Literacy Blogs

Blast from the Past: This timely piece is about time and how to spend it during language arts instruction. Many teachers spend too little time on some components of literacy--because they get wrapped up in doing particular activities rather than teaching particular things. The most effective classrooms have clear goals and they make sure the kids know what those are. If you really want kids to be fluent, having them read only a page or practicing with something that they can already read fluently won't help you to that goal. Likewise, a phonics lesson in which kids spend two minutes ...

  When writing about close reading, I have often mentioned that there are multiple approaches to reading. Most elementary teachers and many secondary English teachers don’t know much about these different approaches or why they have been controversial. Thus, when someone takes pot shots at close reading they are surprised and wonder what may be going on. Towards trying to clarify such disagreements, and to expose the limitations of close reading (and why we wouldn’t want to embrace it too tightly), I have sketched out three major approaches to reading touted by English Departments over the past century. I conclude with my ...

Teacher Letter: I've heard you speak and think I know your position on Background Knowledge and Common Core "New Yorker" style book introductions. But was wondering if you could dedicate a post about the term "Cold Reads" as referred to in the Common Core and address the arguments made by the teacher author of this article on the topic.      Shanahan Response: Thanks. I hadn’t seen this post by Jeremiah Chaffee, an English teacher. I've only  focused on his “cold reading” remarks.   First, Common Core doesn’t use the term, “cold read.” It appears to be meant as a pejorative for close reading, though it only characterizes ...

Teacher question: You say close reading requires students to rely solely on the text during reading. But many of the Common Core Standards (and the PARCC and Smarter Balanced prototypes) require that students compare texts. This seems contradictory. What’s up?  Shanahan response: This is a bit confusing. The basic idea of close reading is, just as you say, that interpretation is to be based entirely on the text itself. Readers aren’t to turn to author biographies or other works in that author’s oeuvre. No Cliff’s Notes either. Even prefaces, blurbs, statements of context, and explanatory notes provided by the publisher are verboten.   These interpretive ...

Common Core advocates make a big deal out of the idea that questions should be text dependent. This means you shouldn’t be able to answer a question without reading the text. By all means ask questions that require reading.   However, this is a very low standard. Many text dependent questions simply aren’t worth asking.   Last week I met a teacher who was trying to generate every literal question she could—long lists of questions. She was interpreting close reading as “thorough reading” and she was making sure that her first-graders missed nothing; no detail was too trivial for her text dependent questions.   However, close ...

Not surprisingly my entry about the PARCC decision to read the reading test to some students received a big response from readers. Some notes from parents of special education students were wonderfully supportive (though they struggled to be because they are torn by the issue--both wanting their kids to forego these tests and wanting them to experience full inclusion including taking these tests). Those letters were not posted to my site and given their personal nature I'm not putting them up here either.  Other responses weren't as supportive. In fact, some respondents were pretty heated up at my view. I usually just respond to those letters on-line as they come ...