledge. I may have a greater desire to read about baseball, but I also know a heck of a lot more about Kris Bryant than Leonardo Bonucci. Is it my motivation that makes the difference or my prior knowledge? The studies haven’t satisfactorily sorted out the cause of that to my satisfaction, but the effect is well known and widely accepted by the research community, nevertheless.

What that means is that the teacher has an estimate of the difficulty of the text that a student was tested on (in terms of word frequencies, sentence lengths, or other factors that don’t have much to do with the reason someone would choose to read a book). She sees that the student made too many mistakes with such a text to believe that enjoyment of it is possible. Consequently, she cautions the student from all such books…. Books that they could read better than she assumes because of their knowledge and interest.

So, your intuition that reading levels don’t make much sense when it comes to independent reading because of problems of testing and the effects of motivation and knowledge is a good one.

My hunch is that this is not really meant as “independent” reading time. What the teacher is going for here is practice reading of texts that resemble those she is teaching with. If your daughter is trying to read books that are harder than that. then she won’t be practicing the same words and skills that she is being taught. That makes some sense with beginning readers—though how much sense it makes is uncertain according to various experts (Snow et al., 1998). It appears to be a decidedly weak approach to building reading skills: the teacher could advance your daughter's reading more effectively by taking a more active hand in the instructional activities.

Enjoyment of independent reading seems to be a decidedly tertiary (and expendable) goal in this case. That your daughter is put off by being prohibited from reading the same books her friends are reading is a tip off that love of reading is not the crux of what the teacher is aiming at with this activity. If love of reading were the teacher’s point, your daughter’s angst over her reading segregation would be a prime consideration.  

That fact may may allow you to negotiate for some latitude in this teacher’s practice. Perhaps your daughter can check out two books: one the teacher wants her to practice to gain the appropriate repetition of classroom skills and one to satisfy her own interests and aspirations as a reader. Sort of like allowing a piano student some time to try to play tunes while still putting in the requisite hours on the scales.

Your daughter’s aspirations as a reader are the problem here. Some kids are allowed to read the red-dot books and others are stuck with the baby books with the blue dots. She wants to be a red dot kid, to hang with the red dot kids, to be seen as a red dot kid… but her teacher can only see her as a blue dot kid and she must learn to stay to her own bookshelf with her own kind if she is going to succeed in this classroom.

That shouldn’t be surprising. Study after study finds that young readers select independent reading books that are harder than their “independent reading levels” (Donovan, et al., 2010). Of course, this is more likely for the lowest readers, but it is even true for many of the best ones, too. This teacher’s practices are exacerbating this problem by making it socially desirable to get to read the same books the other kids are.

As I’ve written before, I don’t really believe in this whole instructional level idea when it comes to teaching reading (except with beginning readers). There are big problems in validly and reliably measuring kid’s reading levels and the text levels (especially in grade 1); and the idea that there is a specific way to match kids to text that maximizes learning doesn’t appear to be valid either.

Given my skepticism, I may not be the best arbiter of this issue. Your question, perhaps, would be better asked of advocates of the reading level idea.

Actually, somebody has already done just that, putting those same queries to Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas (Parrott, 2017). Their names seem to be synonymous with leveled reading, so their views on this may carry some real weight with such a teacher.

What did they say?

They vigorously and eloquently rejected both the idea of leveling classroom libraries and of prohibiting kids from reading particular levels of books for enjoyment. Here’s a link to that source: https://www.slj.com/2017/10/literacy/fountas-pinnell-say-librarians-guide-readers-interest-not-level/#_

Perhaps sharing their opinions of these practices with your daughter’s teacher might lead to a reprieve.

In the meantime, explain to your daughter that the teacher is trying to help her but that we teachers sometimes don’t get it right, and that you can’t always “fight city hall.”

For now, she should read the required "independent reading" books for her teacher and when she comes home she can read what she really wants to read. Perhaps you can identify some of those books that would allow your daughter to make the social connections she desires and put them on the home bookshelf. That puts a bit more pressure on you to support her reading habit, but you sound like a pretty committed Mom, so I suspect that’s going to happen anyway. I’m pulling for both of you.

Teacher question:

I was curious what your thoughts are regarding small group instruction in Elementary school during the ELA block.  I’m unaware of any definitive research on the effect size of small group instruction or the impact it has regarding student achievement in reading. There seems to be a few different schools of thought: direct whole group instruction for all components of reading, shortened whole group reading followed by differentiated small group instruction, whole group instruction followed by student work groups facilitated by teacher walking around. It seems all three could be effective depending on the students, the teacher and rigor of text or content being used.  However, I’m curious if there is a research-based recommendation? 

Shanahan’s response:

What a smart question.

Small group teaching is ubiquitous in elementary reading. Sixty-years ago (when I was being taught to read) the same was true—though since our classes then were so large, “small group” usually meant groups about the size of today’s typical classroom enrollment!

A hundred years ago there was a great deal of within-class grouping, but that was due to the pervasive one-room schoolhouse. The “groups” were the “grades” that the kids were in (my dad, for years, bragged that he “graduated at the top of his class”—meaning that the other kid flunked).

When I was first exploring the idea of becoming a teacher myself, the lore of the time was that reading teachers always had three reading groups: the Robins, Blue Jays, and Crows. As a teacher’s aide it looked that way to me, and I certainly wasn’t surprised during student teaching when Mr. Krentzin had me take over his reading groups one at a time, so I could ease into it.

As a primary grade teacher, I always grouped my kids for reading instruction. (Studies since the 1960s usually report that more than 90% of primary grade teachers group for reading instruction, and the numbers are still high in grades 4 and 5, as well).

Nevertheless, I’ve been surprised recently by the odd practice of organizing instruction specifically around the idea of “small group” teaching. In the past, the grouping was to match book levels to the kids’ reading levels (let’s face it, the Crows just can’t keep up).

But this is different: by organizing the schedule around “small group time” these schools are promoting the idea that small group teaching is valuable—no matter what the teacher may be teaching or what the kids’ levels may be or what the materials are that they are using.

That makes your question especially timely. Does small group teaching advantage kids in learning to read?

John Hattie identified three meta-analyses on small group instruction and reported it to have a medium-to-large effect (.49) on learning. However, few of the studies in those meta-analyses focused on reading, they weren’t always comparing small group teaching to whole class instruction, and some of the reading studies were from back in the day when 45-60 kids in a class was common practice. Several of the studies were based on secondary school and college teaching, too.

Robert Slavin also conducted a best-evidence synthesis of research on grouping back in the 1980s (effect size of .32). But at that time, he found no reading studies that compared grouping for reading instruction with whole class teaching.

Not exactly the evidence base I’d want to use for recommendations about elementary reading instruction.

However, even if we were to rely on those meta-analyses, the payoff of grouping for reading instruction had lower effects than was found for the other subjects (only .13), and it mattered a great deal how large the groups were—groups of 5 or larger received little or no learning benefit from within-class grouping (Lou, et al., 1996).

There are a couple of sizable individual studies I think we need to consider, however.

For example, Kamil and Rausher (1990) conducted a study in which they compared whole class reading instruction with small group teaching in a large suburban school district. Surprisingly, they found that small groups “were not superior to whole class” teaching in terms of learning. There was just “too much variance within classrooms for the grouping patterns to have much of an impact.”

Even more sobering is a large study of grouping in reading conducted by Sørensen & Hallinan (1986). They found small group teaching more effective than whole class instruction—that is, if one compares 30 minutes of small group teaching versus 30 minutes of whole class teaching, the kids in the small group tend to make larger learning gains.

However, they also found small group teaching provides kids with fewer learning opportunities. Basically, teachers teach more when teaching whole class.

Comparing equal amounts of small group teaching with whole class teaching might make sense to researchers, but it has little to do with the actual circumstances of classrooms. If a teacher has three groups who each receive 20 minutes of teaching, this should not be compared with 20 minutes of whole class instruction… but with 60 minutes—the time it takes to teach the three groups (in fact, it might even be fairer to compare it with 65-75 minutes because it takes transition time to switch out these groups).

When one compares small group and whole class instruction in this more meaningful way, small group teaching loses its advantage; that is, no differences in average achievement.

But, that doesn’t mean there’s no impact. What Sørensen & Hallinan (1986) concluded was that the high groups tended to get more learning opportunities in small group instruction than the low groups. And, since race and SES are correlated with reading, Black kids and poor kids (and I imagine ELLs) are more likely to find themselves in the low groups. Thus, there is no overall or average learning benefit for small group teaching, but there is a bit of rotation that ensures that minority kids make the least progress.

My conclusion from this is that small group teaching is beneficial in that it improves the impact of a lesson on the kids who are taught the lesson. But amount of instruction matters, too, and when kids are grouped they are necessarily going to get less teaching. It’s a tradeoff at best. But we also need to be concerned about the lower readers who tend to be somewhat disadvantaged by this approach.

I’m not willing to give up altogether on small group instruction (or even individual teaching)—because there can be useful learning advantages from it. But I’d never organize classrooms so as to ensure that they specifically deliver small group teaching. And, I’d always try to minimize small group teaching whenever possible for the sake of efficiency.

Never do with a small group, what you could be done as well with the whole class. I’ve observed the identical lesson being delivered repeatedly to groups of three, for instance. That is foolish—even if the curriculum director mandated small group teaching. Similarly, the idea that conferencing one-on-one about a book (for 2-5 minutes) is going to take kids to the same depth of interpretation with a text that a group or whole class discussion (for 30-60 minutes) is strikingly unconvincing.

Districts would be wise to provide teachers with professional development in the most effective ways to teach whole classes--including how to use grouping within those classrooms when it is sensible. Seatwork is necessary in both small group and whole class instruction. In the former, the assignments are aimed at keeping the kids busy while the teacher works with other groups, while in the latter the teacher is usually able to circulate among the kids while they work on the assignment (giving support and additional guidance as needed). Perhaps teachers would be better off teaching a whole class lesson, that was followed by individual work done in ability groups (in other words, three or four different follow up assignments based upon the lesson depending on the students’ levels). Then the teacher could circulate, helping kids at all levels.

Last week I watched my friend, Catlin Tucker, showing teachers how she organizes her classrooms by task. If kids are working on research projects, she groups them based on what part of the project they are focused on at a given time. That allows her to maximize the power of her instruction, without the inefficiencies of unnecessary grouping.

In other schemes, teachers deliver whole class lessons, monitoring kids' success and then small group work is reserved for re-teaching as needed.

Of course, there are approaches like cooperative grouping that have good research records, but that allow for a mix of whole class, small group, and individual work without the large losses of time evident in most small group centered classrooms. Cooperative grouping, project based learning, and other similar approaches may be beneficial in part because they don’t lock kids into reading levels--but encourage work with grade level texts or with a range of text difficulties.

Maximize the amount of learning opportunity that you provide to students. Use groups to focus on different learning tasks or to follow up whole class lessons as needed. Don’t group for the sake of grouping and minimize grouping on the basis of reading level—at least beyond grade one.

But this was going to be a strange situation.

The school had adopted a curriculum program I’d developed. They hadn’t told me that. Now I was to critique teachers who were using my lessons. Uncomfortable territory.

The principal assured me it would be fine since the classes using my stuff were doing well—better test scores than in the past. I wasn’t so sure.

Two teachers were using the program: one was experienced but she’d never taught reading before, and the other was a rookie.

I watched the first teacher, had the follow up meeting… nothing remarkable.

But then I sat in on the neophyte’s class. She wasn’t a superstar—yet. But she was darn good, one of those lessons that probably couldn’t get much better. What she may have lacked in artfulness, she more than made up in fundamental teaching chops. Heinemann probably wouldn’t sign her to a book contract, but you’d be pleased if she were teaching your kids!

During that lesson I started to think I was pretty wonderful. Here was a fresh-faced beginning teacher, a greenie, working with a challenged bunch of kids and outperforming past teachers… using my program. Magic!

Then I came to my senses.

For instance, when presenting the brilliant vocabulary lesson that I’d designed, the rook would sometimes add an extra example of a word’s meaning; other times, she omitted one.

The same kind of thing happened during the comprehension portion of the lesson: Sometimes she’d ask the wonderful questions as I’d written them, sometimes she’d recast one or omit one or add one.

It looked like she was following my lesson plan, and she was, kinda. But she was also sort of teaching her own lesson.

When we sat down for our debriefing, she immediately thanked me for designing such a wonderful program. She explained that she wouldn’t have known what to do if it hadn’t been for me. That was true—in a way. And, yet, it was only part of the reason for her pedagogical success.

That incident came to mind while reading a new research synthesis (Parsons, Vaughn, Scales, Gallagher, et al., 2018) published this month in Review of Educational Research that examined studies of “teachers’ instructional adaptations;” the kind of instructional responsiveness that rookie had demonstrated.

Parsons and company reported that studies over the past 40 years have described the phenomenon in a variety of ways: instructional decision-making, scaffolding, reflective teaching, adaptation, teacher metacognition, dialogic teaching, etc. But whatever it has been called, it’s an essential, and too often ignored, component of effective teaching.

Coaching has been found to enable adaptive teaching (Vogt & Rogalla, 2009), and six studies reported that focusing teacher attention on student learning (assessment) improved both teacher adaptability and student outcomes. Teaching experience also tends to improve adaptability (my rookie was an outlier—it usually takes awhile to gain the kind of “teacher vision” she exhibited).

What was it that I had seen in that observation? A complex pedagogical dance between a teacher trying to adhere to the major outlines of a program—I’d provided the bones of the lesson and sequenced the major activities—while she observed the students’ responses and reacted accordingly. If she saw confusion, she reworded my script or added an example or helpful explanation. If the lesson was clear, but student interest was flagging, she added a teaspoon of enthusiasm and kept their heads in the game.

That reminds me that there are two really important things underlying effective teaching.

On the one hand, as teachers we need to have a profound understanding of what needs to be taught. It matters that primary teachers possess a depth of knowledge of the alphabetic system, or that high school algebra teachers be well schooled in math. That’s where great curricula come in; a coordinated body of texts, lesson plans, and activities that have a strong chance of engendering the desired knowledge and skills.

On the other hand, slavishly following such a curriculum is unlikely to succeed, unless teachers are wisely adaptive. Effective teaching will always be more than following a script. Teachers must assess on the fly and note whether the kids are getting it and if they are not, then something needs to happen. Teachers must make both immediate adjustments—adding explanations, changing examples, requiring more practice—and more ambitious changes, too (“today’s lesson was a bust, I need to reteach it tomorrow”).

I worry these days about the idea of teaching with “fidelity to program.” Was my rookie evidencing fidelity? In a way she was. And, yet, any careful analysis of a transcript of her lesson would reveal that she was making important adaptations to my brilliant handiwork. She was taking a good lesson and making it go. Both components are essential, and one is no more important than the other if learning is the goal.

