A Couple of Ways to Promote Literacy: Please Lend a Hand

Hi everyone. Reach Out and Read does great work in getting books into the hands (and mouths) of young children. It is participating in the Pepsi Refresh project, an online challenge that could net them $250,000 to expand their work. I've been going on line every day and voting for them, and they have been inching up in the competition (this is getting me ready for the Olympics, I think). Can you imagine how well they would do, if you were voting for them, too? The directions are below and they are pretty simple. Easiest contribution I've made to literacy this month!

Here’s how you can help:
1. Visit http://www.refresheverything.com/ReachOutandRead
2. Vote once each day for Reach Out and Read through February 28th.
3. Pass this along to your colleagues, friends, and family and encourage them to vote for Reach Out and Read as well.

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Also, each year my friends at the National Center for Family Literacy honor a family literacy teacher. If you know any special family literacy teachers, it would be a real nice thing to nominate them for the recognition that they deserve. The info is below.

2010 Toyota Family Literacy Teacher of the Year Award

Applications now available! Nominate a teacher today!

Presented by the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) and Toyota, the Toyota Family Literacy Teacher of the Year Award is given to educators who demonstrate exemplary efforts to help parents and children learn together and achieve their academic and non-academic goals.

The 2010 Toyota Family Literacy Teacher of the Year will receive a $7,500 award for his/her program, courtesy of Toyota. He/she also will receive a trip to the 19th Annual National Conference on Family Literacy in San Antonio, Texas on April 11-13. He/she will be recognized during the Opening General Session at the Conference.
Nominations will be accepted online through February 24, 2010!
To access and complete the nomination form, click here.

http://datacapture.doe1915.com/ncfl/form.php

More Ideas Not Everyone Will Like: Musings on Teacher Education

This week I had the opportunity to spend some time with some old friends. One of them, Mary Beth Curtis, reminded me about a column I had published in Reading Today when I was IRA president. The column was about teaching and teacher education and it provoked a great deal of controversy and comment at the time, so I remembered it quite well. Her reminder seems timely given the big kerfluffle over teacher education right now, so I'm re-issuing that piece here and now (the original title was "More Ideas Not Everyone Will Like"--I've added the post colon description for this wider audience).

Mark Lundholm is a comedian. Like most funnymen he can make an audience uncomfortable. When he takes the stage, he notes the diversity of perspectives in the crowd. And then he says something wise. “If I offend you, don’t walk out. Just understand that it isn’t your turn.”

What a wonderful insight. Since everybody has different views, it would be impossible for any writer, speaker, comic, or president to speak for all of us with any statement. In other words, we should expect differences of opinion, and shouldn't be offended just because it isn't our opinion that is being expressed now. (Our turn will come, or maybe it has passed). In a learned profession, as in a democratic society, we have to be open to hearing lots of opinions—even those we disagree with. And we need to engage those opinions forthrightly and respectfully.

I have taken positions in this column that have admittedly made some readers uncomfortable. I did that by challenging conventional wisdom that has been allowed to dominate our thinking without question. Sadly, some readers have been so upset that any useful discussion becomes impossible (a professor wrote recently to tell me that she couldn’t possibly discuss these issues civilly). And there have been those who exhibited what Bill Maher calls “false outrage.” These plaintiffs haven’t refuted my assertions as much as they have tried to censor my expression of them—usually by claiming to be offended or, even better, claiming to defend someone else that I must have offended.

That is not likely to change soon, since today’s column is also about conventional wisdom, and it seems sure to anger somebody. Conventional wisdom refers to widely held beliefs that may or may not be true, and as such, it tends to be the enemy of useful new theories, explanations, and practices.

If a field is to advance, it has to at least consider whether deeply cherished ideas are correct or not. It might be upsetting to find out that we don’t know how to encourage kids to read successfully or that good teachers often rely on programs, but it would be even worse to proceed with the misconception that the conventional wisdom on such subjects is based on anything more than gut feeling. If we want to succeed in improving children’s reading, we can’t continue to accept “truthiness” over truth.

Teaching expertise may be overrated
Here’s some conventional wisdom that most of us, me included, have accepted as genuine fact: teaching expertise is the key to learning. There is certainly some evidence on this one, though I suspect it wouldn’t be very convincing if we didn’t already believe in it. Maybe we’ve made teaching expertise a fetish and it’s holding us back!

What made me wonder about this was a New Yorker article on obstetrics (“The Score,” October 9, 2006, pp. 59-67). I know, I know. That is not a blue-ribbon panel report or a scholarly article from a refereed journal. But Atul Gawande’s article caught my eye because it claimed that to improve effectiveness it may be necessary to rein in or limit expert practice.

