Literacy Blogs

"Summertime and the living is easy, fish are jumping, and the cotton is high..." It is summer and not a good time for a long blog on literacy teaching. So, I took the time to write a short one. I didn't want to get worked up in the summer heat, so have provided a pithy critique of 5 popular myths about reading instruction. 1.  No, the fact that you do not use a textbook to teach reading does not make you a good teacher. The idea that good teachers don’t follow a program and weak ones do has been around since ...

Think-Pair-Share in Reading Instruction: Is it Effective?   Teacher Question: Our reading coach has encouraged all of our teachers to use a lot of the “think-pair-share” reading strategy. I’m an upper elementary grade teacher. Is “think-pair-share” research based? Shanahan responds:            This seems like such a straightforward question, but it has been tying me in knots for days. It all depends on what you mean by “research based.”            You might be asking me whether there is there any empirical evidence showing that if you use “think-pair-share” in your classroom your kids will end up with higher reading achievement by the end of the year. If that ...

Why do you support the use of basal readers for teaching reading? Isn’t it the teachers that make the difference, not the textbooks?           What an peculiar—but all-too-common—question.            What has led to this weird belief that schools can have either textbooks or good teachers? That investments in teacher development and textbook adoption are opposites? Or, that the good teachers will run screaming from the room upon textbook purchases?            The real issue isn’t whether teachers or programs matter, but whether students are best served by a corps of good teachers ...

I’m a literacy coach, and one of the teachers in one of my online classes asked the following question: “The article mentions that using a dictionary to define a word is a superficial method of vocabulary acquisition. While it may be too rash to discontinue using dictionaries, how should they be used in vocabulary instruction, and how much should teachers rely on them in the classroom?” Vocabulary teaching is currently in vogue; there are lots of good books and articles out there on how to teach word meanings. That’s good, as far is it goes.         Steve Stahl used to ...

Teachers question: I have just been hired as a reading coach in a school where I have been a third-grade teacher. My principal wants me to raise reading achievement and he says that he’ll follow my lead. I think I’m a good teacher, but what does it take to raise reading achievement in a whole school (K-5) with 24 teachers? Shanahan's answer:             It’s easy J. Just do the following 9 things: 1.    Improve leadership.                                 Literacy leadership matters. You and your principal will need to be a team. The more the two of you know and agree upon the ...

            For nearly a century, leading educators and school textbooks have encouraged teachers to set a purpose for reading. Sometimes these purposes are called “motivation” or they might be stated as questions, “What is a population?” or “What is the major problem the main character faces?”             It makes sense. We want our kids to be purposeful and such purpose-focused reading leads to higher comprehension, right?             Not exactly. Researchers (e.g., Richard Mayer, John Guthrie) have shown that, indeed, if you set a specific purpose for reading, students will do a better job of accomplishing that purpose. So far ...

  Question:          I am currently teaching workshops and courses on reading and the Common Core and have approached these with regard to disciplinary literacy.  So many of the teachers involved are seeing the value of creating discipline-specific reading experiences in their classrooms. This is especially true of secondary teachers but upper elementary as well.            Where we are having a question is how can this apply to kindergarten classrooms. We discussed using texts that focus on science and social studies topics, how the authors might get their information, and focusing on a text structure if one is ...