I’m a big fan of shared curriculum because without it, it is virtually impossible to get large-scale school improvement. Likewise, it makes no sense to adopt such a shared curriculum and then tell everyone they can do whatever they want with it. But such a collective commitment to a common program of instruction in no way should limit a teacher’s ability to adapt lessons to student response. Follow the research, teacher adaptation matters.

Teacher question:

What’s the difference between comprehension skills and comprehension strategies? Are they synonyms or do we teach different things when we are teaching them?

Shanahan response:

I’m glad you asked.

Comprehension skills and comprehension strategies are very different things.

They are often confused; the terms are often used interchangeably by those who don’t understand or appreciate the distinctions they carry.

And, most importantly, these concepts energize different kinds of teaching.

The older of the two terms is “reading comprehension skills.” It was used occasionally throughout the Twentieth Century, but really took off in a big way in the 1950s. Professional development texts and basal readers were replete with the term and its use burgeoned for about 30 years before slackening a bit.

“Comprehension strategies” were rarely heard of until the 1970s. The term had wide use throughout the 1980s, both because of the extensive strategy research and because those promoting comprehension skills appropriated the newer, trendier label—old wine in new bottles. (Some of this due to honest ignorance and some to the frequent but idiotic claim of educators that any new practice is “what we were already doing.”)

Use of the term strategies finally overtook skills in 2000, but not necessarily because the practices of teachers actually had changed.

Basically, the term comprehension skills tend to refer to the abilities required to answer particular kinds of comprehension questions. Skills would include things like identifying the main idea, recognizing supporting details, drawing conclusions, inferencing, comparing and contrasting, evaluating critically, knowing vocabulary meaning, and sequencing events.   

The old basal readers would make sure kids got plenty of practice with particular comprehension skills by making sure they practiced answering particular kinds of questions.

These days, the core reading programs do pretty much the same thing with the educational standards, with each standard being translated into a question type in lessons and assessments.

For most of these skills, there are no studies showing that they can be taught in a way that leads to higher comprehension, and even in those few instances where there is such evidence, the effects are quite small (and probably due to greater attention to reading the text than to practicing the so-called “skills.”)

In fact, there have been a number of studies and logical analyses showing that these skills lack any kind of psychological reality… they are indistinguishable from one another in test performance, though that hasn’t stopped instructional designers from trying to come up with programs that would teach these skills in a way that would benefit achievement (e.g., Wisconsin Design).

There has been a lot of research into question types over the past 50-60 years. Despite the claims, this body of research is a morass. There are so many variables that may be affecting any of these results, that it would be impossible to know what it all means.

Here are just a few of the variables found to affect how readers answer questions: poor/good readers; low/high knowledge readers; story/information text; the centrality of the information queried; verbatim vs. paraphrase; open-ended versus close-ended questions; reading or re-reading; text available or unavailable during answering; amount of text; factual vs. inferential; immediate recall vs. delay; and so on. (Of course, it is this complexity that undermines any possibility that one can teach question answering as a skill).

Reading has much more to do with being able to read particular kinds of texts and to deal with particular kinds of text features than to answer particular kinds of questions. The ACT (2006) concluded, for example, that if texts were easy, students could answer any kinds of question about them, while with sufficiently complex texts, they couldn’t answer any question types, no matter how simple.

An odd kind of skill the performance of which is totally dependent on the contexts in which it is used. Each text presents information in its own way, and reading comprehension is heavily bound up in the readers’ knowledge of the topic covered by the text. As such reading comprehension (different than decoding) is not a skilled activity, per se.

If comprehension is not a skill, then why has that been such a popular way to teach it? Initially, the concept fit the times. In the late 1950s when it “broke out,” B.F. Skinner’s version of behavioral psychology (e.g., stimulus-response, programmed learning) was in vogue. The idea that learning would result if we could simply induce particular responses to questions and then reward kids for their answers—rinse and repeat—seemed very convincing.

It has been harder to eradicate than a fungus, I assume, because it appears to map onto educational standards and the high-stakes tests. Principals and teachers assume it makes sense to practice the “comprehension skills” that tripped the kids up on the tests. So, they “use their data”: combing through test results to identify the kinds of questions that students failed on and then practicing those supposed skills over and over in the hopes the kids will be enabled to answer such questions on the next test. That it hasn’t actually worked doesn’t seem to dissuade them at all.

The idea of comprehension strategies is more recent, and it has a substantial body of research behind it. If the notion of comprehension skills emerged from behaviorism, then comprehension strategies is the child of cognitive psychology. Instead of repetition and automaticity as the watchwords to learning, intention and decision-making and thinking move to the forefront with strategies.

The basic premise of strategies is that readers need to actively think about the ideas in text if they are going to understand. And, since determining how to think about a text involves choices, strategies are tied up in meta-cognition (that is, thinking about thinking).

Comprehension strategies are not about coming up with answers to particular kinds of questions, but they describe actions that may help a reader to figure out and remember the information from a text.

For example, the idea of the summarization strategy is that readers should stop occasionally during reading to sum up what an author has said up to that point. Doing that throughout a reading and at the end has been found to increase recall… recall in general, not of any particular type of information.

Another frequently studied comprehension strategy is questioning. Students read, stopping throughout to quiz themselves on what the text says (and going back and rereading if one’s questions can’t be answered). The point isn’t to ask particular kinds of questions, so much as to think about the content more thoroughly, more actively than one would do if they just read from the first word to the last.

The same can be said about monitoring, visualizing, thinking about the way the text is structured or organized, rereading, and connecting the content with one’s prior knowledge.

These kinds of actions—these strategies—are used intentionally by readers to increase the chances of understanding or remembering what one has read.

Comprehension strategies need to be practiced too; however, they aren’t learned by repetition and reinforcement, but by gradual release of responsibility (including modeling, explanation, guided practice).

If you are serious about raising reading achievement, there is no point to teaching most comprehension skills. (Note: vocabulary is often listed as a comprehension skill and there are benefits to teaching that.).

On the other hand, there are very good reasons for teaching comprehension strategies, but there are at least three big problems with that kind of teaching.

First, studies of comprehension strategies have tended to be brief, usually about 6 weeks in duration (there are exceptions). Somehow that has been translated into substantial amounts of strategy teaching across students’ school lives. To be perfectly honest, no one, including me, knows how much strategy instruction is needed. But there is certainly no evidence that there are benefits to be derived from 8 to 10 years of 30-35 weeks of strategy teaching.

Second, the only point to using strategies is to make sense of texts that couldn't be grasped without that effort. Many texts are easy enough that a reader would not need to expend that amount of energy in comprehending. Unfortunately, most strategy instruction that I have seen takes place in texts that frankly are relatively easy for the kids to read. That means they have to pretend to apply those strategies in situations that wouldn’t benefit from such effort. If kids ever do apply these strategies to complex text, they are usually on their own. Most skip the effort since what such teaching conveys is that you don’t need strategies.

Finally, even major proponents of explicit comprehension strategy instruction (like the late Michael Pressley, for instance) argued that as important as it was to teach strategies, teachers needed—even when teaching them—to make sure the kids were actually learning the text content and not just the strategies they were using to think about that content. That principle largely has been ignored by teachers and publishers.

More on the teaching of comprehension skills and strategies next week; should we guide students' reading?

Teacher question:

It seems to me that asking a series of good questions about what an author appears to be telling us allows students (all of us) to build our knowledge, learn how to question conclusions, and overall just better understand the text at hand. Do you agree or am I still missing something? 

Last week, I posted an explanation of the difference between comprehension strategies and comprehension skills. Before answering your thoughtful question about comprehension teaching, let’s quickly review what I said previously.

Shanahan response:

Basically, comprehension skills have been conceptualized as the ability to answer certain kinds of questions.  Accordingly, there is a main idea skill and a comparison skill and a supporting details skill and so on. In their zeal to teach standards-appropriate skills, teachers and publishers transform the standards into questions. Skills teaching devolves into having kids practicing answering those questions.

Skills, by their very nature, are meant to be automatic; someone should learn to implement them without conscious attention.

The problem is that, for the most part, these question types are not really comprehension skills and they do not translate into effective teaching or learning.

Comprehension strategies, on the other hand, have a different history and a different purpose. Comprehension strategies refer to intentional (not automatic) actions a reader takes to keep his/her head in the game. Comprehension strategies include summarization. Not the ability to write a summary, but the use of summarization as a technique for increasing understanding and recall. When reading a challenging text, an effective reader may stop occasionally to sum up the text. Summarizing occasionally during reading, develops a clearer understanding of a text.

Strategies like monitoring, self-questioning, visualizing, comparing the text with prior knowledge, identifying text organization, and so on are all intentional, purposeful actions that are effective in improving comprehension or recall.

Comprehension strategies don’t improve the ability to answer specific kinds of questions, but they have substantial research support showing their ability to improve reading comprehension generally and definitely should be taught.

Instructional implications?

Let’s consider skills first.

The right amount of time to spend on comprehension skills in curriculum, instruction, or assessment? Zero.

Skills practice is a time waster. It’s like pushing the elevator button twice. It makes you feel better, perhaps, but the elevator doesn’t come any more quickly.

Teaching comprehension skills might make you feel like you are doing something, but it won’t improve students’ reading comprehension.

But, this week’s question rightfully queries the practice of guiding reading with questions. Does it make sense to have kids reading texts and then asking them questions about them. Isn’t that just the skills practice that I derided?

E.L. Thorndike first took up this issue in 1917. He assigned readers to two groups; one that just read, and one that read and responded to questions. The question-answerers ended with better comprehension, and researchers started recommending that readers do more than just read in the classroom. Teacher questions and discussion time became a standard of reading instruction practice. (Later research showed that answering questions improves recall for the information questioned, but not for the rest of the information—and the questioned information was more likely to be remembered later (Andre, 1990; Wixson, 1983)).

In the mid-1930s, when publishers started including teacher’s guides along with their basals, following Thorndike, they provided lists of questions to be asked for each story. It was not long before the idea emerged that there were certain kinds of questions that should be asked, and over the years this idea morphed into what we now think of as “comprehension skills.”

It isn’t much of a distance from the idea that questions focus one’s attention, to the possibility that experiences with certain types of questions could more generally focus one’s attention on particular kinds of text information. It’s not that easy, however.

This kind of attention focusing works, but only when the information emphasized is easy to identify and parallel across texts. Students, given multiple text reading tasks, who early on are asked questions about numbers or dates, get better at paying attention to that kind of info in subsequent readings (Anderson, 1977).

However, most question types don’t focus readers’ attention quite this powerfully.

It’s one thing to be on the lookout for the numbers in a text and quite another to draw correct conclusions. Texts are just too varied to allow information-types to be identified easily. Main ideas, inferences, application, interpretation, right there, think and search, relationships, supporting details, comparisons, drawing conclusions, higher-order questions, and so on are all question types that instructional programs or tests claim to emphasize, but none of these are generally identifiable in any useful way by readers. Therefore, they are not likely to have much impact on anybody’s reading ability.

If you ask kids questions that challenge an author’s claims, they’ll probably come away with doubts about the author’s conclusions (and will be more likely to remember those doubts later). Yay, critical reading questions.

However, if the idea is that by asking such questions, readers in the future will be more likely to recognize the short-comings evident in subsequent texts, well that outcome is much less likely.

Indeed, keep having kids read text, and definitely engage them in discussions of those texts, but form your questions--not on the basis of standards or skills lists—but on the basis of the texts themselves. Your questions should lead kids to think deeply about a text and to come away with a coherent and lasting memory of its content and aesthetic qualities.

Reading should be about that; not about answering particular kinds of questions, even if the questions vaguely resemble the ones on your state assessment test.

If there is such a thing as comprehension skills, they are made up of those repeatable things we do while reading that allow us to understand a text. Things like making sense of the meaning of unknown words based on context or morphology. Or, recognizing that a term is an idiom and can’t be looked up in a conventional dictionary. Or, making sense of the complicated grammar of a sentence. Or, making cohesive links among the words and ideas across a text. Or, identifying and using the structure or organization of the text. Or, drawing logical inferences during reading.

These actually are comprehension skills because they enable comprehension and because being able to do them can improve one’s performance with multiple texts.

Readers usually don’t read text looking for information that they could use to answer particular kinds of questions. But they do use the meanings of words again and again, and they do learn to recognize verbs in sentences, and to recognize that authors sometimes use synonyms instead of repeating the same words.  

Guiding students in the reading of texts that are difficult to read… and using questions to get them to confront the sources of that complexity and to hold them accountable for learning the content through questioning, discussions, projects, and writing assignments are central to the teaching of reading comprehension.

And, what about strategy instruction? Where does that fit into this picture?

Comprehension strategies should be taught—and, according to research, should be taught using a gradual release of responsibility approach. That just means that the teacher models and explains when, how, and why to implement the strategies. Then the teacher guides students to use the strategies themselves, turning more and more of the responsibility for that over to them gradually.

However, in our pendulum-oriented field, we have a tendency to either ignore the teaching of strategies altogether (which disadvantages kids since strategies can help them to be active as readers and focused on making sense of texts), or to teach strategies ad nauseum.

Studies of strategy teaching usually have examined brief regimens of instruction, so it’s fair to say that we may be overdoing it a bit. (Strategy teaching is a research-based idea but teaching strategies 180-days a year for 12-13 years has nothing to do with research). There are no studies evaluating the diminishing returns of strategy instruction, but for most kids 6-10 weeks of such teaching each year is likely plenty. But even during strategy teaching, there needs to be a major focus on mastering the content of the texts; that’s the only purpose for the strategies in the first place, and kids should see, from the beginning, that they work in helping accomplish that goal.

What does it mean to teach reading comprehension?

Guide kids to read—and reread—challenging texts with thoughtful questions.

Get kids to think deeply about the parts of the text that might trip up their understanding.

Teach kids to keep their heads in the game—reading mindfully—through strategy use.

Make sure kids come away knowing more about their world each time they read.

What should you avoid?

Having kids practice answering certain kinds of questions.

Placing greater emphasis on comprehension skills and strategies than on the content of the texts being read.

I've been bringing my shared reading teaching into my small groups. The students read a text during shared reading and we spend time analyzing the text and really digging in—nuances of the language, comprehension of the text, vocabulary, and so on. From there we move into small groups where students answer standards-based questions about the text.  

My concern at this point is this: I find myself doing pretty much the same lesson in small groups for all the groups. Should I be doing this (answering standards-based questions) in the whole group instruction? Then what about small groups? What do they look like?

