Some Recent Questions, Explicit and Implied

Aren’t non-fiction and informational text the same thing?

No, they are not. Informational text is factual, but that isn’t the point (or it isn’t the only point). CCSS is emphasizing the reading of literary and informational text to ensure that students are proficient with a wide variety of text. If the distinction was just fact vs. fiction, then text could be limited to narratives. Kids need to learn how to read exposition and argument as much as stories. Each of those types of text has different purposes, structures, graphic elements, text features, etc. And, that’s the point: exposing kids to all of those elements.

Isn’t close reading just highly accurate reading?

There are many good synonyms for close reading: analytical reading, critical reading, deep reading… careful reading is certainly included in each of these, but it is not a very good synonym. Close reading engages students in making sense of what a text says or implies, but it is more than this. A close reader makes logical inferences, but is aware of the inferences and recognizes the evidence and reasoning on which they are based (good readers can distinguish what they have been told from what they have assumed). Close readers don’t just get what a text says, but how it works, can evaluate the accuracy, quality, and value of the text, and compare the text with others.

My school uses Gates Foundation Units. That means that they are aligned with the Common Core, right?

While it is true that the Gates Foundation generously supported the development of the Common Core that doesn’t mean that everything that they support aligns with Common Core. Various Gates supported curricula have been appearing, and they have nothing to do with Common Core (they represent the interpretations of the common core of the individuals who got the Gates funding).

We don’t have to worry about implementing the common core because the states are dropping out?

Actually, no states have dropped out, but a few have talked about it and one (Indiana) has put it on pause to study whether to drop out. Also, Alabama has decided not to be part of either testing consortium. However, these “second thoughts” don’t have anything to do with pedagogical judgments (can we teach these effectively?), kids’ educational needs (are these appropriate for what we want for our own children?), or even the economic needs of our society (how well do students need to read, write or do math to grow our economy?). The disagreements have been about states rights and politics—this isn’t really an issue of deep political concern, but clearly some politicians hope that it will be. 

Indiana Backs Down on Common Core

Indiana is the first state to withdraw from the common core state standards. Previously, there were four states that had not adopted the standards, but of those that had done so, Indiana is the first to back down. Technically, they have only “suspended” their CCSS efforts for further study so it is possible that this will just be a delay and not an actual withdrawal, but the politics around this in Indiana suggest that this may be the beginning of the end of CCSS there.

Various state leaders have made noises about withdrawing from CCSS to re-embrace their previous low educational standards, and some (e.g., Alabama) have already pulled out of the PARCC and Smarter Balanced testing, but Indiana is the only one to act on their second thoughts.

Indiana Governor Mike Pence gave several reasons for the suspension, including the added costs. I’ve written about that issue in this space before, so it should be clear that I’m sympathetic to that problem. Many states, perhaps Indiana being one of them, adopted these standards without much forethought, and now are trying to implement without much real financial support either. That may be a good way to drive teachers crazy, but it won’t help kids learn.

Most of Governor Pence’s concerns seem to be about states rights, rather than learning. He apparently doesn’t like the federal government poking its nose into Indiana business. This is the same reason Virginia and Nebraska stayed out in the first place; the idea that these standards  emanated from President Obama and not from the states that combined to develop and implement them. I admit that I don’t have expertise on states rights, but I do know – Indiana politics aside — that Obama wasn't the source of these standards. That makes this concern more of a political wedge issue than an education concern. 

Also, I remember the state fights against the No Child Left Behind law during the last administration. The Supreme Court, a conservative court, was quite clear that states could be exempt from federal education mandates as long as they refused to accept the federal education money—which in Indiana’s case is more than $300 million per year that Governor Pence would need to send back. (I might not understand the ins and outs of political power, but I’ll bet you a quarter that Governor Pence for all of his enthusiastic independence from Washington would sooner outlaw basketball in Indiana before he’d that much money back to DC).

