Literacy Blogs

A mother is doing her marketing with her 5-year-old in tow. She stops by the magazine rack and sees some children's workbooks aimed at teaching phonics. She pages through one of them and drops it into the grocery cart.   This kind of scene plays out daily across America. Mothers want their kids to do well in school, and in grade 1 being able to read is "doing well." (It is no accident that so many grocery stores, drug stores, etc. sell such workbooks.)   Such materials help kids to see the match between letters and sounds and a lot of kids like "playing ...

Cyndie and I published an article about disciplinary literacy in December: Analysis of Expert Readers in Three Disciplines: History, Mathematics, and Chemistry. This is the study in which we had historians, mathematicians, and chemists doing think alouds while they read, and from this we were able to compare how these experts from different disciplines read.   Upon the publication of the study, Cyndie was interviewed about this work and that interview is available to you through the Voice of Literacy, a site I have lauded before in this space. I thought she did great and that you might find this information to ...

Recently, Cyndie and I published a study on disciplinary literacy in the Journal of Literacy Research (Shanahan, C. Shanahan, T., & Misichia, 2011). In the study we report on our efforts to identify the special nature of literacy in three disciplines. We looked specifically at history, science (chemistry), and mathematics.   The study was based on the theory that it would be useful to account for such information when teaching students to read. The idea is that if students were taught to read history in a way that corresponds to how historians read they'd be better equipped to handle such materials. Obviously ...

A friend of mine, Alfred Tatum, and some of our graduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago developed a guide to encourage parent involvement in their children's learning (supported by Tavis Smiley). They gave me permission to post a copy of it for your use on my blog. One of the best parts of this guide is that it supports parent involvement not just in the early grades, but through high school. That is absolutely correct! Parents can play a specific and direct role in their children's learning. I hope you find it useful.   https://sites.google.com/site/shanahanstuff/parent-information

The past couple of blogs have dealt with the challenging text demands required by the new common core standards. Teachers who have been used to moving students to easier texts are in for a rude awakening since the new standards push to have students taught at particular Lexile levels that match grade levels rather than "reading levels."   Last week, I explained the evidence about the importance of text difficulty that was provided by the ACT. This week, I want to expand upon that explanation to show some of the other evidence that the authors of the common core depended upon, evidence ...

I was recently reading a draft of a doctoral dissertation. I was eager to read it because it was written by a smart student who I know to be a good teacher, and who has focused on important issues in literacy education. But, I was disappointed.   The study looked at how students thought about and reasoned about the complex information that they were asked to read. The scholar had challenged the kids with a collection of complex texts and videos.   The reason for my chagrin was not the design or results of the study, but the reaction of the researcher. The kids ...

Recently, Diane Ravitch had an article in the New York Times. One of the things that she said was that, “If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.” This is a familiar echo of an earlier David Berliner article, “Our Impoverished View of Educational Reform,” in which he emphasized the educational importance of poverty and its horrifying off-shoots: ill nourishment, lead-paint poisoning, psychiatric disorders, drug/alcohol abuse, inadequate housing, and so on.   And who can disagree? Poverty is horrible, ...