I know that sounds nuts, but Gawande makes a pretty good case that the transformation of obstetrics from a field that stressed skilled craftmanship to one based more on an industrial factory model has led to better outcomes for patients.

It’s easy to reject medical analogies since they so often depend on biological processes which are so different from what we face in teaching. But let’s not reject this one too quickly since delivering babies is more like teaching than most medical specialties. A successful delivery requires extended involvement and engagement, and depends on the physician’s ability to carry out complex behavioral procedures, often under challenging circumstances.

According to Gawande, “If medicine is a craft, then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills… You do research to find new techniques. You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands.”

“But if medicine is an industry, responsible for the safest possible delivery of millions of babies each year, then the focus shifts. You seek reliability. You begin to wonder whether forty-two thousand obstetricians in the U.S. really could master all these techniques.”

Gawande goes on to describe the ingenuity of the various delivery procedures (such as the use of forceps) that were invented along the way, and how medical schools emphasized these procedures for difficult births. These approaches were hard to master and few obstetricians ever really learned to use them well (which didn’t stop them—when the use of complex procedures becomes a hallmark of professionalism, then all professionals want to use those procedures no matter what the outcome).

But things changed. Obstetricians adopted rules more like those of the factory floor than of a learned profession or a skilled craft. To discourage the use of complex procedures by the inexpert, even the skilled physicians who could use them well set them aside. The result of the standardized use of “good enough” practices has led to big improvements in the health and safety of babies.

I wonder if we define teachers too much by the procedures they use. I wonder if, due to our zeal to protect educator autonomy, we have championed complex and subtle practice at the expense of overall success. Can 3.8 million teachers really do what many professional development programs push?

The old system of obstetrics created pockets of excellence; some pretty amazing doctors at times pulled off some pretty amazing deliveries. The cost of that, of course, was high: lots of botched deliveries by doctors unable to manage the challenging procedures. Obstetrics eventually surrendered this “heroic physician” model to stress standardization—and the result has been more live births and fewer damaged children. I wonder if we are clinging too tightly to our own traditional “heroic teacher” model and our excellent, but perhaps too ambitious, instructional schemes. We, too, can point to our pockets of excellence, but then think about the very real cost this might represent to the great numbers of children for whom we are responsible.

Two More Provocative Ideas
Two more provocative reading-relevant ideas that might disturb us came up in the same article: Gawande writes that “evidence-based medicine,” the use of randomized experiments to figure out what works (sound familiar?) has played a very limited role in obstetrics! Unlike other medical specialties, there are few of these kinds of studies in obstetrics and those that have been carried out are often ignored in practice. Obstetrics comes in last in the use of hard evidence among medical specialties, and yet it has done more to extend life than any of the others.

There are, to be sure, differences between medicine and education, but it’s interesting to see this successful use of a very different model of research than the one that I use and that is fast becoming the new conventional wisdom of much of our field.

How do obstetricians improve practice without experimental study? That question gives rise to one more compelling idea: it may be due mainly to something else that should sound familiar. Gawande attributes the improvements to the use of informal-but-objective assessment results that are reviewed by both the doctor and principal (okay, chief of obstetrics).

The Apgar score allows doctors and nurses to quickly and objectively evaluate a baby’s condition at 1 minute and 5 minutes after birth. That simple assessment has led obstetricians to try things out—not waiting for research—to see if they can improve their scores. Because they always know the baby’s score, the doctors can easily see the relationship between their actions and the outcomes.

It is hard not to think about DIBELS (or PALS, TPRI, ISEL, and so on). These tests all provide quick information so that adjustments to practice can be made. But the analogy breaks down, too, since those tests give multiple scores, and don’t involve much in the way of professional judgment. In other words, DIBLERS may be onto something that could allow for more successful practice, but maybe it’s not quite the right something, since trying to keep track of 2 to 4 scores for each of 30 kids simultaneously is overwhelming and would not foster the kind of intense focus that the Apgar score seems to provide.

Oh well. Questioning conventional wisdom is not for the feint of heart. Deflating overblown claims risks the anger of one’s friends, but it also threatens the comfort of one’s own beliefs. However, that’s the way it should be in a field that is seriously trying to improve measurable outcomes for students.

If what I have written here about teacher expertise is unsettling to you, don’t get angry, just remember, it may not be your turn.

How do kids learn to comprehend?

