Literacy Blogs

23 September, 2010

Why a Skeptic Encourages Kids to Read

Last week a reporter contacted me. She wanted to know why we should encourage kids to read. Some of you might know that I am skeptical about a lot of the claims about reading. I certainly accept that idea that kids learn from reading (introspection alone should tell you that), but how much reading practice it takes to improve reading achievement is not exactly clear. Given that, I'm not exactly the poster boy for those who claim to be improving reading by getting kids to engage in it.   Nevertheless, I'm not against encouraging kids to read. Actually, I'm for it. The ...

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17 September, 2010

Multiple Texts versus Multiple Books

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 ...

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07 September, 2010

Literacy and the Economy

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 ...

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03 September, 2010

To Story Map or Not To Story Map

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 ...

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27 August, 2010

Teaching Phonics to English Learners

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 ...

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21 August, 2010

Welcome Back Teachers, It's a Long Climb

Blast from the Past: This blog entry first posted August 21, 2010; and was re-posted on August 16, 2018. Advice for the beginning of another school year.  This week lots of school openings and students returning to the university. I always look at this time of the year with lots of anticipation (and some foreboding); teaching is both something to be looked forward to and to dread. The part I love is the chance to share what I know with students who want to learn it; the chance to make a difference, to help others know something that they haven’t yet figured out. What a joy! The dread? ...

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07 August, 2010

Teaching Reading with Multiple Texts

The Common Core Standards repeatedly stress the idea that kids should be reading more than one text. I don't mean they call for kids to have multiple textbooks (the standards say nothing about how teaching should take place), but they do call for kids to be able to compare and contrast, analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information across texts. That is a big step forward, since multiple texts place different, and more authentic, reading demands on students. Here are many of the standards that dictate developing students abilities to read multiple texts and the grade levels that these are expected to ...

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25 July, 2010

Turn Around Schools

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 ...

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05 July, 2010

What Does It Mean that a Reading Program Works?

Recently, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) posted a report on multi-sensory programs for teaching children with reading disabilities. The report indicated that Orton-Gillingham, Wilson Reading, and other similar programs lacked convincing empirical evidence of their effectiveness. This has set off a lot of angry e-mailing this weekend from those who “know” these methods work. http://http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/   Although I serve as a reading content expert for WWC, I had nothing to do with this report. They only involve me in those aspects of their work when they have a substantive question about reading instruction or assessment, and on this report, I guess there were ...

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26 June, 2010

On the Misuse of Research Evidence in Reading

Originally posted June 26, 2010; re-posted on August 31, 2017. This post is timely given some of what I saw on Twitter this week as well as some recent questions and responses to my posts. There is still a great hunger to use research to support one's claims rather than using research to try to figure out what instructional actions to take. Too many principals buying programs then seeking reasons why they did. I will write more about this soon.   I remember the first time I was asked to testify before Congress. I was so full of myself. Wow, what a big ...

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