Part of the difficulty I experience is that I only have 90 minutes of reading instruction. This is supposed to be 30 minutes whole group instruction, in which I am to teach phonics, vocabulary, writing, grammar, comprehension, etc.; and 60 minutes of small group. As you can imagine, it is difficult to do all the teaching that needs to be done in 30 minutes prior to moving into small groups. 

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions/comments/insights.

Shanahan response:

I would never organize my instructional day around a grouping scheme or classroom management plan.

Changing the size of the group I’m going to teach is something that I do strategically. I teach individuals or smaller groups or the whole class based on what I’m trying to accomplish. If I can meet my teaching objective more certainly or more efficiently by grouping in a particular way, then that's what I try to do….

Examples:

(A) Yesterday, I taught a lesson to my class and a half-dozen kids didn’t do well with it. I want to meet with the laggards again to reteach that lesson….

(B) I’m teaching PA and it is difficult to get the kids to see my mouth when I’m saying words, so I divide into smaller groups to intensify the teaching.

(C) I’ve been teaching my class using reciprocal teaching. I’ve been working with them as a whole class demonstrating how to use predicting, questioning, summarizing, and clarifying, and I’ve been gradually releasing control to them. Today I want to take another step in that direction, so I’ve divided my class into four groups and everyone has a particular responsibility for reading a shared text and taking part in the discussion (for instance, one child in each group is responsible for getting everyone to make a prediction and so on). Each group is working on this while I move from group-to-group as necessary.

I might decide that I’m going to need 10-15 minutes with a small group to reteach a lesson as shown in example A, but I will do this because I have a small group that needs reteaching to accomplish an objective—not because it’s “small-group time.”

If you look at these three examples, you’ll see that I’m using grouping for a variety of reasons. First, I used it to differentiate instruction. In example A, some kids need instruction that the others do not. I can do that most efficiently by splitting off a group for a brief period of time.

I’m also using grouping to allow intensification of the students’ learning experiences in a lesson and to better control attention. In example B, I wanted the kids to not just hear the words, but to see their articulation up close—in order to speed their progress in developing the ability to perceive the language sounds.

And, I use grouping to foster greater independence. In example C, the kids have to guide and help each other more, though I’m still hovering nearby. At some point, I’ll have them applying these strategies independently, but for now the groups create opportunities for the kids to explain the strategies to each other and to execute them with less teacher support.

We often think of small groups as being of a particular size or purpose... but even when you do something like paired-reading for fluency, you are grouping, though the groups in that case only have two kids in each. Which is my favorite configuration for fluency practice... I can circulate from pair to pair during a 30-minute lesson, and on average everyone gets 15 minutes of reading practice, substantially more oral reading experience than kids can get even in more traditional small groups.

If you find yourself repeating the same lesson over-and-over, as you describe, then I think you are wasting time. Try having kids respond to those same kinds of questions with the whole class, rather than in groups.

I’d use white boards or the kids’ notebooks for this… getting everyone to jot answers down prior to discussion. In other words, I’ll get individual responses before we open it up to the whole class discussion. That means everyone has to think about the questions, everyone has to try to answer. You can seat kids so as to allow you to monitor those written responses easily (I favor horseshoes and double horseshoe seating plans. That way, you'll know who's having trouble and can address those needs (immediately, or later, perhaps in small group).

Of course, you can use think-pair-share or turn-and-talk for this purpose as well (as you can see, there is not one way to skin a reading objective).

Experiment with all of this but approaching the problem this way should provide a more powerful teaching experience for the kids, and more satisfying professional experience for you.

You’ll have more time for a deeper discussion of each selection, every student will have an opportunity to respond to every query, and, if you hone your discussion-leader skills, you might not even lose any of the interactions that you are currently generating in the small group discussions.

Another possibility would be to ramp up text difficulty even more... working with texts that the kids struggle with--and staying with those texts until the kids can read them at an instructional level (which would mean by the end they would read that text fluently and with high comprehension).

With texts that difficult, the kids will need closer reading supervision. Small group teaching in such a circumstance very well might have the different groups reading the same texts and trying to answer the same questions. The grouping would not lead so much to different teaching, but to everyone getting sufficient support when trying to accomplish something they couldn't do without that much support.

If you were a plumber, we would not prescribe daily "wrench time" for your practice. That'd be silly, since a wrench is just a tool that a plumber uses to address various problems. You want him to use it as needed.

You may not be a plumber, but you are a teacher, and small-group teaching is nothing more than a tool. Use it to address real problems. Small group time is not how you spending a particular part of your day.

My question is about disciplinary literacy. Should we be guiding teachers to integrate social studies or science and ELA or having our ELA teachers teaching disciplinary literacy for these subjects? Our curriculum focuses on overarching concepts and essential questions.

Shanahan response:

You raise two separate issues here: curriculum integration and who has responsibility for the disciplinary literacy standards.

Let me take them one at a time.

I don’t oppose integrating social studies or science and literature, but I’m definitely cautious about such combinations.

We want our students to develop a clear appreciation of what literature is, how it’s read, what it brings to the table, and so on.

We want the same for history and science and math and music and the visual arts and physical education and… well, you get the idea.

The tendency in integrated instruction is to kind of knock the edges off those different subjects; like using literature as an information source in a social studies class, rather than as a work of art that conveys a mood, tone, or zeitgeist of an era. Thus, in such units we may have kids reading historical fiction that aims to recreate the era under study, rather than considering the implications of the art that emerged from the historical period in question. We’ll have kids reading Johnny Tremain in a history unit about the American Revolution (which fictionalizes various events in revolutionary Boston), but not the children’s books of the late 18^th Century which could help reveal the nature of life at the time.

(And, of course, even with the reading of historical fiction, a good deal of the accompanying LEA instruction should still focus on issues that would be of little importance to the integration with the social studies… characterization, plot structure, vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, and so on.)

Equally problematic, on the social studies side of such integration, is the danger of treating the historical, geographical, and economic texts in a fashion more appropriate to literature (like accepting a novel as an independent work of art, not requiring corroboration from other sources).

The same is true for science, of course. Philip Dick’s science fiction is wonderful, and yet, what a terrible source for developing an understanding of physics (and comparing the factual underpinnings of his science with today’s scientific findings may have some limited literary value but would not be expected to foster a deep understanding of science).

However, if you can integrate science or social studies with literature in ways that allow kids to appreciate specialness of each including how they differ and what they bring to the party—and that will lead to deep knowledge on both sides of the curricular divide—then go for it. (Let’s face it. That is almost impossible to do with mathematics, so I’m not even trying to give examples of that.)

If that can’t be accomplished, then avoid integration.

There are lots of authoritative recommendations encouraging curriculum integration, but very few studies with findings showing it to be effective. It is hard to do well, but when it is done well, the results can be satisfying.

And, as for your second question:

The emphasis on disciplinary literacy in many states’ educational standards is not aimed at increased integration of teaching across subject matters. It is aimed at teaching students how to engage in the special reading and writing routines inherent in the body of knowledge and inquiry approaches of the various disciplines.

Reading, as such, is neither a content area nor a discipline.

Teaching students to negotiate the special text features of different kinds of books (science, math, history, and literature texts differ in many ways), or to read and write in the specialized ways of an historian, literary critic, mathematician, or scientist are not about combining curriculum goals or standards across classrooms or an attempt to get teachers to work together.

Disciplinary literacy is being emphasized because the reading and writing of the different disciplines is specialized and even unique. Those literacy routines are linked to the content and inquiry approaches of the disciplines, and as such require attention in each of those classes.

The ELA teacher should not be the one charged with the responsibility of fostering an ability to read like a scientist. That needs to come from the science teachers who will be teaching science content, assigning science texts and writing assignments, and engaging kids in scientific inquiry.

My hesitation about integration has to do with the importance of protecting the content of the subjects that are to be combined.

The emphasis on learning the discipline-specific requirements of reading and writing is really part of this same hesitation. Teachers in the disciplinary subjects need to stop protecting their students from the reading requirements of their disciplines and start teaching them to engage in the discipline-specific literacy practices that won’t be learned elsewhere. That has nothing to do with curriculum integration, nor is it aimed at getting ELA teachers to try to be science or social studies teachers.

I’ve collected some data on first-grade writing. I developed a plan for getting 6-year-olds to write arguments and I have a rubric designed to allow me to figure out how well my supports help them to write effective arguments (evaluating whether they took a clear position on the topic, and how much evidence they used). I tried it out and gave the kids plenty of time but was surprised to find that they didn’t write much; I’m having trouble evaluating the quality of this writing given how few words they produced. Any ideas on how to better evaluate the impact of what I did?

 Shanahan’s response:

The specifics of your question are unique—most educators aren’t doing research—but the issue you raise comes up often.

For instance, I frequently hear from kindergarten, first-, and even second-grade teachers who are required to teach the Common Core State writing standards. Those standards require that first-graders be able to:

• “Write opinion pieces in which they introduce the topic or name the book they are writing about, state an opinion, supply a reason for the opinion, and provide some sense of closure."
• “Write informative/explanatory texts in which they name a topic, supply some facts about the topic, and provide some sense of closure."
• “Write narratives in which they recount two or more appropriately sequenced events, include some details regarding what happened, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide some sense of closure.”

They write plaintively to me that their students’ writing doesn’t resemble those descriptions and for the same reason that you give. Most young kids struggle to write enough words to satisfy any of those goals. For those kids, writing might be no more than a sentence, and a hard-won sentence at that.

One of the problems here has to do with expectations. Teachers read those standards and assume those outcomes can routinely be accomplished by average kids. However, no such normative data exist on first-grade writing, so being perfectly honest, no one (including me) really knows what the average 6-year-old can write or the conditions that need to exist for that to happen.

Many of us “grew up” on Lucy Calkins and Donald Graves’s accounts of first-grade writing, and though enlightening, those results were not obtained from “average children,” something that Carol Vukelich and others have written about when they have collected first-grade writing data from larger and more representative samples of 6-year-olds.

As a former first-grade teacher who worked with kids a bit below average, I know we can stimulate writing fluency among first-graders, but that takes a lot of teaching. Just having a good, supportive pre-writing plan alone will not be sufficient in most cases.

We don’t provide teachers with much support for writing instruction. Back in the 1970s I did a study that showed that there weren’t elementary writing programs, writing wasn’t on the report cards, parents didn’t ask about writing, and teachers didn’t receive training in writing. Things have improved since then, and yet not much of what is now provided acknowledges the fact that most first-graders aren’t particularly fluent writers. Thy simply don't tend to elaborate.

I guess I should be happy that there is current interest in improving the “quality” of first-grade writing. But, in my experience, writing quality is something you worry about once kids can actually produce a bunch of words about ideas—not before.

Your writing preparation plan explained clearly what you wanted and provided students with evidence that they could use in their compositions. Those are real pluses. However, they didn’t reach your goal, because those things aren’t what are preventing young kids from wrting fluently.

As a first-grade teacher, my boys and girls wrote every single day. My goal? To get them to produce a bunch of writing. What about focus—the ability to stay on a topic? Not an issue until they can write a bunch of sentences. What about argument structure? Ten words rarely has much structure.

What—for the writing process proponents in my audience—about revision? Revising among young children tends to be adding, not true revising (look at Lucy Calkin’s doctoral dissertation).

Initially my priority is for children to get ideas on paper—lots of ideas. My first-graders engaged in revision a few times a year; not enough to make them good revisers, but sufficient for informing them about what was coming in the future.  

There will be plenty of time in Grades 2 and 3 to making sure that students make logical arguments, that their narratives are appropriately sequenced, and that their expositions include related details. But first let’s get words on paper.

What can teachers do to develop writing fluency with young children?

1.  Encourage talk.

Writing is a secondary form of language. When it comes to expressing themselves, kids think of talking, not writing. Consequently, one of the best prewriting activities is talking. Get kids to tell a story and then see if they can write it (the second version will be abbreviated, but not as abbreviated as if that student had started with writing). The exercise used to support argument writing that led to the query above didn’t include student talk. Next time—after you’ve read a text to the students and explained evidence—have them do a “Turn and Talk” with their neighbor—stating their opinions and ideas that support that opinion. Do something like that and you'll see better writing.

2. Encourage drawing.

Another good way to stimulate writing is to begin with drawing. Expressing oneself in writing is easier once the ideas are on paper pictorially. By second-grade, drawing becomes a way to illustrate the written words, but with younger kids drawing gives them something to write about. For writing arguments, what if you’d given the kids a piece of drawing paper divided into thirds—a place for a picture illustrating each piece of supporting evidence? I bet the writing would get richer.

3. Support drawing and talking.

One of my favorite prewriting activities—because it worked so well—with first-graders is to have them draw pictures. And, then each child presents his or her picture to the group and the other kids ask questions about it. The picture presenter answers the questions and I let this go on until the presenter has enough ideas for a good piece of writing.

4. Accept free spelling.

One of the biggest threats to early writing fluency is children’s concerns about doing it “right.” It is really important to stress that spelling doesn’t matter during this kind of writing (spelling matters in lots of situations, but not when you are getting your ideas onto paper). Any child who knows letters and letter sounds should be able to write reasonably legible text. Some teachers like to provide word lists to help the kids or to run around the class writing words for them, and that’s okay, but those approaches         don’t provide as much phonological awareness or phonics practice as just letting them write the words the way they think they are spelled. No matter how you do it in your classroom, kids shouldn’t be slowed down by concerns about spelling.

5. Hold talkathons and writing marathons.

One of the hardest things about beginning writing (at any age) is that it requires the writer to sustain an extended monologue. I can have wonderful conversations with my three-year-old grandchildren, but a conversation is a like a game of catch. You react to me; I react to you. I don’t sustain the expression, and you don’t sustain it; we do that   together. But with writing, the writer has to think up one sentence after another without any support from a conversational partner. Try involving your students in      monologue practice. My first-graders started the year trying to give 5-second talks; when they could sustain that, we moved to 10-second talks—and so on, through the year. By year’s end each of them could talk on a single topic for a full 60-seconds without any support. Similarly, we did writing marathons where they learned to write non-stop for 2- or 3-minutes (if they ran out of ideas, they were to copy the last sentence they had written until they got another idea). The point is to get them to think while writing (rather than think-write-think-write), and not to stop just because their hands get tired.                          

If you engage in those kinds of instructional practices, your kindergartners and first-graders will eventually produce a lot more writing. Once they do, you can guide them to improve their texts; but until they can generate much writing, accomplishing sophisticated argument will be tough sledding.  

Awhile back I was a member of the National Reading Panel (NRP) that reviewed instructional research on the teaching of reading at the request of the U.S. Congress. One of my roles was to serve on the “alphabetics committee” that reviewed the research on phonemic awareness and phonics instruction.

Since then it has happened numerous times, like it did this week.

Some self-proclaimed phonics authority attributes findings to the NRP that we didn’t actually find (usually because they didn’t actually read it).

