Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: 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 ...

Welcome to 2018.   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.  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 ...

Teacher question: Aren’t “teaching with complex text” and “teaching close reading” really the same idea, just in different words? Some of my teachers are confused by these terms. Some of them, like me, think they are the same idea, while others think they are really two different standards. How can I clarify this for them?  Shanahan response: I must admit that the first time this confusion presented itself to me, I was pretty darned surprised. I was supposed to make two presentations to some California teachers—an AM and a PM talk, and the reading supervisor wanted to know the two titles. I suggested one ...

Teacher question: I was wondering if you are able to provide me with a clearer understanding of what a “silent Reading and Listening Capacity Test” is all about.  Shanahan responds: The whole idea of administering silent reading and listening capacity tests is two-fold. A silent reading test would be used to determine how well a student can comprehend text when reading silently. Typically, such a test would be administered using graded or leveled passages. Thus, if the student could read the fourth-grade passages with 75% or higher comprehension, but could only read the fifth-grade passages with 50% comprehension, we might say something like, ...

Blast from the Past: This blog posted on November 19, 2017, and was re-posted May 21, 2022. I would love to say that its original posting ended the practice of round robin reading. Alas, too many teachers continue to cling to the practice – main, I suspect, because they know not what else to do. And, at least some of the teachers who do manage to eschew the practice try to rely solely on silent reading, which is just not sufficient (monitoring students’ oral reading progress is informative, particularly in the primary grades). This blog may be worth a second ...

Teacher question: I’ve looked at your framework and am surprised that it doesn’t include oral language. I’m a kindergarten teacher and can’t imagine leaving that out. Am I misunderstanding something? Shanahan answer: I feel your pain.   Yes, you’re correct that my framework focuses on the teaching of phonological awareness, decoding/spelling, vocabulary, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. But not oral language.   And, like you, I agonize over that omission (if it is one).   I emphasize PA, phonics, and the rest of those literacy components as the focus of teaching because research shows that teaching those things leads to improvements in literacy. You teach kids to ...