Literacy Now

by Catherine E. Snow
Harvard Graduate School of Education
June 6, 2013

Over the last 18 months I have had the chance to review a couple dozen proposed curricular units, developed by district teams or other groups, and designed to prepare students to meet the Common Core State Standards (or, more specifically, to pass the assessments aligned with the Common Core). I have been simultaneously impressed by the quality of the tasks assigned to students in those units, and dismayed by the lack of attention to providing any justification to the students for why they should undertake such difficult tasks. The tasks were more rigorous and more challenging than most students currently have access to, and undeniably would constitute a better preparation for the demands of college and the work place – if students can actually engage them. But if students find the tasks too difficult or too irrelevant to bother with, then the rigor will be of little value. 

A centerpiece of the activities in those curricular units is close reading with writing tasks designed to evaluate the products of the close reading.  When I pose questions about the units, like "why would students be interested in doing this?" or "wouldn’t it make sense to start with a discussion of some topic from current events (or popular culture, or personal experience) to motivate this passage?" I am met with reactions that range from puzzlement to disdain. It seems obvious to the curriculum designers that the goal of the curricular units should be learning new skills (in particular, the skills of close reading and providing evidence-based arguments) and practicing them. 

I would argue that middle and high school students are not, on average, deeply motivated to learn and master academic skills. They can, of course, become motivated to achieve and can ultimately find mastery rewarding. But it is much easier to recruit students to focus on tasks that will build their skills by starting with engaging questions, appealing topics, and important issues.  In my opinion, those are the hooks on which the new and challenging tasks can best be hung.

Why would anyone reject this idea? There seems to be an emerging conviction that starting with engaging questions and appealing topics violates practices properly associated with close reading. The new orthodoxy around close reading defines the first step as reading a text autonomously, without the benefit of focusing questions or orienting information or an introductory activity designed to foment enthusiasm for the topic. This is what I call "cold close reading"–reading a text without having been warmed up in any way to the topic or the task.

Cold close reading is really hard.  I speak as someone who learned a lot of Spanish during a five-month stay in Madrid by reading El Pais every day; I learned lots more from the articles about international affairs (topics I had already read about in English) than from the articles on Spanish politics, and I learned nothing at all from the articles on Spanish-league soccer. I was a pretty good reader when I undertook this exercise, with well-developed inferential abilities and monitoring strategies, and a very high degree of motivation. Nonetheless, cold close reading was often unproductive.  It was discouraging.  I found I couldn’t read about the unfamiliar topics for more than a few minutes at a time, and that I was exhausted at the end of such efforts.

Of course if the text is selected to be at the right level for the reader, if it is the right length, and if the initial cold close reading generates enough sense of the content that the reader can ask some reasonable follow-up questions, then the cold close reading does precisely what it is meant to do – teaches students the value of struggling with text.  But if the text is too hard, or too long, or too full of unknown words, or about a topic that is too unfamiliar, then the reader quickly exhausts his or her initial willingness to struggle with it. Teachers refer to this as a deficit of stamina. It can just as easily be thought of as a collapse of motivation.

So would more motivation or greater stamina be enough to push the faltering reader through the cold close reading obstacles? The focus in the Common Core State Standards on the virtues of "struggling with text" suggests it should. But the reality of reading a text that is too hard without any help is that it often results, not in productive struggle, but in destructive frustration. Such a reading experience does not generate a gist or a vague initial understanding that can be the basis for self-directed questioning and clarification. It generates a lack of understanding or a misunderstanding, and the longer one reads it the more confused one gets. Cold close reading too often results in an accumulation of misdirection – in a reinforcement of the message that reading is about pronouncing the words correctly, which the practice of close reading is precisely intended to counter.

My goal is not to remove close reading from the list of practices used to promote comprehension.  My hope is that we acknowledge the range of challenges students in U.S. classrooms are likely to encounter with cold close reading, and that we recognize the need to attend to student motivation and interest by replacing cold close reading practices with warmer ones – tasks that make sense from the students’ point of view, that require close reading for an authentic purpose other than just practicing close reading, and that acknowledge the need to respond to the full range of variability within classrooms in student access to the vocabulary, background knowledge, and inferencing skills presupposed by the texts assigned.

Examples of Supporting Studies:

Guthrie, J.T., McRae, A., & Klauda, S.L. (2007). Contributions of Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction to knowledge about interventions for motivations in reading. Educational Psychologist, 42(4), 237-250.