The one this week has been one of the more frequent misclaims. He claimed that the NRP found synthetic phonics instruction to be more effective than analytic phonics instruction.

Synthetic phonics instruction focuses on teaching each individual letter sound and having kids try to sound each letter or letter combination (like th, sh) one at a time and then try to blend those back into word pronunciations.

By contrast, analytic approaches focus attention on larger spelling generalizations (like rimes: ab, ad, ag, ack, am, an) and word analogies (if game is pronounced with a long a then came must be pronounced with a long a).

What did the National Reading Panel conclude about synthetic and analytic phonics instruction? That they both conferred a learning advantage on young readers. The average effect size was somewhat higher for synthetic than analytic approaches, but not significantly so (it was so small a difference that one can’t say one is really higher than the other). In other words, synthetic and analytic phonics are equally good.

It is certainly possible that with more studies and with the same pattern of results that we’d eventually conclude that synthetic phonics is best, but that is a surmise, not a research finding.

Why does this equivalence confuse so many phonics proponents?

The NRP concluded that early, explicit, systematic phonics teaching gives kids a learning advantage. Systematic, not synthetic. (Systematic means that the phonics instruction followed a scope-and-sequence, the teacher didn’t just teach phonics as she thought kids might need it.)

Systematic-synthetic, synthetic-systematic… maybe my phonics friends are looking at the first two letters and then guessing the rest of the word… which is not a very good decoding strategy.

Or, they simply believe that synthetic phonics is best and don’t recognize the damage they do by claiming research support for their beliefs.

When I was becoming a teacher—nearly a lifetime ago—my professors emphasized the superiority of analytic phonics (based on logic rather than research). I believed them, but then tried to teach phonics in first-grade.

It worked fine, usually, but there were kids who struggled to use words as analogies and to recognize the larger spelling units. It just seemed too abstract for some of them.

Although I’d been told it was wrong, out of desperation I tried teaching these kids with synthetic phonics… and they were able to get it. For these kids, working with each of the individual letters was simpler to understand and it seemed to me that they were learning to decode better.

Don’t get me wrong. My claim here isn’t that the research findings should be damned and that my experience allows me to conclude synthetic phonics to be superior to analytic phonics.

I don’t go there, because research has also found problems with the blending part of synthetic phonics. It can be tough to keep from adding vowel sounds to individual consonant phonemes. Synthetic phonics works better when it includes explicit teaching in blending, including engaging kids in the kinds of exercises one finds in Words their Way, morphological teaching, or other more analytic approaches.

The take away: Make sure young children receive daily, explicit, systematic decoding instruction.

But don’t be fanatical about synthetic or analytic approaches.

Synthetic phonics can be a bit easier to catch onto, but its effectiveness can be undermined by blending problems (and some of the analytic approaches can help with that).

Analytic phonics is, in my experience—and perhaps in that small effect size difference—harder to learn, but it can avoid some of those blending problems and tends to be more consistent with what kids will need to learn about morphology.

Sometimes the right solution is “and” and it not “either/or.” Adopt a good phonics program, and make sure it works for your students—which might require that you add some synthetic or analytic instruction depending on how they are doing.

I love that whole idea of Judy and Mickey with their teenage backs to the wall, singing and dancing their way to success (and into our hearts). Younger folks might prefer a more recent analogy—like Footloose—but then I’d have to be a younger blogger who is less than 6-degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

I’m not the only one who appreciates the spunk and eventual success manifest in these films.

Just look at the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The idea was that American education was on the ropes, so let’s adopt high standards that will set college- and workplace-ready goals for U.S. schools and…

And, hey kids, let’s roll up those sleeves, dance and sing like crazy until the world is a better place and everyone can read and write well enough to learn and work and participate in our techno-centric civic and social life. Oh boy, I can’t wait for the big performance number at the end in which even the poorest kids get to raise their voices to show that they can read well, too. MGM would be very proud.

Unless they read the new report released this week by the Thomas Fordham Foundation, Reading and Writing Instruction in America’s Schools by David Griffith and Ann M. Duffett

https://edexcellence.net/publications/reading-and-writing-instruction-in-americas-schools

In 2012, Fordham surveyed America’s English Language Arts (ELA) teachers to determine what their CCSS-relevant instructional practices were. (That was when CCSS was first issued.) Now, eight years after wide adoption of these standards, they've surveyed teachers again.

Whether you think the education system is as audacious, exuberant, entertaining, and successful as Mickey and Judy (or Kevin) depends on which part of the report you read.

Sure, there are more teachers teaching reading with expository text and narrative non-fiction, too. There has also been an increase in the teaching of vocabulary. And more teachers are asking kids to support their answers with evidence from the texts. (Thank you, CCSS).

But those were the simple shifts: America’s schools were already increasing exposition and vocabulary teaching in the reading curriculum during the decade leading up to CCSS and asking kids to show where their answers were coming from is a pretty simple adjustment. (The first reading class I took in 1969 stressed that too, so it’s not exactly revolutionary.)

What about some of the more challenging CCSS-inspired shifts? Teaching with complex text, having kids write about content, using ELA instruction to build kids’ cultural literacy and domain knowledge? Let’s just say, Judy and Mickey wouldn’t have been happy with our efforts: They’d be plowing and milking this summer instead of dancing and singing.

As Shakespeare wrote, “the problem is not in our stars but in ourselves.” In this case, the problem is not in our standards but in our implementation.

Are teachers more focused on content writing (that is, having kids write about historical, social, and scientific ideas) or are they having kids write about personal stuff and what they already know? According to the report, teachers have doubled down on the personal at the expense of academic writing. (The report doesn’t give a sense that teachers have exactly embraced the idea of kids learning a lot about their world from reading either it is fair to note—in fact, they themselves expressed the need for more attention to that).

How about reading classical literature (the so-called “literary canon,” whatever that is these days)? Less, not more, according to the survey.

How about teaching kids to negotiate the complexity of grade level texts? Even more emphasis, according to the report, on teaching students with relatively easy texts that shouldn’t require much teaching. (Forty-two percent of the teachers were concerned that if you exposed kids to grade level texts they’d just be discouraged.)

Judy Garland once sang about a place “Over the Rainbow” where “dreams really do come true.”

Sadly, our literacy dreams have not come true. We put on a show, and nobody came.

This isn’t surprising. Teaching is hard—even harder than putting on a good show.

There is only one thing that raises literacy levels: students’ academic experiences.

If you want to see higher levels of literacy, then you should increase the amount of teaching that kids receive (and the amount of reading and writing that we enage them in).

You need to make sure those academic experiences are focused on things that actually improve reading achievement (like phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, writing, and content knowledge—rather than teaching test-question types).

Finally, you need to make sure that the teaching students receive is as efficient and powerful as it can be (by teaching with books that are hard enough to present opportunities to learn and making sure kids—and teachers—understand the purposes of lessons).

The standards movement labors under a theory that postulates school achievement will improve if we adopt high learning goals, then align tests with those goals. Teachers will see those goals and be frightened enough by those tests that they’ll teach kids to read more successfully.

Past generations - you know the ones that raised American literacy levels (Kaestle has described very steady growth in American literacy from 1776 until the 1970s when things stalled) - weren’t quite that fancy. They did crazy things like increase the amount of schooling that kids received (or brought populations into school that had not been enrolled previously). They increased the education levels of teachers. And they increased supports for them to teach well (look at the changes in reading textbooks in the 1930s, for instance).

If you want to raise reading achievement, kids will have to read more demanding texts. But that means teachers will need to know why that is and how to prepare them for and support them in reading those texts (instead of how to avoid such instruction). Kids aren’t necessarily discouraged by challenging text, but they are often insulted by the below grade level substitutes teachers use in the place of such text.

If you want reading levels to rise, you’ll have to make sure that what kids are reading (and what they are doing with the texts they read) increases their knowledge of history and science and our literary culture.

Standards can only be a start.

States were wise to adopt such high standards. I just wish they would have matched that wisdom with an equal commitment of the energy and resources needed to implement them well.

Countries that have raised literacy achievement have adopted higher standards, but then they aligned their entire instructional system to those higher standards: instructional materials, tests, professional development, teacher and principal education, and parent and media expectations. Now that really can work.

Or you can put on a show…. It worked for Judy and Mickey.

Other links of interest:

Literacy Lifelines (based on this survey):

http://edex.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/%2807.19%29%20Literacy%20Lifelines%20for%20America%27s%20English%20Language%20Arts%20Teachers.pdf

Thomas Fordham Foundation's 2013 survey on these issues: https://edexcellence.net/publications/common-core-in-the-schools

Stephen Sawchuk's (Education Week) take on the new report:

https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2018/07/the_state_of_common-core_reading_5_charts.html?r=85432269

Teacher question: 

Should we teach letter names or letter sounds to beginning readers?

Shanahan responds:

Twice recently teachers have asked this question. In both instances they said they’d been told teaching letter names confused children and that “best practice” was to focus on the sounds rather than the letter names.

As a former first-grade teacher, I vividly remember the kids who when confronted with a word like what would start sounding /d/ (duh). At first I was puzzled, but I quickly caught on that these young’uns were trying to find the sound in the letter name, double-you, and were settling for the first sound in that name.

Obviously, the pronunciation of W was getting in the way (no wonder some teachers tell young children that it is really a “Wubble-you”). W is different than b, d, j, k, p, t, v, and z, in this regard. In each of those cases, the pronunciation of the letter provides a valuable cue as to the most common phoneme represented by that letter. There are also several other letters whose names at least get you close to the right sound (f, l, m, n, s), and still others whose names cue a useful (if not most frequent) phoneme… a, e, i, o, u, c, g.

Beginning reading instruction has included letter name instruction for time immemorial. The very first schoolbooks brought to America from England (The Protestant Tutor) started with the alphabet, as did the first reading books produced here (New England Primer).

Correlational evidence has long supported the practice: beginning readers’ knowledge of the ABCs is a strong predictor of later reading success. The National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) meta-analyzed 52 such studies that had connected ABC knowledge with the later decoding ability of 7,570 kids and found a strong relationship. The more letter names the kids knew, the greater their later success in decoding.

There has been a lot of discussion of all of this over the years (Gibson & Levin, 1975), but with little experimental evidence to go on. The earliest such studies focused on the effects of teaching artificial alphabets, with the conclusion that kids could read words made up of pretend letters even if they didn’t learn their names (e.g., Samuels, 1972). Interesting, but not especially persuasive when it comes to real reading.

Since then there have been several studies that have tried similar things with real letters, typically teaching or not teaching a few to see what happens. The outcomes here have been more mixed, but as with the artificial alphabet studies, the results haven’t been especially convincing because the kids already knew lots of letters which confounds things a bit. No wonder Marilyn Adams (1990) concluded there was little evidence supporting the benefits of teaching the alphabet.

With so little evidence to go on--and such consistent correlations--there are bound to be disagreements. I know of no widely used instructional program that omits letter names, but that practice certainly has its critics (McGinnis, 2003) who are certain--again with no convincing evidence--that letter names hopelessly confuse children.

More recent studies have tended to examine the value of the alphabet within the context of phonemic sensitivity training than on its own. The conclusion from these studies? Training in PA and the alphabet together generally has a much higher impact on later reading achievement than PA teaching alone (NELP, 2008). In other words, for some reason, the inclusion of letters in a PA curriculum has a multiplier impact on its outcome.

Jean Foulin (2005) produced one of the most complete considerations of the problem. He reviewed studies that examined the alphabet’s facilitative effects in learning to read (e.g., Roberts, 2003) both to determine whether such instruction made sense and why letter name knowledge might help. His conclusions: (1) beginning reading instruction should include a serious effort to teach letter names and letter recognition and the sounds associated with letters; and (2) we need a lot more research because it isn’t entirely clear why alphabet knowledge exerts the positive effects that have been found for it.

Given that such an erudite and comprehensive analysis failed to determine why alphabet knowledge matters, let me add my opinion to the mix. Here we go:

Letters are concepts. Concepts are abstract ideas that we use to categorize experience. The letter B is not a single thing… it’s a collection of objects that we learn to treat as equivalent. Look at these various renditions of the letter B. They are all b’s. Some of them are upper case and some lower. They are written in different fonts and some are different sizes. Some are printed and some are script… but they are all b’s, and good readers come to treat them all as equivalent.

What we call phonemes (the smallest meaning-varying units of sound in a language) are concepts, too. Each phoneme is a collection of phones that exist along the spectrographic continuum. What you think of as the /p/ sound or the p-sound is actually quite variant depending upon the pronunciation context within which it is produced and heard. Thus the /p/ that you hear at the beginning of the word pin is actually quite distinct from the /p/ sound in the word spin. And, there are obviously pronunciation differences due to pitch and tone (such as the differences between men’s and women’s voices) and there is dialect variation as well. Nevertheless, learning the phonemes means learning to group speech sounds into the categories that we use in English to distinguish meaning.

Letter names are just labels for these visual and auditory categories, and we’ve long known that providing labels for concepts facilitates learning (e.g., Lupyan, Rakison, & McClelland, 2007; Nelson, O’Neil, & Asher, 2008).

Concepts are abstract and providing them with names appears to help children to think of them as real concrete entities. When provided with the names of concepts children were more likely to seek out information about the objects and their functions.

The best evidence seems to support the teaching of letter names early on (Ehri, 1983; Foulin, 2005). I think there is good reason to do so.

But if my explanation holds water, then it would be wise to teach letters more conceptually than we often do—getting kids to think more about the variation in the letters than is common. It also suggests why it would make sense to teach the sounds for these letters simultaneously (Piasta, Purpura, and Wagner, 2010), and why teaching kids to write the letters matters, too (Gentry, 2006).

Building letter concepts means teaching kids to group collections of visual and auditory objects together into sets—overlapping sets given the complexity of our spelling system. Instruction should help kids to develop these letter concepts rather than having them memorize simple lists.

Please share your thinking as well as research referencing the occasional use of decodable texts for small group reading instruction in grades K-2. 

Shanahan response:

This is not a highly researched topic. There have been only a handful of studies into the effectiveness of decodable texts since the term was first used back in the 1980s. And, truth be told, they are kind of mess; with little evident agreement about what decodable text is, what it should be compared with, and what outcomes we should expect to derive from it.

Research has less solved the problem—is it helpful to use decodable texts with beginning readers—than demonstrated how complicated even simple ideas can be. (I’ve longed argued that in the social sciences this is likely the most profound impact of research. It forces us to operationalize constructs which often reveals how squishy soft our thinking is).

