Literacy Blogs

Blast from the Past: This entry first appeared June 10, 2013 and was reposted on May 1, 2021. This two-part blog entry argued against the primary grade retention policies that many states were adopting at that time. I provided both an analysis of the research that retention proponents were relying on and the highlights of the extensive body of research on retention that they were ignoring. Neither the outcomes of policy initiatives nor new research over the past 8 years have changed my thinking. However, what makes this informaton timely is the COVID pandemic. Data so far suggest that our ...

Teacher question:   I was wondering what your thoughts are on retention of special education students due to the higher demands of the common core standards. Our school uses the "Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project" Benchmark Reading Levels as our primary reading assessment. Student report card grades in reading are based on this assessment.   Two years ago, a Kindergarten student could be on level B, and be promoted.  Now, two years later, they must be on Level D/E. The pattern continues throughout the grades, what was acceptable a few years ago as grade level is no longer the case. This presents a problem ...

Teacher question: I am writing to you for some suggestions and recommendations concerning working with science and social studies teachers in light of the writing standards in the common core.  I am a former English teacher with 35 years of experience and have, for the past seven years, worked to develop and present workshops and classes for content area teachers in reading – focusing on both disciplinary and content literacy.     I have been asked by a school district to provide professional development for secondary science and social studies teachers in implementing the writing standards in the common core.  Their suggestion was to ...

I received this letter recently and below is my response. I bet this goes on in lots of schools (unfortunately). Dear Dr. Shanahan, What do you believe to be best practice in assessing a student's reading comprehension? As elementary schools turn to the Professional Learning Community framework, teachers are expected to devise tests within their grade level teams to test for reading skills like inferring, author's purpose, cause & effect...etc...   In your comprehension blog, however, you stated that it was difficult to assess these skills separately since reading is an integrated process. That makes a lot of sense.   Are these Professional Learning Communities misdirected ...

Many schools are into what they call “backward design.” This means they start with learning goals, create/adopt assessments, and then make lessons aimed at preparing kids for those assessments.   That sounds good—if you don’t understand assessment. In some fields an assessment might be a direct measure of the goal. If you want to save $1,000,000 for retirement, look at your bank account every six months and you can estimate of how close you are to your goal. How do you get closer to your goal? Add money to your accounts… work harder, save more, spend less.   Other fields? Doctors assess patient’s temperatures. ...

I received a letter this week from a teacher wanting to know about ability grouping. Her principal wants to reduce the heterogeneity in reading achievement, so teachers will not have to make adjustments. She wanted to know what I thought of this arrangement.   I see a lot of these schemes these days in urban schools. Often the school will have three second-grade classrooms or three third-grade classrooms, and all the low kids end up in one room, and all the high ones in another room. The research says that these arrangements slightly advantage the top kids, but that they suppress the ...

Where does the author fit in common core text interpretations? Should students think about authors or is this verboten?   We (T. Shanahan, C. Shanahan, & C. Misichia) published research that considered how disciplinary experts (historians, mathematicians, historians) handle this problem. Our historians, consistent with many past studies, revealed that they focus heavily on authors during reading. They talked a lot about what they perceived to be the author’s arguments or biases.   The mathematicians we interviewed had a different take on the matter, claiming that author had no place in interpretation. They, according to their accounts, didn’t think about author at all when reading. ...