When Virginia’s Republican governor rejected the CCSS originally, he made the same state’s rights claims. He had been for the standards until he found out the Obama administration wanted them too, so for him it had become an issue of states rights (surprising how it sounds more like expediency). But the Virginia governor also indicated that the CCSS standards had been reviewed carefully and rejected because they were no higher than Virginia’s educational standards. I’ve written about that before, and it is a silly claim that doesn’t bear scrutiny. I have no idea whether Virginia or Indiana should adopt common core or cling to the lower standards, but pretending to not be able to tell the difference is embarrassing.

Indiana is the first state to withdraw from the common core state standards. Previously, there were four states that had not adopted the standards, but of those that had done so, Indiana is the first to have backed down. Technically, they have only “suspended” their CCSS efforts for further study so it is possible that this will just be a delay and not an actual withdrawal, but the politics around this in Indiana suggest that this is likely the beginning of the end of CCSS there.

Various state leaders have made noises about withdrawing from CCSS to re-embrace their previous low educational standards, and some (e.g., Alabama) have already pulled out of the PARCC and Smarter Balanced testing, but Indiana is the only one to actually take action on their second thoughts.

Indiana Governor Mike Spence gave several reasons for the suspension, including the added costs. I’ve written about that issue in this space before, so it should be clear that I’m sympathetic to that problem. Many states, perhaps Indiana being one of these, adopted the standards without much forethought, and now are trying to implement without much real financial support.  That may be a good way to drive teachers crazy, but it won’t likely be sufficient to help kids learn.

Most of Governor Pence’s concerns seem to be about states rights. He doesn’t like the federal government poking is nose into Indiana business. This is the same reason Virginia and Nebraska stayed out in the first place; the idea that these standards somehow emanated from President Obama rather than from the states that combined to develop and implement them. I admit that I don’t have real expertise on states rights, but I do know – Indiana politics aside — that Obama was not the source of these standards. That makes that more a political wedge issue than an education one. 

Also, I remember the state fights against the No Child Left Behind law during the last administration. The Supreme Court, a conservative court, was quite clear that states could be exempt from federal education mandates as long as they refused to accept the federal education money—which in Indiana’s case is more than $300 million per year that Governor Pence would need to send back. (I might not understand the ins and outs of political power, but I’ll bet you a quarter that Governor Pence for all of his enthusiastic rhetorical independence from Washington would outlaw basketball in Indiana before he’d send any of that money back to DC any time soon).

When Virginia’s Republican governor rejected the CCSS originally, he made the same state’s rights claims. He had wanted the standards until he found out the Obama administration wanted them to, so for him it had become an issue of states rights. But the Virginia governor also indicated that the CCSS standards had been reviewed carefully and rejected because they were no higher than Virginia’s standards. I’ve written about that before, too. It is a silly claim that doesn’t bear scrutiny.

Now Indiana is going to review the standards to see whether CCSS are better than what Indiana has aimed for in the past. I wonder if they’ll pay attention to the text complexity requirements that make almost all of the reading standards markedly harder than any previous standards. I wonder if they’ll pay attention to the disciplinary literacy standards for secondary students that require students to read science differently than they read history and literature.

Virginia ignored these differences and then concluded that they didn’t exist. I wonder if the upcoming Indiana review will ignore these stubborn facts, as well. Reject the standards, Governor, if you see some political advantage, you have the power to do so. Just don't mislead Indiana parents with claims that past Indiana standards are as high as the standards you are taking a pause on. They're not. 

IRA Presentations

The IRA conference last week was great. I took part in many presentations and discussions of research and the common core. I gave a talk on close reading the powerpoint for which can be found in the index on the right of my page. I also gave a talk on the changes to writing instruction and that powerpoint is included here  https://sites.google.com/site/tscommoncore/writing-1

A Time for Humility

My correspondent was upset. She was writing because her teaching evaluation had not gone well. She was teaching what was supposed to be a "close reading" lesson and her evaluator thought she had done a terrible job.

The reason she was writing me was because she had modeled her lesson off of my close reading presentation. The supervisor was concerned that she asked too many "right there" questions and not enough higher order ones. The observer was obviously offended that this teacher had not focused heavily enough on issues of craft and structure and critical evaluation. Clearly, somebody was wrong.

Of course, there are always minor misinterpretations that occur from such presentations and execution can be a real problem sometimes--that is, someone may believe they are executing what you said, but they may not be doing so very effectively.