Hulleman, C.S., Godes, O., Hendricks, G.L., & Harackiewicz, J.M. (2010). Enhancing interest and performance with a utility value intervention. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102(4), 880–895.

Purcell-Gates, V., Duke, N.K., & Martineau, J.A. (2007). Learning to read and write genre-specific text: Roles of authentic experience and explicit teaching. Reading Research Quarterly, 42, 8-45.

Reader response is welcomed. Email your comments to LRP@/

by Peter Freebody
The University of Sydney
April 25, 2013

Issue—

We ask: ‘How can different types of research can be useful in guiding us in setting policy and shaping classroom practice?’ But there is a prior question: ‘Why, after so much research on literacy education, do we feel that we have not ‘set policy’ or ‘shaped classroom practice’ to our satisfaction?’ Why is there a sense of disappointment on this count among researchers, policy-makers, and teachers?

My Take

It seems to me that there are at least two kinds of possible answers—to do with the sites and the nature of our research. In spite of our incessant, forensic analyses of the psychological processes of reading and writing, we have relatively few detailed, well theorized studies of the two settings we claim we are trying to influence—the settings in which policy is formed, modified, and implemented, and classrooms.

Students bring to school a more complex and diverse set of socio-economic, technological, cultural, and language backgrounds, and they leave school heading for a more complex, diverse, and unpredictable life, learning, and work trajectories. So reforming both policy and pedagogy, and understanding their relationship, are crucial ongoing tasks for literacy educators.

Where Policy is Formed

How policy affects practice is complex. New policies don’t replace old ones the moment they are introduced, nor do they get acted out the same way in different sites within educational systems. They can rearrange the relationships among educators within systems, and reorder the authority of their expertise. We sense these things (see Elmore, 1996), but how they might happen next time, and with what consequences, we simply don’t know. So how we can align our ambitions with our practices is guesswork on each new occasion.

Classrooms

Similarly, there is much research on the application of commercial products, technologies, and strategies to classroom teaching and learning, but teachers’ work is affected by factors such as time, space, and technology constraints; teacher’s classroom work has many simultaneous functions: the need to manage bodies, movements, and attention, to maximize students’ participation, and their emotional and physical safety, and to monitor progress in their learning, and so on, as well as teacher’s need to teach syllabus content.

Teachers try to organize classroom activities so that all of these functions operate at the one time. So one crucial question for researchers is: ‘How are these functions best co-ordinated or orchestrated in different sites to maximize the instructional value of the activities (Dillenbourg, 2011)?

I-O Causal Connections

From this view comes a second kind of explanation for our ‘disappointment’. Much of the research we conduct in classrooms is based on two central ideas: 1) an intervention (I) of some sort—say, a new curriculum or teaching strategy—will or will not cause a change of learning outcome (O); 2) that this I-O causal connection holds in general, and 3) that we know this because we can amalgamate data from lots of classrooms or lots of individual studies. This is the powerful logic of drug testing: ‘this chemical causes the death of these bacteria—overall, generally, wherever.’

Open-System Campaigns

But researching the efficacy of educational activities may be more like researching governmental campaigns about the dangers of smoking than testing the effects of drugs on bacteria. These campaigns operate within ‘open systems’, and they may work or not depending on how they interact in possibly unpredicted ways with other mediating factors (Ms)—in families, neighbourhoods, or workplaces. In this light we have a more generative set of research questions about a variety of I-M-O connections (Reimann, in press/2013). We could improve our chances of doing rigorous work that at the same time speaks more powerfully to the sites in and around literacy education that we wish to influence. For a start, this would probably need to involve long-term projects in more extensive collaborations with teachers and policy-makers, and might even lead us into a refreshing ‘post-disappointment’ phase.

Reader response is welcomed. Email your comments to LRP@/

by Peter Afflerbach
University of Maryland
April 17, 2013

I first read this article 3 decades years ago—when I was a rookie elementary reading teacher—and the important message it carries has stayed with me. I return to it every few years, providing myself with the opportunity to see how it has influenced my thinking and practice. And reminding me of how careful and caring research matters. If you're interested in experiencing how a 30-year-old article can speak to today's classroom practice, this is the read for you.

The article focuses on differential treatment of readers, and examines the question, “Might the type and focus of reading instruction provided to struggling readers  have unintended consequences?” Allington examines the allocation of instructional time given to readers in different reading ability groups, and then examines the instructional emphases within those groups. The study includes a review of relevant research literature, combined with classroom observations and teacher interviews. 