First issue… what is decodable text? Originally, the term was used relatively, to suggest a continuum (Juel & Roper-Schneider, 1985). Basically, phonics-oriented decodable texts used a preponderance of “words where all letters followed their major sound patterns.” The contrast was the basal readers of the time that employed a lower proportion of such words. Words like pet, big, nap, and dot would fit the decodable definition, while words like cow, pear, and come would not (cow follows a common spelling pattern, but not the major sound pattern for o, and pear and come are irregular).

How regular did the words have to be to merit designation as decodable? And, doesn’t decodability change with learning? As children know more and more spelling/pronunciation patterns, then those less frequent patterns become decodable, too, right?

Some researchers tried setting percentages of decodability and others worked with shifting definitions based upon kids’ learning. And, still others simply analyzed texts purported to be decodable and found a preponderance of simple, regular spelling patterns with short vowel sounds (Wolf, 2018).

You see the problem… if we all define decodable text in different ways, no matter what my research findings, someone can reject them simply by saying that wasn’t “what I meant by decodable.”

In that first study (Juel & Roper-Schneider, 1985), they found that the kids who had worked with relatively decodable texts were more able to decode at the end of grade 1. However, those kids also presumably got more phonics instruction during that time. One can’t tell from that study whether the difference was due to the phonics or the phonics plus decodable text.

Later studies, though with more exact definitions of decodability, found that decodable text either led to advantages or disadvantages. For example, Mesmer (2005) found that kids were more likely to try to decode decodable text (duh), but leveled texts (less decodable) led to greater fluency (Mesmer, 2010). Some studies (Cheatham & Allor, 2012; Compton, 2005) concur with the first Mesmer study, but that’s okay because others support the second (Priec-Mohr & Price, 2017). And, then there are those with mixed results (Chu & Chen, 2014).

The problem with all of these studies is that it is unclear what the right outcome would be. The ones that found the less decodable texts to be superior found that kids were able to read the leveled books more fluently in grade 1. However, phonics early on does bring with a bit of disfluency—because instead of just remembering a simple pattern or reading already known words, the phonics users have to figure out the unknown words (Barr, 1975). Many leveled readers can be read “fluently” even by non-readers because they don’t necessarily depend much on reading. And, the differing degrees to which students in the various conditions are taught phonics is a huge confound in the other direction.

Perhaps the best study of the problem was conducted by Jenkins and colleagues (2004). They compared the effectiveness of text with 85% decodability with text that had only 11% decodability (and these percentages were based on the texts’ match with the patterns that students had been taught). And they found? That degree of decodability made no difference. It made no difference in decoding, word reading, passage reading, or reading comprehension. (The two groups that received instruction with texts at these two levels of decodability both outperformed a group that received no additional instruction, so the teaching was effective in both cases).

Of course, there are a number of studies and evaluations of phonics instruction in which the program under investigation included instruction in decodable text (e.g., Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, et al., 1998; or look at the phonics studies synthesized in the National Reading Panel Report or the various reports of What Works Clearinghouse). These phonics programs were successful, but there is no evidence that they would have been any less successful without the decodable texts. To be perfectly honest, evaluations of phonics programs that lack such a component are usually effective, as.

This lack of positive support may be surprising. If phonics instruction were useful—and it is—one would think that opportunities for concentrated practice of those phonics skills would be beneficial. And, perhaps it is. But proving that is going to require a lot more study—and with much more care in considering the nature of the decodable and less decodable texts (and with more attention to issues like repetition—Mesmer, Cunningham, & Hiebert, 2010).

Two final thoughts:

First, given that there have been no evident negative effects associated with the use of decodable text within some of the successful phonics programs, I think it’s safe to say that it is okay to use such materials as a very small part of instruction. Perhaps there is a small practice effect, and perhaps there isn’t—but such teaching isn’t likely to hurt either, at least when kept minimal.

Second, English is complex and the sounds associated with particular letters and letter combinations depend upon the letter’s position in syllables, morphology, and etymology. That’s why so much is made these days of “statistical learning.”

Readers start to discern that b is more often associated with the /b/ sound in words like big and bad much more often than it will serve as a silent letter (such as in words like bomb or climb), and readers learn to respond accordingly. If unsure of the pronunciation of a b word, go with /b/; you’re more likely to get it right. Presenting students with lots of decodable text, text that’s much more regular that normal text, might mess up some of these cognitive calculations. Dick Venezky and Dale Johnson (1973) long ago showed that adults attribute sounds to letters in proportions more reflective of their appearance in children’s primers than of the actual proportions in which they appear in English more generally. (This is a problem for both leveled readers and decodable texts.)

I think it’s okay to use decodable texts as part of phonics instruction, but such practice should be severely limited, and even beginning readers should be reading more than decodable texts.

I attended one of your recent presentations. You cited the Hart & Risley canard that there is a 30 million-word gap. Aren’t you aware that study has been rejected? There is no word gap. Poverty kids have as much language support as other kids.

Shanahan response:

Research can get things wrong.

That’s why researchers—unlike practitioners and policymakers—are usually so interested in the methods of a study. Study a problem one way, you get one answer. Study it another way, perhaps a different answer emerges. Try to understand why the two studies diverged and youstart to gain a deeper understanding of the problem.

That’s why I don’t like the term “findings” in research studies. “Results” is the more accurate term. Even with qualitative studies that my claim no results, just findings, because they only watch and record and don’t intervene… yet, how one observes and records can influence outcomes, so even those kinds of studies have results.

In the 1990s, Hart and Risley published a widely disseminated study in which they collected language data on 42 families (some of these were upper socioeconomic status, some  were working class, and some were families on welfare). Monthly over 2.5 years, they audiotaped young children’s (7-9 months to 3 years) language environments.

They found that children were spoken to much more often in the upper income households than in the poverty households, and extrapolating across the children’s waking hours, they concluded that there was a 30 million-word gap. Some kids were having a lot more language experience. The researchers measured other more qualitative aspects of these children’s language environments as well, but the 30 million words became a symbol or summary of the whole study -- which has been hugely influential of policy and research.

As the questioner above notes, recently there has been some new evidence on young children’s early language environments. This summer, Child Development, published an article by Sperry, Sperry, & Miller (2018). Basically, it concluded that there were big differences in home language environments, but that these were equally distributed across the different socioeconomic strata. Some kids were definitely hearing fewer words than others, but it wasn't necessarily the kids living in poverty.

That study got a lot of play because it claimed to be a replication of the original study (it included 42 families as well). However, it was so different from Hart & Risley’s investigation that I think replication is the wrong description. For example, the biggest differences in H&R’s results were between the high SES kids and those growing up on welfare—that’s where the 30 million-word gap came from (working class and welfare differences were both much lower in this variable than the well-to-do), and yet this new study didn’t include a higher income sample. That alone could explain the lack of differences reported by Sperry and company. 

In the original study, the researchers went to the houses with tape recorders and sat there for an hour each month. There has been great concern that placing a PhD in the households of low-income families like that might suppress language use. Let’s face it. Anyone observed like that might be inhibited (I think I would be—I imagine whispering), and some speculate that this would be especially true for low income/low education parents (and there is research suggesting that this kind of inhibition does take place). If that were the case, then the welfare moms may have spoken to their children less than usual just because they were being observed.

There are things that can be done to limit or reduce such reticence (like having observers stay longer so those being observed get used to their presence or making sure the observers are of the same race and gender as those being watched, etc.), and this new study made better use of such methods. Perhaps the original observation techniques discouraged talking in some families and encouraged it in others. If so, then one might conclude that Sperry and company are correct.

The problem with that conclusion is it assumes that the only study reporting a language gap was the Hart & Risley investigation.

However, Sperry et al. weren’t the only ones re-exploring these waters and some of those other studies also reported such a gap. In my opinion, the most rigorous study on this so far is one reported by Gilkerson, et al., in 2017. They used technology instead of potentially-intrusive observers and collected a whopping 49,765 hours of recording from 329 families (more than the Hart and Sperry investigations combined). That study reported a much smaller word gap than what Hart & Risley claimed, but unlike Sperry, et al. it did identify a sizable gap (and with a much larger population, studied much less intrusively and more thoroughly).

Gilkerson claimed “only” a 4 million-word gap between those highly educated, high SES parents and those much less educated low SES ones. Four million words ain’t chopped liver! Spread over two years (these kids were observed from age 2 to 4), it would be like hearing a 55 minute a day speech from mom (spoken at 100 wpm… which is slightly slower than conversational speech, which makes sense for talking to a 2-year-old). But let’s face it…. No matter how much money or education you have, no one is going to give a 55-minute speech to a baby. What there will be is a lot more parent-child interaction…literally more hours of daily conversation between parent and toddler.

Another critical difference is that the Sperry study included the presence of ambient language. That’s the language not spoken to the children themselves, but that was in their environment. If Aunt Edna is yacking away on her iPhone while young Egbert is playing nearby his language is getting real shot in the arm, according to the Sperry methodology.

Hart & Risley (and Gilkerson) only counted words spoken to the child. One reason Sperry’s team found no difference was because of the language emanating from the TV sets and fugitive background conversations of adults who were not speaken to the kids. But as Golinkoff et al. (2018) point out, the notion that ambient language has a big effect on language development (compared to language spoken directly to the child) has been rejected by direct study. Despite the methodological problems evident in the original Hart & Risley work, analyzing the language spoken to the children instead of what might have been overheard from the TV in the next room was not one of them.

Finally, it should be pointed out that studies have shown that early language differences matter in later reading performance (Golinkoff, et al., 2018; National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). And, that the specific children exposed to low language environments in the Hart & Risley study, when followed to school, were themselves found to be at a learning disadvantage when it came to reading (Hart & Risely, 2003).

What that all means is that there is good reason to believe that many young children are not receiving sufficient language learning support during the preschool years, and that this insufficiency is implicated in later reading problems. High education, high income families appear to be more able to provide this kind of early language support, than low education, low income families. And, it is possible to provide aid and encouragement to families that allows them to narrow this significant gap (no matter what its actual size may be) (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008).

The Hart & Risley study has been under fire and it is far from a perfect study. Nevertheless, the results of this body of research continue to suggest that what parents do in the home with their children matters educationally (which is why I was using the study in my presentation). Parents need to do more to support their children’s early language learning and parents living in poverty can use some help there. Despite the methodological limitations of the Hart & Risley study, environmental differences (as opposed to genetic ones) still seems to be the best explanation of why poverty kids are underprepared when reading instruction begins.

I don’t get the reason for trying to make students read “like historians” or read “like scientists.” Many of my students aren’t likely to even go to college and even if they did they probably won’t be historians or scientists. I understand why it makes sense to teach students how to study a history or a science textbook so they can pass the tests on those, but “read like a…”, why?

Shanahan response:

You are definitely correct that most students will never become literary critics or English professors, mathematicians, historians, or scientists. Some will, but most will not, and even when someone does choose a discipline as the center of their life’s work, that choice usually requires rejecting the others. Thus, if someone were to become a historian, that likely means he or she will not spend much time reading—within that job—like a scientist, mathematician, or literary expert.

The idea of teaching students to read like experts might begin the process of induction into a profession for a small minority of kids, but that isn’t the real reason for teaching disciplinary literacy.

Being able to read and remember the facts from a history textbook might be sufficient for passing some high school or college classes. Teachers may even be able to convince themselves that enabling that kind of reading is all their jobs require.

But teaching students to “learn” history—by summarizing, questioning, KWL, retelling charts, four-square, and the like—can only foster a naïve understanding of history. Historians focus on the comparative reading of multiple texts on any topic with a heavy focus on author perspectives in that reading.

They engage in that kind of reading because of the nature of history and the methodology used to write history. Without an understanding of those – and reading approaches based upon them — readers won’t be able to formulate a deep understanding or appreciation of such content (or the critical hacks to keep from being misled by disciplinary experts).

The same point could be made about understanding the poetic “roughening of language” in literature or the purposes for multiple representations in scientific discourse or the nature of evidence or reasoning in any of these fields of study. There is more to reading comprehension than being able to tell back the stated information.

The reason more than 40 states have adopted disciplinary reading and writing standards—standards that require teaching students how to read disciplinary texts in a sophisticated manner—is because in our society it is important for citizens to be able to take multiple perspectives and to evaluate expert claims and evidence.

Economically we live in an age in which society rewards those who are able to cross cultural boundaries successfully. The engineer who can write a clear explanation of the new medical device, the marketing pro who can translate consumer data into a powerful algorithm, and all the others who are able to turn words into pictures into diagrams into codes into formulas and back again are the new masters of the employment universe.

The better that all readers understand the basic approaches to information inherent in each and all of the disciplines, the better their chances for being able to cross disciplinary boundaries, for being able to appreciate different perspectives, and for being able to translate from one kind of language into another.

In the course of a lifetime, we all confront a plethora of problems requiring the use of diverse sources of information to effect sound solutions. Being able to turn to a multiplicity of “literatures” that emanate from the various disciplines and specializations is essential.

A reader reminded this week of something I’d written a while back:

“I don’t believe our job is to make the science- or literature-preferers comfortable. I think we do our jobs best when the science kid discovers he can enjoy a story well told or when the math whiz is moved by poetic expression. We are most on our game when Little Miss Literature realizes that she has the chops to pick apart Algebra problems or that she can describe incisively in writing the structure of a cell.”,

Couldn’t have said it better myself (if I hadn’t already said it).

We teach disciplinary reading so that our young readers can start to read texts with an insider’s grasp of their purposes and the innate limitations inherent in their methods and evidentiary standards.

That’s good enough for me (and my children and grandchildren). I hope it will be good enough for you, too.

I read about the "research base" for guided reading, and Fountas & Pinnell’s exposition of this research mostly contains only position papers--no empirical, peer-reviewed research. I realize that many of the guided reading strategies can be found in research that predates F & P, but what about the effectiveness of guided reading itself? The reason I’m asking is because “guided reading” is now being promoted for high school. What do you think of guided reading for adolescents?

Shanahan's response:

As usual, it all depends on how you define things.

What do you mean by guided reading?

The F & P version of guided reading is certainly the most known form, but it isn’t the only one and when I speak to teachers about it they have different perceptions of what I’m saying.

Guided reading these days is a veritable elephant to the blind—snake to one man, rope to another, wall to a third.

I criticize some aspect of guided reading, and the response might be that I’m opposing small group instruction. I’m not, but if you think guided reading is about avoiding whole class teaching then you’ll blanch at my complaints.

My sense is, that despite the complexity of F & P’s guided reading approach, both advocates and denigrators tend to focus on one characteristic or other.

I’ve already noted there are those who believe that guided reading and small-group instruction are synonymous. Small groups are important to guided reading, but it certainly isn’t the same thing. There are many other kinds of small-group pedagogy, including explicit phonics groups and cooperative reading groups.

