Literacy Blogs

One of the most difficult challenges facing teacher is the issue of differentiation. Matching the reading difficulty of texts and curriculum coverage with student proficiency and knowledge is complicated and its benefits can be subtle (that is, it can be difficult to attribute learning gains to such adjustments). When I look at studies of differentiation and grouping, it is evident that such arrangements can facilitate greater interaction and can allow instruction to proceed more efficiently (since students tend to make faster gains when they are working at levels that don’t differ by too much from their own proficiency levels). But ...

How can parents and teachers increase their young children's knowledge of the world, as such knowledge propels reading comprehension? Certainly, it is a good idea to talk to your child a lot, pointing things out, defining them, and explaining them.   It is a terrific idea to read to your children, too. That is a great way to get them beyond their experience and to help them develop language for what they are learning. Similarly, watching (some) television shows together and talking about it as you would personal experience can increase what children know.   Now there is a new resource that my friends ...

When I was in elementary school, each class had one reading book (no, it was not printed on clay tablets). By the time I became a teacher, this book-a-grade system was replaced in the primary grades with two books, one per semester (and there was a lot ink spilled over whether schools could afford this innovation). Still later, the numbers of textbooks expanded even more (what did California require, 6 texts for grade 1?). Of course, when the “whole language” wave moved across the country, lots of schools stopped using textbooks altogether, and replaced them with “class sets” of novels.   The ...

From about 1992 to 2007, I typically started my presentations on reading with a focus on the economy. While I know there are colleagues who believe that literacy is a “manufactured crisis” and that literacy has little to do with the economy, I strongly believed that such views were inconsistent with the economic evidence as well as with what I see in adult literacy programs.   However, when the economy melted down in 2007, I stood down. It wasn’t that I didn’t think that I had been correct about the role of literacy in the economy, but it looked like with the ...

Yesterday, I got a question from a middle school teacher. He wanted to know if story maps were a good approach to summarizing fiction. Good question.   First, teaching summarization is a great idea. Of all the reading strategies that we can teach, that is a real winner. All of the repertoires of strategies that are taught include summarization, and that makes sense since summarization gives the biggest payoff of any single strategies.   I can even go farther than that. Story mapping itself has been found to confer an advantage, at least with primary grades.   A story map is simply a structural summary of ...

Back in the 1990s, there were lots of arguments in reading education between those who believed that explicit phonics was helpful in teaching reading and those who advocated whole language (whose views ranged from no phonics to occasional mini-lesson phonics as needed.   These days, those arguments don’t happen quite as often. The National Reading Panel reviewed data on phonics studies; the National Early Literacy Panel reviewed data on phonics; and phonics studies continue to accumulate. It seems pretty clear that phonics instruction is helpful in getting reading started quickly and appropriately and so most teachers in the primary grades usually try ...

Let me go on record as saying I'm not a big fan of the turnaround school movement that comes out of Chicago. The idea has been that you identify a school that isn't doing well, you try to fix it, and if it doesn't improve you close it down. I have always been on the side of fixing such schools rather than closing them.   However, what do you do with a school that doesn't improve? There are schools in Chicago (and elsewhere) that have received a lot of resources and that have had a lot of time, and they still haven't ...