However, I don't think that was the case this time. The teacher's plaint convinced me that the supervisor had a weak understanding of close reading, but was going to cling to this thread of "knowledge" for all it was worth.

I've read quite a bit about New Criticism and close reading over the years--both pro and con. I.A. Richards. Check. William Empson. Check. Robert Penn Warren. Check. Wimsatt & Beardsley. Check. I studied Adler and Van Doren like a Gospel when I was still young enough to get really passionate about such matters. I learned to read a book and a page. I hied to publishers that minimized the "apparatus" (kudos to Library of America) and to publications that avoided getting between the writer and the reader (Go, New Yorker!). I even found ways to split the differences between the E.D. Hirsch and Cleanth Brooks.

In none of my studies of the topic did I learn that plot didn't matter in a story or that we shouldn't ask kids about key ideas and details of a text if the author was explicit about those. Nor did I learn that it was essential that close readings include a hodgepodge of thinking; readin, in that view, is apparently just a disorderly melange of key ideas and details, craft and structure, and critical response.

I have spoken with brilliant literary critics (Peter Rabinowitz for one) who explained to me that the hardest thing about teaching freshmen college English students to engage in close reading is to get to the craft and structure earlier--but that had more to do with their impatience and lack of self confidence as readers, rather than any vision of reading and the way it ought to be.

Yesterday, I heard from a publishing company friend who was presenting a program to teachers. One of them was adamant that the program was doing it "wrong", because in close reading, you are "not allowed" to preteach vocabulary. She evidently was certain that such preteaching had been forbidden by the Common Core State Standards.

In my discussions of this matter with David Coleman and other members of his team, we all agreed (very quickly) that issues like the introduction of vocabulary or the pre-teaching of word recognition skills in anticipation of a text were separate matters entirely from other issues of prereading (such as previewing text, predicting what will happen in that text, background knowledge preparation, purpose setting, etc.).

I think we sometimes overdo the preteaching of vocabulary and I'm pretty certain that we don't always pick the right words for such assistance, but the research on this matter is clear and overwhelming:  preteaching vocabulary improves reading comprehension and increases the chances that students will be able to make sense of complex texts. Common Core is absolutely silent on the issue despite this teacher's absolute certainty that it has forbidden such lessons.

The problem in both of these cases (and many more that seem to arise each day) is our all-too-human need to lord it over our fellow man (and woman). People who a year ago hadn't even heard of close reading are now "experts" on the matter. I wouldn't mind so much if they had strong educational backgrounds that had engaged them in close readings of history, literature, science, or math, but most never had such opportunities. I wouldn't mind if they were reading the kinds of sources I noted earlier and had not only a depth of understanding what they were talking about, but an awareness of how to be flexible in these principles and precepts without making a wreck of the whole enterprise.

It is funny. In an approach to reading that necessarily must be flexible -- because of the centrality of the text to such interpretation-- we are spawning a bunch of supervisory twits who are insisting on inflexibility at every turn. Instead of paying close attention to the text and allowing it to determine the direction of the interpretative exploration, these buggers want everyone to do it their way.

It can be very appropriate to preteach vocabulary for a close reading, as long as the author doesn't provide the definitions himself/herself within the text, or if the interpretation doesn't turn on the nuances of meaning of the pretaught words. The point is to enable students to read the text successfully, but without doing the interpretive work for them.

It can be very appropriate to ask "right there" questions about a text, as long as the explicit ideas that are  queried are key points that are essential to building a sophisticated interpretation. If there are three key tenets to a scientific theory, I want to make sure the kids got them, even if the author stated them explicitly. It can be valuable to have an organized discussion of such matters that ensures that students not only got the major points, but that they are understanding how they fit together (developing coherent memories of such points is valuable). The same goes for asking about key plot turns and character motivations. The issue with such questions isn't whether they require memory or inferencing, but whether they are essential points in the universe of thought created by the author.

It can be very appropriate to read a text multiple times, each time going deeper into the interpretation. Adler and Van Doren suggest the necessity of three or four readings of the "great books," with each reading solving part of the interpretive problem. Thus, it is fine to read the text once just to come to terms with what it has to say, and to read it again, to delve deeply into the author's choices of craft and structure and how these serve to extend and reinforce the meanings identified in the first reading.