To me the key element of F & P’s guided reading is the idea that kids need to be taught with texts of particular levels of difficulty (that’s the definition the International Literacy Association has in its Literacy Glossary). Supposedly if kids are matched to texts properly they’ll make surer progress in learning to read. Research hasn’t been supportive of that idea and in practice it usually means students get less opportunity to deal with content at their cognitive, motivational, and social levels -- a big issue in high school—since graded-text adjustments are more likely to be down than up.

Lately I’ve noticed that many critics emphasize the specific kinds of guidance that students are given in the F & P scheme. Particularly offensive to them is the guidance aimed at getting kids to guess words based on pictures or promoting the use of the “three cueing systems” to read words.

The term “guided reading” originated in the 1930s. It quite accurately refers to what happens when teachers lead students in a communal reading, and that is true of F & P’s scheme as well. In their guided reading, teachers escort groups of students through a text every bit as much as the teachers did back in “Dick and Jane” days (in fact, that’s where the term came from originally). I wish we’d reserve “guided reading” for this communal reading, reserving “Guided Reading” for the F & P variety—though I suppose that cow is already out of the barn.

You note that some of the strategies within guided reading (such as preteaching vocabulary, talking about prior knowledge, or questioning kids after a reading) long have had a research base, and that is correct—though there are, as of yet, no convincing studies of the efficacy of guided reading itself. And, in this case, what is true for elementary reading is the case for secondary students.

What do I think of guided reading for secondary students?

I have no problem with small group teaching in middle school and high school, though it is harder to manage this profitably because of the shortness of the instructional periods. Don’t group solely for the sake of small group teaching, but I certainly wouldn’t discourage teachers from using small groups when they make sense; when they amplify your teaching rather than reducing the amount of teaching.

But matching kids to texts on the basis of reading levels makes no more sense with secondary students than with elementary ones, and the same can be said about teaching students to read words through anything but orthographic cues. Neither matching kids to texts based on reading levels or teaching cueing students are supported by research, and there are reasons for rejecting both (e.g., research finds we can raise reading achievement by teaching with harder books than those prescribed by guided reading; poor readers depend upon semantic and syntactic cues to recognize words, but good readers do not).

At secondary level, I would certainly include various kinds of communal reading—under teacher guidance. Having classes/groups of students read common texts with teacher scaffolding is a good idea, whether we are talking about the reading of a short story in an English class or a chapter from a science book. Such communal reading opportunities well managed promote mature interpretations of particular texts or the development of comprehension strategies.

Communal reading here doesn’t mean reading a text aloud—either with the teacher reading to the students or the kids taking turns round-robin style. Guided reading focuses on reading comprehension and, except with the youngest readers, that is best practiced through silent reading.

This guided/communal reading can take many forms. For example, reciprocal teaching guides students to read texts while learning to use particular strategies (predicting, summarizing, questioning, clarifying)—and gradually fades or withdraws guidance as students gain proficiency with the strategies (the I do, we do it, you do it approach). Or, close reading is another way to communally explore text—this approach aimed at developing a rich interpretation on the basis of a careful consideration of what texts say and how it says it (e.g., repetition of ideas, use of literary devices).

That means I very much support the idea of “guided reading” with secondary students—but I wouldn’t “Guided Reading.”

Do we read digitally as well as we read paper texts? 

Shanahan response:

I’ve been asked this provocative question three times in three weeks. Once I was presenting a workshop on how to teach college-bound high-schoolers to handle complex text on tests like the ACT. This group wanted to know if it mattered whether students were tested digitally or with paper (studies estimate significant differences in performance favoring paper). 

Last week, I was on a panel at Reading is Fundamental’s National Reading Coalition, a meeting of literacy providers, policymakers, and business leaders. This time the question was posed by Kathleen Ryan-Mufson, Director of Global Citizenship for Pitney-Bowes, a major player in digital communications. She wanted to know about the importance of digital literacy in learning, which opens up issues of access, precision of understanding, and student preference.

Then Friday, I was with a particularly thoughtful group of middle-school teachers in Indiana. They asked the question straight-up and were pretty sure that digital was better than paper because of technological affordances, such as easy in-text access to a dictionary, and because these kids are growing up digitally (the so-called “digital natives”).

Must be something in the water.

My answer: We don’t read as well digitally as we do on paper. When texts are short – a page or less — and comprehension demands light (what’s the main idea?), we do pretty well with either kind of text. But as learning demands increase and the texts are more extensive, paper wins hands down.

Like those Indiana teachers, students tend to think they read best digitally; but tests of their comprehension reveal that they are wrong.

Years ago, knowing such questions would come my way, I did some self study. I read a novel silently, usually prior to bedtime; I read one aloud to my youngest daughter; I listened to one on “Books on Tape” when I drove to work; and I read Dracula on my computer (thanks, Gutenberg Project).

My personal sense of the matter was that I was hurrying when I was reading digitally. As with current research findings, I was fine with major plot points, but it seemed like my understanding was fragile and not very deep. For me, at that time, reading online was more like skimming than reading. I was moving too fast.

Since then technology has improved and I’ve grown used to such reading. Engineers have improved digital texts, in lots of ways. We can now download texts so that we’re no longer “online.” Page sizes and formatting are more similar to those of real books; and screen illumination is better, too.

There are even ways in which tech books are demonstrably better. I can increase font sizes (which, at my age, I love) and I can set screen illumination so that I can read with the lights out and Cyndie can sleep. I spend a lot of time on airplanes and portability matters, so being able to bring along tech’s version of a dozen books and as many magazines is a definite win.

These days I often read digitally, or work and pleasure, much more often.

Nevertheless, reading digitally is still a different experience.

One loses the sensory pleasures of the page, and navigation can be disorienting. I can’t always go back and locate what I’m looking for. I still have a sense that I’m going too fast and, perhaps, reading too superficially. Though that just might be me. Kretzshmar, et al. (2013) found older readers do make shorter fixations when reading digitally, but that wasn’t true of younger readers.

Dillon (1992) and Singer & Alexander (2017) have conducted the most complete and thorough meta-analyses of the issues; the former looking at all the pre-1992 studies, and latter all the work since Dillon.

Both meta-analyses concluded that we don’t comprehend digital as well as paper, and that the disparity is as true for so-called “digital natives” as for people like me (“digital geezers?”).

Apparently scrolling a screen is more memory disruptive than simply turning a page. And, digital reading is often interrupted by multi-tasking (Baron, 2015): 67% of readers don’t last ten minutes before they’re messaging or shopping during reading!

Of course, this is all a bit complicated. Reading a PDF file on one’s computer is a different from reading a test passage on an online state exam or from reading Prairie Fires for pleasure on my I-Pad. They differ in their navigability, their user friendliness, and how likely one is to be tempted to do other things instead of reading.

That means comprehension is not always suppressed or limited by digital text, and yet it is often enough that we all should be concerned. Mangen (2013) found students could get the major plot points of a story digitally but that they were deficient when it came to making connections of other text points with the plot.

Maryanne Wolf (2017) has agonized over the potential losses to patience, persistence, and depth of thought that could result from a daily diet of the short, peripatetic text excursions characteristic of digital reading.

Oh, and may I add that lots of people don't actually enjoy reading digitally as much as they do text on paper. (The last couple of Scholastic surveys have found that the overwhelming majority of kids much prefer books.)

Digital reading is superficial, less understandable, and less enjoyable for most people. Sounds like we should get rid of it, and that only fools would invest in digital texts for their instructional programs, right?

I strongly disagree.

Digital text is here to stay. There are all kinds of economic and social reasons why this is likely true, but what matters is that if I’m correct, then kids—all of us really—are going to need to learn to read such texts effectively.

Two things that need to happen:

First, many other writers (e.g., Boone & Higgins, 2007; Jabr, 2013; Kieffer & Reinking, 2006; Talaka, et al., 2015) have argued that tech engineers should continue to beaver away at making digital reading environments more supportive. Instead of trying to make tech readers like books, they need to think about how to produce better digital tools. Tech environments can alter reading behavior, so technological scaffolding could be used to slow us down or to move around a text more productively.   

Second, we as teachers need to make students aware of their tech fallibility. Instead of romanticizing the tech savviness of everyone born since the first Apple sprung from the head of Steve Jobs, we should be teaching humility. They aren’t as good with these tools as they think they are, and the digital tools, while solving some problems, pose others.   

Kids vary in their ability to locate information on Google, to evaluate such information, or to understand it. Basic reading comprehension ability helps with these things, as does amount of world knowledge; but even when those are high, students frequently struggle to take advantage of the affordance of digital text or even to understand what they read digitally.

Interestingly, not everyone’s comprehension is impaired by digital text. Singer and Alexander (2016) found a group of college students who actually did better; they slowed themselves and became more careful when reading digitally (unlike me and the majority of the students they studied).

We should be teaching students strategies for digital reading, fostering ways of reading that allow students to overcome the limits of the ways that they tend to adopt for screen reading. We should also teach them efficient ways of navigating in different screen environments (e.g., arrows, site maps, breadcrumb trails, non-linear navigation), and how to evaluate the trustworthiness of the digital information that they do locate.

Students don’t comprehend digital text as well as they do paper text. But they could.  

I am an elementary literacy coach. A trend I am seeing in our K-2 classrooms are center activities not aligned to measurable outcomes. My question is, in a room of 24 first graders, when the teacher is pulling a small group to deliver targeted instruction, what does research say is best for what the other students to be doing? I'm struggling to find a model that we can confidently start driving towards.  

I am often asked about what the "other students" should be doing while teachers meet with small groups. I refer to What Works Clearinghouse studies to see gains for different programs and approaches. I can't find anything that quantifies students' reading improvement for independent reading vs. a computer program. For example, teachers will tell me they "put" students on a computer program daily for 20 minutes while they work with a small group because the teacher likes the program and thinks it is effective. Some of these programs do show decent gains on the studies on What Works Clearinghouse, yet I'm not a fan of computer-assisted reading programs. I struggle to respond to that because I can't find research support that refutes it over gains from independent reading. Can you help me to explain to teachers the difference or benefit to having students read independently over being put on a computer program if there is one?

Shanahan responds:

Wow! Thanks a lot, ladies.

You’ve used up my weekend in researching an answer to these questions.

No, I don’t mean I’ve been reading the research on seatwork (okay, I did a bit of that).

But there are an amazing number of websites that promise they can teach you how to say, “I don’t know” and still sound intelligent.

Unfortunately, they counsel that the dummy who doesn’t know should offer to research the question.

My problem is that I’ve researched it and still don’t know the answer. (Do I still sound intelligent?)

There isn’t much research on this topic.

But go to Amazon, type in “learning centers,” and an plethora of books pops up. They are all great—apparently; their blurbs describe them as “effective” and say they “really work.” (What they work at is not clear from the blurbs.)

There are some studies on seatwork, particularly in mathematics. This neglect is surprising given the vast amounts of classroom time devoted to seatwork. One study found that kids spend as much as 70% of their instructional time on their own, which varied by subject area (Fisher, et al., 1978); and more recent studies have produced similar results (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005; Vaughn, et al., 2002).

The studies that do exist tend to evaluate the effectiveness of seatwork, rather than pointing out successful seatwork routines that increase learning.

For example, back in the 1980s Paul Sindelar and his colleagues tested different amounts of direct teacher guidance and seatwork activities. They devoted 25%, 50%, and 75% of the time to teacher-led instruction and found that the more time with the teacher the better the kids did at learning math. And, the opposite—the more seatwork, the less learning.

Is it a good idea to have kids spending so much time working away from the teacher?

According to the studies, no.

Studies report that kids are less likely to be engaged in learning when working on their own (Cohen, 1994; Cowen, 2016; Gump, 1967; Kouno, 1970); and amount of seatwork has been found to be negatively related to learning (Seifert & Beck, 1984).

One study even reported that the best readers did reasonably well with seatwork and other independent activities, but lower readers learned substantially less from such activities (Connor, Morrison, & Petrella, 2004). They needed the teacher time.

The remaining research on seatwork focuses less on what kinds of assignments, centers, or programs lead to the most learning, and more to how teachers might manage seatwork better so that the kids won’t be as disruptive. In other words, their goal is identifying which routines keep kids busiest, not which ones teach best.

What these studies are all saying is that seatwork should be thought of not as a productive part of the school day, but as a necessary evil.

When it comes to academics, kids simply don’t learn that much on their own—except perhaps for the ones who are really good learners anyway—in which case, seatwork could be characterized as an effective way to make sure the lower kids don’t catch up!

The second questioner above hoped that I could point out research showing that independent reading was better than computer work. I know of no studies that make that comparison, but generally independent reading tends to have a pretty small impact on reading achievement. Seatwork studies suggest that the more learning comes when kids are interacting with others; not working by themselves—even when that self-time might be reading on their own.

It is possible that there are benefits to working with digital programs, since they provide some interaction (and some do have supporting research). However, even the best of those programs tend to require lots of teacher involvement if they are to make a learning difference—though that isn’t always how they are used in classrooms.

I do like the idea of having kids read during their downtime, but I would link this closely with their reading instruction. Thus, I might have the kids reading something silently prior to coming to group, so that they are ready to discuss; or I might have kids follow up their reading with me, by practicing fluency with a partner (which can help if the texts are hard enough and the kids stay on task). And, either of these activities could involve a social studies or science book, not just the “reading books,” which might take advantage of some of the slack time in those classes.

Research is very supportive of cooperative learning groups, so you might have some luck combining that with project learning activities, but cooperative learning requires some real knowledge. You’d have to study up on that if you wanted to really be successful.

Writing is another activity that can fill such space. Perhaps doing a writing lesson prior to meeting with reading groups, and then having kids working on their compositions while you work with groups would be useful (again, as long as they stay on task).

Overall, my message would be to minimize this kind of independent work, seatwork, center time, or on-one’s-own computer assignments. It’s better for the kids to work with the teacher and to work with each other.

Brush up your skills in working with larger groups including how to maximize student-to-student and student-teacher interactions and choral or every-student-responds responses.

Seatwork is like homework; it is best focused on applying what students already have learned.

When you do meet with small groups, try staggering the schedules—talking with one while the other reads, then moving to the other group to interact with them, while the first group is annotating. Or, if you meet with groups in a particular order, always give yourself 5-10 minutes between groups to interact with the kids who have been doing seatwork on their own.

I’d love to tell you that there are terrific research-supported workbooks, seatwork activities, computer programs, stations, or learning centers. There just aren’t. Given that practitioners need to be experimental, trying out various routines to evaluate their impact on learning and behavior.

Those books I noted earlier might be a good place to start. But wherever the ideas come from for your seatwork routines, you should be skeptical and data-oriented in evaluating their effectiveness and usefulness, and willing to try lots of alternatives.

Or, I could just say, “That’s a really interesting question.”

