Literacy Blogs

  Ever wonder why we teach kids with a one-size-fits-all anthology in the regular classroom, but are so careful to teach them at their “reading levels” when they are in a pull-out intervention program?     Me too. In reading, students need the greatest amount of scaffolding and support when they are reading hard texts, and they need less support when reading easy materials.                                                                                 ...

I get this kind of question frequently from teachers who work with struggling readers, so I decided to respond publicly. What I say about these two tests would be true of others as well.   I am a middle school reading teacher and have an issue that I'm hoping you could help me solve. My students' placements are increasingly bound to their standardized test results. I administer two types of standardized tests to assess the different areas of student reading ability. I use the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests and the Terra Nova Test of Reading Comprehension. Often, my students' WRMT subtest scores ...

Blast from the past: This blog was first posted on March 31, 2014; and was reposted on November 15, 2017. The reason for revisiting is that over the past couple of weeks these unproven claims against teaching reading to young children have emerged yet again--this time in a posting by Valerie Strauss for the Washington Post. As usual, the press likes a good educational controversy rather than helping a community figure out the best way to address educational problems. Teaching young children to read is not harmful despite the claims.   During both my childhood and the early years of my teaching ...

Blast from the Past: This entry was first posted on March 8, 2014 and was re-posted on August 1, 2020. This posting dealt with perhaps the biggest issue facing all of us today: the amount of reading instruction that students receive. I've long been convinced that amount of teaching is one of the three major tools that we have to improve reading achievement. Now, under the limitations imposed by a pandemic, our kids and grandkids are having their reading instruction greatly reduced. Various school plans for the impending school year are suggesting reductions in teaching by as much as 50%. ...

Teacher question: I've been looking for online and workshop information on close reading and everything I've seen and heard has recommended doing close reading on material that is well above kids independent reading level. Your post talks about the futility of doing a close read on preprimer material, which I completely agree with. What do you think about using higher text, say second grade, with second semester first graders in a teacher-supported group lesson? Shanahan response" The reason why I challenged close reading with young children is because of the lack of depth of appropriate texts for them to read. Close reading requires ...

Teacher question: My question centers on identifying students for special education. Research says identify students early, avoid the IQ-discrepancy model formula for identification, and use an RTI framework for identification and intervention.  That said, I have noticed that as a result of high stakes accountability linked to teacher evaluations there seems to be a bit of a shuffle around identifying students for special education. While we are encourages to "identify early", the Woodcock Johnson rarely finds deficits that warrant special education identification.  Given current research  on constrained skills theory ( Scott  Paris)  and late emerging reading difficulties (Rollanda O’Connor), how do we ...