Principals, supervisors, and teacher evaluators: If you have just learned about close reading, if you have seen a presentation on it at a conference or a school workshop, if you have read a few chapters about it in Doug Fisher's book or glanced at my blog, or watched a You Tube video, or read the first version of the Publisher's Criteria, let's assume that you really don't understand it very well yet. Show some humility when it comes to lording your vast knowledge over your colleagues and subordinates.

Do you understand how close reading differs in history and literature and science? Do you understand the implications of the idea that close reading isn't a teaching technique but a learning goal? Do you grasp the differences between reading and reading deeply? Can you discern the difference between high level or higher order questions (a la Bloom) and essential or important questions within the universe of the text? Have you taken part in a Great Books discussion group? If not, be humble.

There are many ways to do close reading and there are big philosophical differences in what may seem to be minor points (e.g., is it okay to explore the implications of a theme in children's own lives? is it okay to draw interpretive information from the author's biography or other works that he or she has written? can the reader use what he or she knows about the social world to draw connections among the ideas in a text or to determine a character's or historical figure's motivations?). Do you understand what the implications are of these various views?

For the supervisor who said that it is inappropriate to ask "right there" questions in close reading, I would ask "Why?"

What is it about close reading that is violated by determining that there is bad blood between Hector and Achilles or that Ahab is obsessed with Moby Dick? Yes, those are clearly stated or demonstrated in the text, but why would it be wrong to ask such questions? Why would it be bad to question students on what God forms the universe from in the first 10 lines of Genesis (as David Coleman asked an audience at IRA this week)? Again, if these questions are offensive to your view of close reading, there must be a reason why they are offensive -- blaming your prejudice against "right there" questions seems to be tied to various theories of reading instruction, but they have no discernible connection to close reading as far as I can tell.

Why wouldn't you preteach vocabulary essential to making sense of a text? Especially if your purpose is to teach reading to a group of children. Perhaps close reading, in this regard, may play out differently in a Yale seminar room and in Mrs. Jone's third grade at P.S. 57.

Close reading, complex text, writing from sources, and the common core are all quite new. Let's not understand them too quickly. It is a time for humility.



 




 

Backwards Design and Reading Comprehension

Many schools are into what they call “backward design.” This means they start with learning goals, create/adopt assessments, and then make lessons aimed at preparing kids for those assessments.

That sounds good—if you don’t understand assessment. In some fields an assessment might be a direct measure of the goal. If you want to save $1,000,000 for retirement, look at your bank account every six months and you can estimate of how close you are to your goal. How do you get closer to your goal? Add money to your accounts… work harder, save more, spend less.

Other fields? Doctors assess patient’s temperatures. If a temperature is 102 degrees, the doctor will be concerned, but he won’t assume a temperature problem. He'll guess the temperature means some kind of infection. He’ll want to figure out what kind and treat it (the treatment itself may be an assessment—this could be strep, so I’ll prescribe an antibiotic and if it works, it was strep, and if it doesn’t, then we’ll seek another solution; all very House).

And in education? Our assessments are only samples of what we want students to be able to do. Let’s say we want to teach single digit addition. There are 100 single addition problems: 0+0=0; 0+1=1; 1+0=1; 1+1=2… 9+9=18. Of course, those 100 problems could be laid out vertically or horizontally, so that means 200 choices. There is the story problem version too, so we could have another 100 of those. That’s 300 items, which would be a small universe in reading comprehension.  

A test-maker would sample from those 300 problems. No one wants a 300-item test; too expensive and unnecessary. A random sample of 30 items would represent the whole set pretty well. If Johnny gets 30 right on such a test, we could assume that he would get all or most of the 300 right.

But what if the teachers knew what the sample was going to look like? What if only five of the items were story problems? Maybe she wouldn’t teach story problems; it wouldn’t be worth it. Kids could get a good score without those. She may notice that eight items focused on the addition of 5; she’d spend more time on the 5s than the other numbers. Her kids might do well on the task, but they wouldn’t necessarily be so good at addition. They’d only be good at this test of addition, which is not the same thing as reaching the addition goal.