For many years, reading comprehension wasn't taught at all. American students read text aloud for much of the 19th century without a lot of discussion. Early in the 20th century, Thorndike found that if readers were asked questions about what they had read, they understood and remembered more. Soon after, publishers created teacher’s guides (an innovation of the ‘20s and ‘30s), and they all included questions for teachers to ask to facilitate comprehension.

Things began to change again in the 1960s: the idea that we could guide students to think about text more effectively, not just by rehearsing after reading (e.g., answering questions), but by predicting or asking your own questions. Literally hundreds of studies showed that we could teach readers to do these kinds of things in ways that would improve reading comprehension.

Obviously many kids in the 1800s understood what they read, without much, if any, teacher guidance. And it is just as obvious that plenty of kids learned to comprehend when their teachers were doing nothing more than asking questions.

Recently, Moddie McKeown and Isabel Beck published a study that examined the effectiveness of a kind of enhanced discussion plan and the preliminary results showed improved children’s understanding of what they were reading (sort of like Thorndike’s original results on asking questions). They stripped the typical core program guided reading lesson down to its essentials: (1) they had the students doing the reading of the story or article; (2) they had the students stop at predetermined points that they thought to be potentially confusing or particularly challenging; (4) they limited the questioning and discussion to make sure the kids were understanding the text (no side talk about word recognition, vocabulary meaning, etc.). The idea of this approach is to help students to develop clearer, more coherent mental representations of the text.

It is clear that this approach does a better job of helping kids understand the story they are reading, but its long term benefits, if any, are yet to be determined. We do know that strategy teaching has good long term benefits because studies show that kids taught in this way do a better job of reading other texts. However, as useful as strategies are, teachers do not spend every guided reading lesson teaching them, and so it seems pretty clear that the McKeown/Beck style lesson makes a great deal of sense. When we guide students to read a story or chapter, we should help them to develop a clear and coherent and complete understanding of the text.

When Time isn't the Only Thing

For 20 years, my speeches and writing have been heavily oriented towards time--amount of instruction. I have made a big deal that schools with longer school days tend to do better as do countries with longer school years; that summer school programs increase achievement as do many after school programs; that snow days lower school achievement, as do student absences; that extended school years and all-day kindergartens work; that classrooms differ in how much instruction they provide and that these differences are related to student learning, and that guiding teachers to use time better improves achievement.

A policymaker recently pointed out to me that increases in time don't always work. Specifically, studies of the NCLB-required after school programs show few learning gains. Or, the Reading First evaluation: RF teachers increased literacy teaching by about 10 minutes per day, but their kids did no better in comprehension. Studies of reading interventions for middle school and high school, that provided a reading class, didn't really work either, or not very much anyway.

Have I been wrong about time? I don't think so. From the very beginning of such research, it has been apparent that the students have to be engaged in learning during the time that is allotted. I visited a school recently where the children were ignoring the teachers (running around, throwing things, etc.). Extending the day with those teachers wouldn't raise reading achievement, because there would likely be no additional teaching added. Time increases tend to work because most teachers aren't struggling as much as those two. Mark Dynarski's work on after school programs suggests that those NCLB programs didn't do well, because they have not necessarily added much teaching.

Trading time isn't so effective either. What I mean by that is that, all things being equal, you'll be better off having students attend an extra reading class, rather than a reading class that substitutes for another academic class. Some of those intervention programs that are conferring a small advantage when they are taking the place of other academic experience, but they likely would confer a somewhat larger benefit if they were adding time rather than just replacing it.

How many more minutes does it take to give a learning advantage? In the Reading First study 10 minutes a day didn't have an impact. Now maybe these teachers weren't really teaching, but what if they were? My own personal reading of research says that fewer than 30 additional hours of teaching sometimes helps and sometimes does not (more often the latter); more than 30 hours and the burden shifts (it's still a mixed bag, but more advantages are seen; and when the numbers climb into the 50-100 extra hours, it is pretty rare that gains aren't seen).

One last thought: the reason those interventions may not look like they are working could be that the tests used in the studies aren't sufficiently sensitive to pick up the gains. Imagine a 9th grader in a special reading program. He is reading at a third grade level at the beginning of the year and a fifth grade level by the end. That means he is still 5 years behind, and it is quite possible that he is still testing at the bottom of the scale on the high school test (he learned, but not enough to be noticed by the test). Perhaps interventions with older students need to use multiple evaluation instruments, including out-of-level tests, to be sure that we are really identifying gains.).

(I've come to believe that those middle school and high school interventions may have boosted achievement more than the studies could show, because if you move an older student from a 3rd to a 4th grade reading level that will not necessarily be captured by a high school reading assessment).