Literacy Blogs

Lexiles and other readability measures are criticized these days about as much as Congress. But unlike Congress they don’t deserve it.   Everyone knows Grapes of Wrath is harder to read than predicted. But for every book with a hinky readability score many others are placed just right.   These formulas certainly are not perfect, but they are easy to use and they make more accurate guesses than we can without them.   So what’s the problem?   Readability measures do a great job of predicting reading comprehension, but they provide lousy writing guidance.   Let’s say that you have a text that comes out harder than you’d hoped. You wanted it ...

Teacher question: I am a 4th grade math teacher, and I love CC standards. I’ve been teaching to them and my students are making HUGE gains in math.  My question is about PARCC. I have looked online at the protocol questions and cannot figure out what students will really be expected to do. It looks like they will need to cut, paste, and type. My fear is that the online component of the test is going to skew the results and students will be unnecessarily frustrated trying to show their thinking using "tools". It seems the test is automatically biased towards wealthier ...

My friends at the Thomas Fordham Institute asked that I weigh in on the controversy over the close reading lessons being touted by School Achievement Partners. I wrote a blog for their site and have included a link to it here. You might be interested in my assessment of those lessons and on some of their claims about close reading. Here it is:  Commentary on Gettysburg Address Close Reading Lessons   Since I was posting that article, I thought it would be a good time to provide a couple of other links. This fall, I had an article in American Educator about how ...

What is the biggest educational change promoted by the Common Core?   There are so many choices: kids will be reading more challenging texts; close reading will revolutionize the reading lessons; high school English, science, and social studies teachers will teach disciplinary literacy; there will be greater attention to argument, multiple text, informational text, and writing from sources, and so on?   So which is the biggest change? Perhaps one that you haven’t even thought of…   Past standards were long lists of skills, knowledge, and strategies; lists so endless that they were less standards than curriculum guides. Until CCSS, the typical standards looked like a ...

Teacher question:   It seems that there is a lot of conflicting information coming out about accuracy and complex text. In the April edition of The Reading Teacher, Richard Allington wrote an article pertaining to struggling readers. In this article he says that there are studies showing the benefits to teaching children using text where their accuracy is high. Our district just raised the running record accuracy rate expectation to 95-98% accuracy based on the current research. Yet, your blog postings pull in the opposite direction. How do teachers know what is right and what is wrong? After all, teachers want to ...

My district has decided not to purchase a core reading program since we are now teaching Common Core. Does CCSS really prohibit the use of commercial instructional materials?   No, CCSS neither requires the use of commercial programs nor does it prohibit such use. That is strictly a local decision. So should we use a program?   I’ve long argued that teachers need programs. The development of extensive lesson plans and tracking down appropriate materials each day is overwhelming for most teachers, and it introduces great variability into classroom instruction. One of the things I learned as director of reading in Chicago was that having ...