I am working with schools who are strongly committed to the “I Do, We Do, You Do” method of teaching reading, and attempt to use this method when working with the reading of complex texts. I have noticed that this approach doesn’t often exist with “highly aligned curricula.” My questions are: What is the role of modeling as it relates to complex text? What does good modeling look like with a complex text that doesn't simplify understanding of a text down to just using one reading strategy? I would appreciate any insights you have here. Thank you!

 Shanahan's response:

Cool question.

I don’t think that is a bad way to think about teaching complex text, I just haven’t usually thought of it that way myself.

The method you summarize as “I do, we do, you do,” is often described as “gradual release of responsibility.” The idea being that initially the teacher takes full responsibility for carrying out a particular task – reading comprehension, in this case – and then through a series of steps relinquishes more and more of the responsibility to the students.

Your teachers are wise to be committed to this approach because it is well supported by research. According to the What Works Clearinghouse, the gradual release approach to teaching reading comprehension has strong research support.

Unfortunately, as effective as this approach can be, it is often badly done. Teachers may turn over the keys to the kids too quickly… sometimes without any modeling or guided practice at all. When done like that, the method is no more than an independent reading assignment. “Go to your desks, read the text and fill out the chart. Good luck!”

Or, teachers may model—like when they read a text to the students—but without adequate attention focusing or explanation. If I read the text and tell the kids what I learned or noticed from it, it is very unlikely kids will be able to duplicate that effort on their own.

As you point out, many programs don’t include this kind of approach, and no wonder. The easy parts of the process are at the endpoints. Initially, when the teacher does all the work it can be scripted, and at the end when the kids do everything, no more is needed than an assignment.

But what about in the middle? How much guidance should the teacher give? How quickly should she turn over the process? How gradual is gradual?

Those decisions are hard because they need to be made on the spot. And, when they are wrong—that is, when it turns out that the kids can’t take the reins successfully—the teacher has to take back the responsibility, for the time being that is.

That’s why I think of gradual release as: I do it, we do it, I do it again, we try to do it again but this time a little differently, we do it, we do it, oops, I have to do some of it with more explanation, you do it (no, not quite like that), you do it, we do it again, okay now you can do it. (I know it isn’t catchy, but it is more descriptive of how the process really tends to work).

So what does that approach have to do with teaching students to comprehend complex text?

First, you have to identify a particular text barrier to understanding that you want to teach. Authors build affordances or barriers to understanding into their texts, and readers have to learn how to take advantage of these or to surmount them. In this case, let’s say you want to teach students how to use context to make sense of a word’s meaning or how to transform a sentence with an independent and dependent clause into two independent sentences to clarify meaning. (The point is to teach kids to operate on the text so that something unclear initially makes sense.)

Then, you need to explain this to the kids and show them how you do it… with several examples. Be sure to show them how you notice that you don’t know the meaning of a word (e.g., “that’s a new one to me,” “oh, I’ve looked that one up before but don’t remember its meaning,” or “I thought I knew that word, but the definition I know doesn’t fit this context, hmm”). Once you’ve noticed this barrier to understanding, then you have to show the kids how you deal with it. Breaking the sentence down or looking for context clues that may clue you in to the meaning of the unknown word.

That’s the “I do it” part of the equation (and, yes, you might have to go back and show these steps again multiple times—even after the kids have tried it themselves).

To start to release control, the kids have to read something under the teacher’s supervision. Of course, the text chosen needs to have some of the potential barriers you’re trying to teach them to overcome. The key here is to have some target problems to home in on.

I usually come up with questions aimed at testing the kids’ understanding of the particular idea expressed in the text that the barrier should have blocked them from. If they can answer the question—if they unpacked the sentence themselves or made the cohesive link or figured out the unknown word—there is nothing to be done. However, if they can’t answer, then you can guide them to figure it out… showing them what to look for or how to operate on the text.

At some point, when the kids are getting better at solving such problems, then you can provide them with reading assignments to do on their own. Such an assignment might include a text along with written questions. That could serve both as independent practice, but also as an assessment. Were they able to monitor their understanding of the text? Were they able to take actions successfully when they weren’t understanding it? Could they show you what they did to figure out the answer to a question?

I haven’t done it that way myself with making sense of complex texts, since I tend to focus more on the “We Do It” portion of the sequence, but the introduction of these tools into the process could allow teachers to raise their game.

One last suggestion: tell the kids right up front that complex text is a problem to be solved or a mountain to be climbed. Explain that you are going to try to provide them with tools that will allow them to make sense of a text, even when they initially couldn't make heads or tails of it. (Too often kids think you either get it or you don’t when it comes to reading; give them some ways to overcome barriers to understanding instead of just giving up.)

I argue for research-based instruction and policy.

I point out a dearth of empirical evidence behind some instructional schemes, and champion others that have been validated or verified to my satisfaction.

Some readers are happy to find out what is “known,” and others see me as a killjoy because the research findings don’t match well with what they claim to “know.”

Members of this latter group are often horrified by my conclusions. They often are certain that I’m wrong because they read a book for teachers that had lots of impressive citations that seem contradict my claims.  

What is clear from these exchanges is that many educators don’t know what research is, why we should rely on it, or how to interpret research findings.

Research is used to try to answer a question, solve a problem, or figure something out. It requires the systematic and formal collection and analysis of empirical data. Research can never prove something with 100 percent certainty, but it can reduce our uncertainty.

“Systematic and formal” means that there are rules or conventions for how data in a research study need to be handled; the rigor of these methods is what make the data trustworthy and allow the research to reduce our uncertainty. Thus, if a researcher wants to compare the effectiveness of two instructional approaches, he or she has to make sure the groups to be taught with these approaches be equivalent at the beginning. Likewise, we are more likely to trust a survey that defines its terms, or an anthropological study that immerses the observer in the environment for a long period of time.

Research reports don’t just provide the results or outcomes of an investigation, but they explain—usually in great detail—the methods used to arrive at those results. Most people don’t find research reports very interesting because of this kind of detail, but it is that detail that allows us to determine how much weight to place on a study.

Given all of that, here are some guidelines to remember.

1. Just because something is written, doesn’t make it research.

Many practitioners think that if an idea is in a book or magazine that it is research. Some even think my blog is research. It is not, and neither is the typical Reading Teacher article or Heinemann book.

That’s not a comment on their quality or value, but a recognition of what such writing can provide. In some cases, as with my blog, there is a serious effort to summarize research findings accurately/ I work hard trying to distinguish my opinions from actual research findings.  

Many publications for teachers are no more than compendia of opinions or personal experiences, which is fine. However, these have all of the limits of that kind of thing.

Just because someone likes what they’re doing (e.g., teaching, investing, cooking) and then writes about how well they’ve done it… doesn’t necessarily mean it is really so great. That’s why 82% of people believe that they’re in the top 30% of drivers; something that obviously can’t be right.

As human beings we all fall prey to overconfidence, selective memory, and just a plain lack of systematicity in how we gain information about our impact.

Often when teachers tell me that kids now love reading as a result of how they teach, I ask how do you know? What evidence do you have? Usually the answer is something like, “A parent told me that their child now likes to read.” Of course, that doesn’t tell how the other 25 kids are doing, or whether the parent is a good observer of such things, or even the motivation for the, seemingly, offhand comment.

Even when you’re correct about things improving, it’s impossible—from personal experience alone—to know the source of the success. It could be the teaching method, or maybe just the force of your personality. If another teacher adopted your methods, things might not be so magical.

And, then there is opportunity cost. We all struggle with this one. No matter how good an outcome, I can’t possibly know how well things might have gone had I done it differently. The roads not traveled may have gotten me someplace less positive—but not necessarily. You simply can’t know.

That’s where research comes in… it allows us to avoid overconfidence, selective memory, lack of systematicity, lack of reliable evidence, incorrect causal attribution, and the narrowness of individual experience.

 2.     Research should not be used selectively.

Many educators use research the same way advertisers and politicians do—selectively, to support their beliefs or claims—rather than trying to figure out how things work or how they could be made to work better.

I wish I had a doughnut for every time a school official has asked me to identify research that could be used to support their new policy! They know what they want to do and want research to sell it. Rather than studying the research to determine what they should do.

Cherry-picking an aberrant study outcome that matches one’s claims or ignoring a rigorously designed study in favor of one with a preferred outcome may be acceptable debater’s tricks but are bad science. And, they can only lead to bad instructional practice.

When it comes to determining what research means, you must pay attention not just to results that you like. Research is at its best when it challenges us to see things differently.

I vividly remember early in my career when Scott Paris challenged our colleagues to wonder why DISTAR, a scripted teaching approach was so effective, despite that fact that most of us despised it. Clearly, we were missing something; our theories were so strong that they were blinding us to the fact that what we didn’t like was positive for kids—at least for some kids or under some conditions (the kinds of things that personal experience can’t reveal).

 3.     Research, and the interpretation of research, require consistency.

Admittedly, interpreting research studies is as much an art as science. During the nearly 50 years of my professional career, the interpretation of research has changed dramatically.

It used to be entirely up to the discretion of each individual researcher as to which studies they’d include in a review and what criteria they would use to weigh these studies.

That led to some pretty funky science: research syntheses that identified only studies that supported a particular teaching method or inconsistent criteria for impeaching studies (this study should be ignored because it has a serious design weakness, but then using studies with more acceptable findings even though they suffer the same flaw).

I’ve been running into this problem a lot lately. Not among researchers, but among practitioners. When I point out a research-supported instructional practice (Reading Recovery) that is inconsistent with phonics theories, I’m told “anything works if it is taught one-on-one.” That sounds great, but those same people are offended when there is insufficient attention to phonics instruction, in spite of the evidence supporting phonics such as the National Reading Panel. The problem with this: the instruction in many of those positive phonics studies was delivered one-on-one.

I’m persuaded that both phonics and Reading Recovery work (because they both have multiple studies of sufficient quality showing their effectiveness). That doesn’t mean I think they work equally well, or that they are equally efficient, or that they even accomplish the same things for students.

I agree with those who argue against teaching cueing systems, because research evidence reveals that poor readers use non-orthographic information to identify words and that good readers do not. Teaching kids to read like poor readers makes no sense to me. Nevertheless, Reading Recovery clearly gives kids a learning advantage, and we’d be wise to look hard at it to see why (one study found adding more explicit phonics to it improved kids’ progress, and that’s a clue that may help us understand what it does and what it doesn’t).

The point isn’t phonics or Reading Recovery: but when we make those kinds of choices, we need to weigh evidence consistently—treating as the same those studies that challenge our deepest beliefs as well as those that are wind beneath our wings. What works in teaching, who it helps, how it helps them… those are complex questions requiring sound evidence and wise analysis rather than rage and cheap “hooray for our side” Tweets.

Let’s do better.

Can you explain the difference between central idea, main idea, and theme? There appears to be a lot of confusions with these terms.  

Shanahan’s response:

You’re correct. There is much confusion and disparity in use of the terms central idea, main idea, and theme. And please add topic and topic sentence to that list, too.

Part of the problem here is that these are all colloquial terms. They didn’t arise from the sciences (e.g., psychology, linguistics), so, perhaps, we shouldn’t expect too precise a meaning for each.

Back in the early 1980s, Jim Baumann conducted a series of studies on the “main idea” concept and the steps needed to teach students to identify main ideas. He found that professional books and teacher’s manuals were all over the map when it came to main idea. The term was used in lots of disparate ways and the teaching steps evident in various programs were unlikely to lead kids to be able to identify main ideas. His work is still among the best on how to teach kids to do this.

The term “main idea” has been used in a variety of ways for over 200 years… Sometimes main idea has been limited to summary statements about briefer portions of a text like paragraphs (e.g., main idea is often used as a synonym for topic sentence—and topic sentence instruction is often used as the route to teaching main idea). But there are scads of examples of main idea with regard to entire texts, too.

Sometimes the term “main idea” has been reserved for summarizing the major thought or point behind expository or informational texts only. But even a quick perusal of the educational literature reveals a great deal of inconsistency in that approach. The earliest mentions of “main idea” that I have found refer to the major lessons to be learned from religious stories in the 1850s.

The only consistency evident in main idea is its focus on the big idea that a text is expressing. 

The term “central idea” has been used just as long, but a bit less often, and its use seems even more general. I suspect it has become popular as a synonym for main idea since Baumann’s eye-opening work in the 1980s. Users, perhaps eager to avoid these confusions, employ central idea in the hopes that we’ll understand it better than we would have if they’d used main idea. If so, they have failed. Whatever main idea means in reading, central idea is its synonym—no more and no less.

Theme, on the other hand, is a term that arises from literature, and it is usually incorrect to apply it to most informational texts. A theme is the point or central idea of a literary work… it may be stated in terms of a point of view (e.g., unchecked ambition is dangerous to all) or as a single word (e.g., love, death). Usually literary works express multiple themes—sometimes even conflicting themes--and readers have to learn coordinate, synthesize, or choose from among these thematic expressions to arrive at a rich interpretation of a literary work.

It might be okay to sometimes use terms like main idea or central idea to refer to this overall thematic interpretation, but it wouldn’t work to apply them to the conflicting themes underlying this overall theme of a work.

If these terms are confusing, instruction often makes matters worse. For example, kids are often taught that the first sentence of a paragraph states its main idea. This is true, of course; except in those instances where it is the last sentence, or one of the middle sentences, or it isn’t stated explicitly at all.

Or, students may be taught that a text has a single main idea… Again, a notion that is correct, except whenever it isn’t. Think of reading an encyclopedia entry on Japan. Perhaps one could say “the main idea is Japan” (the topic) which is not particularly satisfying (most reading teachers would rightly reject that one—main ideas and topics shouldn’t be used interchangeably), or that “it is an article that tells a lot of facts about Japan, a country in Asia” (which is a reasonable description of the purpose of the entry, but which seems a bit thin on substance). My hunch is that the problem here is that we are trying to state a single main idea when this kind of text is a slew of main ideas. “This entry tells facts about Japan, a country in Asia. It describes Japan’s history, politics, military, economy, science and technology, infrastructure, demographics, and culture.” Maybe not entirely satisfying yet because it is little more than a string of topics, but I think you’ll agree that it is a whole lot closer than those previous attempts.

There has been interesting research done--both with human readers and computer readers—to try to come up with an operational definition of main or central idea that would be a bit less squishy. That work has focused on expository/informational text alone and usually homes in on main idea by how often they are referred to throughout the text. The more the various sentences connect to a particular idea, the more likely it is integral to the main idea that the author is trying to put across.

(I wonder if the term “central idea” has been latched onto recently as a way of trying to capture this perception that all of the other ideas connect up to some central idea. For instance, my wife, Cyndie, says she prefers to think of the main idea is being at the top of a hierarchy, with all of the other ideas connected below it.)

