Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: 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 ...

Teacher question: 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 ...

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted November 16, 2018 and was re-posted on November 20, 2021. Since this blog first posted, English Learners continue to lag, and schools continue to try to provide pull-out and push-in interventions for them. I thought it was time to revisit the issue. There was no need to revise the phonics comments here as research still shows that ELs can benefit from extra decoding instruction, but it also continues to find that such instruction does not have as big a learning impact as it does on English speakers. There is clearly a need (and ...

Teacher question: 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 ...

I talk a lot about research in this space. 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 ...

Teacher questions: 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 ...

Teacher question: 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 ...

Teacher question: 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 ...