When a reading comprehension test asks main idea questions like, “What would be a good title for this story?”, teachers will focused their main idea instruction on titles as a statements of main idea. Not on thesis statements. Not on descriptive statements. If the test is multiple-choice, then teachers would emphasize recognition over construction. If a test only asks about stories, then to hell with paragraphs. 

Conceptions like main idea, theme, comparison, inference, conclusion, and so on, can be asked so many different ways. And there are so many texts that we could ask about. Anyone who aims instruction at a test, thinking that is the same as the goal, may get higher scores. But the cost of such a senseless focus is the students’ futures, because their skills won’t have the complexity, the depth, or the flexibility to allow them to meet the actual goal--the one that envisioned them reading many kinds of texts and being able to determine key ideas no matter how they were assessed.

Reading comprehension tests are not goals… they are samples of behaviors that represent the goals… and they are useful right up until teachers can’t distinguish them from the goals themselves.    

On Being Careful Not to Read too Closely

Where does the author fit in common core text interpretations? Should students think about authors or is this verboten?

We (T. Shanahan, C. Shanahan, & C. Misichia) published research that considered how disciplinary experts (historians, mathematicians, historians) handle this problem. Our historians, consistent with many past studies, revealed that they focus heavily on authors during reading. They talked a lot about what they perceived to be the author’s arguments or biases.

The mathematicians we interviewed had a different take on the matter, claiming that author had no place in interpretation. They, according to their accounts, didn’t think about author at all when reading. Their attention was on the words and nothing more. We later received a note from a mathematician thanking us for showing that they were the only ones “who read with integrity.” 

However, math educators at Rutgers have pointed out that mathematicians may strive to read without attention to author as they told us, but that their interpretations do account for this supposedly irrelevant fact, at least under some reading conditions. Let’s just say, the math ideal is to read without attention to author, no matter what the practice may actually be (“the spirit is willing but the body is weak”).

The debate in literature is a more complicated one since the ideal is less clear. There was a time when the study of literature was overwhelmed by interpretations based on author’s biographies and contextual information about how the texts may have been written. The push-back to this historical approach to literature came from New Criticism. The New Critics wanted poetry to be read like mathematics; as if there were no source.

That is where the idea of the “intentional fallacy” came from… that it was invalid to consider what the author may have intended with his or her words, rather than thinking about the words themselves.

As Wayne Booth has shown the idea of author awareness is pretty central to the reading process – with real authors, implied authors, implied readers, and so on. What voice do you hear when you read Huckleberry Finn? That of an old codger in a rocker down by the Mississippi or a wealthy white-suited insurance investor in Hartford, Connecticut?

The idea of author awareness comes into legal interpretations as well. This is the season when lawyers argue their cases before the Supreme Court, and the term “original intent” is pretty descriptive of what some justices try to consider in their interpretations of the law.

I found myself thinking about all of this as I read E.D. Hirsh’s recent 85^th birthday reminiscence, “How Two Poems Helped Launch a School Reform Movement” http://bit.ly/11WCkw6

Hirsch, though trained as a New Critic, rebelled early on, writing a book that heavily influenced my thinking, Validity in Interpretation. (A book the title of which I often fondly misremember as The Ethics of Interpretation).

So what does this have to do with the common core?

It points out why one needs to be very careful NOT to do too close a reading. Hirsch argues persuasively in his recent essay why student prior knowledge matters in interpretation, and why author intentions play a related and legitimate role in text interpretation. That certainly doesn’t mean that we have to have a 10-minute discussion of student prior knowledge every time we read a text or that we should study an author's biography before we can profitably read his or her words. 

By the same token, close reading should not harken back to a time when we tried to read every text as if were handed down from the mountain, with no discernible author. It is okay to allude to an author’s other works in a discussion, or for kids to explicitly use their knowledge when trying to make sense of an author’s logic. The author’s words need to be central to our focus on the text, but not to the point of being either dismissive of the intentions of the author or foolish about what we can validly conclude about a text. A little common sense is going to be needed with this aspect of the common core.

Happy birthday, Don Hirsh. Hope it is a joyous one.