Look, for instance, at these paragraphs from a Newsela article (https://newsela.com/read/elem-national-park-sled-dogs/id/40708).

In the winter, thick snow blankets Alaska's Denali National Park and Preserve. It is one of our nation's most incredible wild places. The wilderness stretches over 6 million acres. That's bigger than the state of New Hampshire. It's home to North America's tallest peak, as well as wolves, moose, snowshoe hares and grizzly bears.

Denali is also home to a one-of-a-kind team of canine park rangers. Alaskan huskies, 31 in all, pull sleds, helping transport park rangers and loads of heavy equipment in the snow.

It's an important job. With temperatures regularly as low as -40 degrees in Denali's winter, "mushing" with sled dogs is a much more reliable form of transportation. Motorized vehicles or snowmobiles might not start in the cold. Plus, the dogs can keep their human rangers' feet warm at night.

        In February, kennel manager and park ranger Jennifer Raffaeli is out on the trail for a month-long trip in the park. The dogs will haul sleds packed with equipment. The rangers will patrol and collect data for scientists at hard-to-reach sites near the park's glacier-fed Wonder Lake.

What’s the main or central idea of the first paragraph?

It certainly isn’t the first sentence.

In fact, I don’t think it would be possible to select any sentence in paragraph 1 as a main idea. Perhaps one could craft a main idea statement by combining sentences 1 and 2, though that certainly skips a lot of important information.

From a paragraph like that, it’s easy to see why someone might conclude that topics and main ideas are the same thing. But I don’t buy that the paragraph’s main idea is “Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve.” Perhaps this is like the encyclopedia entry: the main idea is how incredible Denali National Park is in terms of its size and what’s found there.

In Paragraph 2, it might even help to ignore the first sentence. A good main idea for this one could be:  In Denali, the park rangers depend upon sled dogs for transportation.

The main idea of Paragraph 3 seems to be placed right in the middle: Sled dogs are more reliable transportation in Denali than machines because they handle the cold weather better than machines do.

And, finally, Paragraph 4, the dogs help the rangers to get to hard-to-rach parts of the park.

Though it is possible to come up with “main ideas” for each of these paragraphs, one also could say that the complete text has an overall point or main idea as well.

Here is where it can help to notice which ideas get repeated and referenced most.

The challenge of Denali (its size, climate, transportation problems, etc.) comes up in all four paragraphs. The dogs’ ability to conquer these problems is noted in paragraphs 2, 3, and 4, as does the notion that these dogs’ abilities are relied upon by Denali’s rangers.

A main idea for this—because of the number of repetitions of each of these ideas and the linking of them to each other—might result in something like: “The Denali National Park is very large, cold, and snowy so transportation is difficult. Because of that, the Denali rangers need to rely upon sled dogs for transportation.”  

The take away?

Despite all the messiness of this terminology…

Everyone agrees that good readers must make these kinds of summary statements about the major, chief, main, key, foremost, or central ideas of informational and argumentative texts.

And, good readers also can identify multiple themes from literary texts. See my earlier blog entry on what it means to teach theme, http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/teaching-kids-to-interpret-theme-the-limits-of-practice#sthash.q5ClgDXB.rOnpeI8Z.dpbs

Good readers have to be able to identify these major ideas—the ones that state the point of the text or that are the most repeated or referenced ideas of the text—with paragraphs, sections of texts, and entire texts.

These main idea statements can be dinged for being too general (such as just stating the topics Denali or Japan) and they can be too specific (citing too many of the specific details instead of some generalization that captures the whole set of ideas). In other words, they need to learn to identify the Goldilocks main idea, the one that is “just right.”

Textbooks and state educational standards use these terms somewhat inconsistently and interchangeably. That just reveals the imperfections of language when addressing such abstract ideas that vary so much by context (think of my various examples above).

Don’t get misled by these linguistic inconsistencies. There are no fine distinctions that are being hidden from you. You just have to nurture the ability to capture these big ideas from a wide variety of texts across a wide variety of genres.

I saw you speak recently and you mentioned a few times that schools of high needs should receive more reading instruction compared to schools of low needs. Were you basing your comments on research or your opinion?  Our buildings of high needs students receive fewer instructional reading minutes due to everyone wanting to get a piece of the student for their services (e.g., math needs, reading needs, social skills, specialty school curriculum).

 Shanahan response:

There are no studies that reveal the amount of reading instruction that is necessary or sufficient to teach reading effectively to students at different levels of performance. However, there is an extensive body of literature showing the importance of amount of instruction in reading achievement (e.g., Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Denton, Foorman, & Mathes, 2003; Fisher, Berliner, Filby, Marliave, et al., 2015; Hoffman, 1991; Kent, Wanzek, & Al Otaiba, 2017; KIesling, 1977-1978; Puma, Darweit, Price, Ricciuti, et al., 1997; Taylor, Pearson, Clark, & Walpole, 2000; Weber, 1971).

The most basic finding from all of this?

More teaching results in more learning.

Thus, those students who are behind in reading need more teaching—not less—if the goal is to catch them up.

Or look at the book Annual Growth for All Students…Catch-up Growth for Those Who are Behind by Lynn Fielding, Nancy Kerr, and Paul Rosier… which shows how their school district couldn’t raise achievement sufficiently until they started providing greater amounts of instruction for the lower performers.

When scientists first started looking into these issues, much was made about the difference between allotted time and academic learning time (ALT). The former is how much time we plan to devote to a subject, and the latter is the actual amount of productive time that we provide. Transition times, for instance, don’t lead to learning, nor does other off-task time.

These days further refinements to the amount of instruction construct are being added. Recent findings are finding that all instruction is not equally potent. More time for certain teaching activities has a bigger payoff. And, this is also true when it comes to specific needs students have. If kids are struggling with decoding, for instance, devoting more instructional time to reading comprehension won’t be as likely to lead to big learning gains as more appropriately targeted instruction would (Connor, Spencer, Day, Giuliani, et al., 2014; Sonnenschein, Stapleton, & Benson, 2010).

Nevertheless, the basic idea is still sound. More teaching leads to more learning—as long as the instruction is appropriate and everyone is paying attention.

When I was a school district administrator, I never made a decision without considering amount of teaching. When directed to implement some policy or to consider a policy direction, I always asked: Will this increase the amount of teaching our students will get? If the answer was yes, then whatever the action, I was for it. And, if it was going to reduce the amount of teaching, then I was adamantly opposed.

That should be every school administrators’ watchword.

Amount of teaching has a big impact on school achievement, and it is a major resource that you can control.

Your situation is a little different, of course. Your kids are lagging pretty much in all areas. Amount of instruction matters in reading, but it matters with other subjects and areas of development, too (e.g., Walberg, Harnish, & Tsai, 1986). If you try to escalate the amount of reading instruction, this likely will come at the expense of instruction in some other area.

Some of this tradeoff might be made up for by focusing reading lessons on content texts, but there are limits to that. A comprehension lesson can easily include science or social studies content, but a phonics lesson not so much.

Reading is important, but it isn’t the only thing that matters in student development. Your team needs to get together to set priorities, so that the areas of greatest need (and potential value) get the greatest time allotments. And, keep looking for ways of expanding the amounts of instruction that will be made available to these needy students.

References

 Bentum, K. E., Aaron, P. G. (2003). Does reading instruction in learning disability resource rooms really work?: A longitudinal study. Reading Psychology, 24(3-4), 361-382.

Bryk, A.S., & Schneider, B. (2002). Trust in schools: A core resource for improvement. New York: Russell Sage, NY. 

Connor, C.M., Spencer, M., Day, S.L., Giuliani, S. et al. (2014). Capturing the complexity: Content, type, and amount of instruction and quality of the classroom learning environment synergistically predict third graders’ vocabulary and reading comprehension outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106(3), 762-778.

Denton, C., Foorman, B.R., & Mathes, P.G. (2003). Schools that “Beat the Odds”: Implications for reading instruction. Remedial and Special Education, 24, 258-261.

Fielding, L., Kerr, N., & Rosier, P. (2007). Annual growth for all students…Catch-up growth for those who are behind. Kennewick, WA: New Foundation Press.

Fisher, C., Berliner, D., Filby, N., Marliave, R., et al. (2015). Teaching behaviors, academic learning time, and student achievement: An overview. Journal of Classroom Interaction, 50(1), 6-24.

Hoffman, J.V. (1991). Teacher and school effects in learning to read. In R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, P.B. Mosenthal, & P.D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (vol. 2, pp. 911-950). New York: Longman. 

Kent, S.C., Wanzek, J., & Al Otaiba, S. (2017). Reading instruction for fourth-grade struggling readers and the relation to student outcomes. Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 33(5), 395-411.

Kiesling, H. (1977-1978). Productivity of instructional time by mode of instruction for students at varying levels of reading skill. Reading Research Quarterly, 13(4), 554-582.

Puma, M.J., Darweit, N., Price, C., Ricciuti, A., et al. (1997).  Prospects: Final report on student outcomes. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education Planning and Evaluating Service. 

Shanahan, T., & Walberg, H.J. (1985). Productive influences on high school student achievement. Journal of Educational Research, 78(6), 357-363.

Sonnenschein, S., Stapleton, L.M., & Benson, A. (2010). The relation between the type and amount of instruction and growth in children’s reading competencies. American Educational Research Journal, 47(2), 358-389. 

Taylor, B.M., Pearson, P.D., Clark, K., & Walpole, S. (2000). Effective schools and accomplished teachers: Lessons about primary-grade reading instruction in low-income schools. Elementary School Journal, 101 (2000), pp. 121-165.

Walberg, H.J., Harnisch, D.L., & Tsai, S. (1986). Elementary school mathematics productivity in twelve countries. British Educational Research Journal, 12(3), 237-248.

Weber, G. (1971). Inner-city children can be taught to read: Four successful schools (CGE Occasional Paper No. 18). Washington, DC: Council for Basic Education.

I hope and pray that you write about or repost regarding state reading assessments. I just received a call from a frantic academic coach stating that her principal has told her teachers to look at our state test’s achievement level descriptors and create test-based questions aligned to those levels to ask when immersing students in literature and informational texts. Is this a good use of their time? Isn’t it really all about the text as wells as students’ knowledge of the subject matter, vocabulary, and sentence complexity? Please help!

Shanahan response:

You’re right. It’s been awhile since I’ve gotten up on this particular soapbox. 

Many consider this “the season to be jolly,” but for schools the kickoff for heavy test prep is soon to begin. Bah, humbug.

That principal has probably been told to “use your data” or to create “data driven classrooms,” with the idea being to shine on the annual accountability tests.

While I appreciated the hopefulness behind this practice, I have one small concern…. The fact that it doesn’t actually work.

These so-called test score improvement experts who promulgate these ideas don’t seem to mind that their recommendations contradict both the research and successful educational policy and practice.

Their “theory”—and it is just a theory—is that one can raise reading scores through targeted teaching of particular comprehension skills. Teachers are to use the results of their state accountability tests to look for fine-grained weaknesses in reading achievement—or to try to identify which educational standards the kids aren’t meeting.

This idea makes sense, perhaps, in mathematics. If kids perform well on the addition and subtraction problems but screw up on the multiplication ones, then focusing more heavily on multiplication MIGHT make sense.

But reading comprehension questions are a horse of a different color. There is no reason to think that practicing answering particular types of comprehension questions would improve test performance.

Question types are not skills (e.g., main idea, supporting details, drawing conclusions, inferencing). In math, 3x9 is going to be 27 every doggone time. But the main idea of a short story? That is going to depend upon the content of the story and how the author constructed the tale. In other words, the answer is going to be different with each text.

Practicing skills is fine, but if what you are practicing is not repeatable, then it is not a skill. 

The test makers know this. Look at any of the major tests (e.g., SBAC, PARCC, AIR, SAT, ACT). They will tell you that their test is based upon the educational standards or that their questions are consistent with those standards. But when they report student performance, they provide an overall reading comprehension score, with no sub-scores based on the various question types.

Why do they do it that way?

Because it is impossible to come up with a valid and reliable score for any of these question types. ACT studied it closely and found that question types didn’t determine reading performance. Texts mattered but questions types didn’t. In fact, they concluded that if the questions were complex and the texts were simple, readers could answer any kind of question successfully; but if the questions were simple and the texts were hard, the readers couldn’t answer any kinds of question.

Reading comprehension tests measure how well students can read a collection of texts—not the types of questions they can answer. 

If this principal really wants to see better test performance, there is a trick that I’m ready to reveal here.

The path to better reading scores? Teach kids to read. 

It works like magic.

Devote substantial time to teaching phonemic awareness (preK-1), phonics (preK-2), oral reading fluency, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing. Make sure kids are being taught to read grade level texts—not just texts at the kids’ supposed reading levels” in grades 2 and up.

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving, Chanukah, December Solstice, Christmas, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, St. Stephen’s Day, New Year’s or any of the myriad of other joyous occasions that mark this time of the calendar, I wish you joy and bounty

This will be my last entry of 2018. Stay tuned. I have lots of new content planned for 2019.

I hope you will continue to read my blogs and to use the free publications, videos, resources, and other material at Shanahan on Literacy. Be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an entry, and please consider signing up your entire school, department, or district for a subscription (let us know of your interest and we can facilitate that).

It has been an annual tradition at Shanahan On Literacy to encourage everyone to remember literacy programs in their charitable giving. I’m only able to remind you of wonderful nationwide and international programs deserving of your generosity. I limit my list programs with the highest Charity Navigator ratings. Obviously, there are many other local programs that could benefit from your assistance, too (many of those are listed in Charity Navigator, but without ratings).

In 2017, with the start of my new website, it became possible for me to keep links to these charities available year round: https://shanahanonliteracy.com/charities. But an annual reminder still seems worthwhile. (In case it matters, I have no connection to any of these agencies.)

Please consider gifts to the following literacy and book-oriented charities:

Books for Africa

This program collects books for readers of all ages in Africa—it accepts both book donations as well as financial contributions.

First Book

Every year First Book distributes free books to 5 million needy kids as well as to large numbers of classrooms.

Jump Start

This program supports volunteer projects in schools with a focus on early education and reading promotion.

Reach Out and Read

This program distributes books and provides parent reading training and support through pediatricians and medical clinics.

Reading Partners

This provides volunteer-based tutoring programs in 14 metropolitan areas around the U.S.

United through Reading

This program connects military families through reading—making it possible for our military men and women to read to their kids at a distance. 

Room to Read

This worldwide literacy program focuses on partner training and book distribution.

This will be my last blog entry of 2018. Stay tuned. I have lots of new content planned for 2019. I hope you will stay with me and will consider signing your entire school, department, or district for a subscription (please let me know, I can facilitate that).