Looking across of range of studies, including many of his own empirical efforts, Allington found a range of consistent differences between the instruction provided to good versus struggling readers.  For example:

• engagement (good readers are observed to be on-task significantly more often than struggling readers),
• emphasis (good readers receive more emphasis on the meaning of the texts they read while struggling readers' instruction emphasizes cracking the code and skills),
• type of reading (oral for the struggling and silent for the good),
• the number and types interruptions (that's right, teachers let the errors of good readers pass but almost always interrupt struggling readers to correct their errors), and, perhaps most important, the sheer number of words read per day (good readers read, on average, three times the number of words read by struggling readers).

Allington’s major point, anticipated by his related (and famously titled) article “If they don’t read much, how they ever gonna get good,” was that struggling readers may remain struggling readers because of the instruction they receive, and how they are treated in reading classrooms.  If struggling readers are not provided significant amounts of additional time to read, it is almost impossible for them to join the ranks of their successful classmates.  And, the focus of instruction can sometimes hinder reading development, especially when remedial reading instruction does not include opportunities for struggling readers to experience success in reading real texts.

My recollection of reading the article for the first time includes the fact that it challenged how I thought about reading instruction. It forced me to rethink what was behind the challenges my students experienced in their reading development. This article still has the power to help us reflect on practice.

The article examines the different treatment that struggling and accomplished readers receive, concluding with a cautionary tale.  If we believe that a reading problem exists within the child, we may give our best efforts to address that problem (or problems).  These efforts will be focused on matching instruction to the student’s indicated needs. But, what if the real obstacle is not a skill deficit but not enough time and opportunity to actually read meaningful text?  What if we focus only on cognitive strategy and skill, while ignoring the student’s self-concept as a reader? How can children who are behind their peers ever catch up, when the instructional environment in our schools gives high achievers more opportunity to do real reading than low achievers.

Allington forces us to focus on the critical interactions of students, teachers, and curriculum, and finds that particular instructional practices, however well intentioned, may have the effect of widening the achievement gap. The struggling readers he observed received considerable amounts of reading instruction, but their opportunities to read intact texts, worthwhile stories, and meaningful writing were severely restricted. 

For those of you who believe in the power of student affect, Allington documents the prevalence of skills instruction and corresponding lack of attention to student motivation and engagement.  This anticipates the exciting research of the last decade, research that demonstrates that engagement and authentic reading are necessary for students’ ongoing success with reading. Membership in the low reading group can quickly depress students’ self-efficacy, sense of self as a reader, and the belief that one can succeed in reading. 

Allington’s article from 3 decades ago deserves our attention today.  Why read it?  It challenges us to reflect on all manner of curriculum and instruction that is intended to foster students’ reading development.   It may lead to an insight about instruction and the impact of different curriculum for our educational haves and have-nots. It will reaffirm your commitment to providing accessible and interesting books and remind you that affective growth is as important as cognitive growth.  The article, in some senses, was ahead of its time. Give it a read and find out how current it is.

Reader response is welcomed. Email your comments to LRP@/

by Virginia Goatley
University of Albany
April 15, 2013

To help address this question, let’s start with background information for readers who are not familiar with this assessment.  The edTPA is a performance assessment for pre-service teaching candidates that is being piloted in a number of states.  For the assessment, candidates provide a range of artifacts, including lesson plans, a videoclip of their teaching, student work samples, and a reflective narrative on the lesson.  In some states, a successful score on the edTPA is a requirement for teacher certification (see the State Policy section of the edTPA website for participating states).  Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the initial states using the edTPA have Race to the Top funding with a goal to re-envision teacher evaluation.  It is especially important for literacy educators to know about the assessment, given that the elementary assessment has a focus on literacy instruction. 

The Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) at Stanford University developed the edTPA, as an extension of their earlier work with the original Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA).   The assessment draws on collaboration with numerous reviewers and is informed by other initiatives in performance assessment including National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, InTASC, and the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (see the Overview section of the edTPA website for a complete overview).

The edTPA website also provides a list of research references on pilot work related to teacher performance assessment. In addition, the FAQ section includes references to research from the National Board as support for the initiative:

A number of researchers in teacher education view a performance assessment with a focus on actual teaching as having potentially greater value than a multiple choice test alternative or value-added models of student performance (Chung, 2008; Darling-Hammond, 2012). Under the National Board model, a similar performance assessment is voluntary and intended to recognize highly accomplished teachers. Based on research on K – 12 assessment, a shift to a high-stakes mandatory assessment for pre-service teaching is likely to raise some issues to sort through, such as permission to videotape, consequences when a candidate does not pass, match between assessment goals and teacher preparation program goals, and so on.  Information on student success rates will likely inform teacher preparation program improvement and the accreditation process.  As a work in progress for several states, many teacher educators and literacy professionals are closely monitoring the edTPA developments and participating in conversations about implications for their states.

Reader response is welcomed. Email your comments to LRP@/

by John Guthrie
University of Maryland
April 15, 2013

Dilemma—

The common core state standards (CCSS) are bringing a sea change in reading and writing. Designers of the new standards, educational administrators, and teachers all say the CCSS will require new reading skills. Calling for more complex text, the standards immediately raise the difficulty of the materials in the classroom. Beyond the texts, the standards call for reading as reasoning. Merely recognizing words, or being fluent at reading aloud, is not enough. Students need to think deeply to answer high level questions.

Teachers are assembling the complex texts. They are aligning them to the standards at each grade. Daily teachers are creating unprecedented high aims for learning from books and the internet. Unpacking the CCSS-based questions themselves is a formidable reading problem. In most classrooms, most students face daunting reading demands in every lesson.  

Will this work? Can educators succeed simply by giving harder, higher reading tasks to everyone?

My Take

Absolutely not. While students must learn a new reading skill set, teachers cannot simply force feed hard reading materials. Students are not like empty jars waiting to be filled. We cannot simply pour hard reading materials into them. Too many students are passive learners, or even dislike reading. Presenting hard texts and high level questions cannot be sufficient. Students are growing beings who require nourishment. Teachers need to activate and energize their students. Teaching new skills is a must, but new skills must be balanced by inspiring students’ passions and purposes for learning.

Evidence

Every teacher knows that students have to be motivated to learn. Opening the book, looking at it, concentrating to comprehend it, and using what you learn from text are all motivated. They take effort and energy. Learning to read the more complex texts demanded in the CCSS takes more dedication, certainly not less. In these times, students have to be more fully engaged and motivated than ever. A review showed that 100 studies have connected motivation to comprehension (Guthrie, 2009). For example, children who enjoy reading stories in their spare time and have favorite authors or genre like mysteries are higher in comprehension than less avid readers (Becker, 2010). Evidence substantiates what most teachers know. Students with interest, drive, desire, belief in themselves and passion for reading will tackle complexity, devour deeply, and persist in reading until their jobs are done.

Teachers often believe that motivation comes from home, which is partly true. But tragically many teachers overlook the empowerments of their own classrooms. A host of studies shows that the classroom context can be a motivator (Guthrie, 2012). For example, when teachers give academic choices and some freedom, students awaken to learning; whereas when teachers dominate the landscape and control everything, children shrink from engagement and decline in achievement. The classroom can motivate and inspire or it can discourage and disengage. This pattern is vividly evident from primary through secondary grades (Christensen, 2012).

Teachers can expand on how they enhance their students’ motivation and learning. Even when they have not done so before, teachers can learn to give students a few meaningful choices—choice within boundaries is the idea. Teachers can promote partnership activities instead of constantly expecting solo work. Teachers can link a story or a science book to student backgrounds and personal interests to show relevance. Choice, collaboration and relevance are all motivators—and there are dozens more.

In our work, we have found that even with just a half day of professional training, coupled with a half day of coaching, teachers can enrich their classrooms with motivational activities (Guthrie, 2013). Equally important, we know just providing new materials and turning teachers and students loose on them doesn’t do the job.  In the absence of training for motivation and engagement, an infusion of complex information texts and guidelines for comprehending them does not increase achievement (Baker, 2011). A barren text that is not interesting, relevant, important or inspiring—no matter how interesting we as educators might think it is—has few chances of boosting students to the heights of CCSS attainments.

It may appear that providing a more motivational context is a bit more work for the already overworked teacher. But that bit of extra work will pay big dividends because motivated students initiate their own activities. They require less discipline, guidance, organization and micromanagement.  A small investment in designing for engagement yields a classroom of self-directed learners, freeing the teacher to plan and organize creatively.

Closing

To assure that all students are attaining the CCSS, teachers want to afford them a rich—and balanced—literacy diet of teaching for skill and designing for engagement. Without both parts of this diet in every lesson, students stumble out of their classrooms half starved—and still hungry for engaging activities that lead to the sort of learning championed in the CCSS.

Reader response is welcomed. Email your comments to LRP@/