Literacy Blogs

Last week, I provided a link to a video that a reader sent me Close Reading Video . The link purported to present a model “close reading” lesson.   Although, there was much to like about the lesson, I complained that it wasn't close reading. Close reading is not a synonym for reading comprehension (or even "really good reading comprehension").  This is happening a lot. A company says their anthologies include “complex text,” but it isn’t clear what teachers are supposed to do with it, or why it's there at all since the instructional procedures still seem to favor the idea of protecting kids from complex ...

Last week, I explained why disciplinary reading strategies are superior to the more general strategies taught in schools. That generated a lot of surprised responses.  Some readers thought I’d mis-worded my message. Let me reiterate it here: strategies like summarization, questioning (the readers asking questions), monitoring, and visualizing don’t help average or better readers. They do help poor readers and younger readers.  I didn’t explain better readers don’t benefit, so let me do that here. Readers read strategically only when they have difficulty making sense of a text. Recently, I was took a second shot at reading the novel, Gilead. I tried to read it a ...

Question:    We are preparing for a PD session and want participants (who are a mix of K-12 teachers, coaches and administrators across the state) to begin to think about disciplinary literacy. To be transparent, this focus is in part a reaction to hearing that some of our schools are cutting social studies and science to make room for CCSS ELA/Literacy blocks in K-5…we want to stronglydiscourage these kind of decisions to the extent we can, and PDs such as this one are an opportunity to do so.            Since this explicitly references comprehension strategies with disciplinary texts, ...

I’m a music education professor and music literacy is an area of research for me. I am intrigued by your work on disciplinary literacy and my colleague and I are interested in determining how disciplinary literacy could be applied to music. I’ve searched, but have found no research in this regard. Do you know of any? Also, I would love to hear your opinions regarding directions we could take as we look into this subject further. As of now, we see a need to look at music notation literacy as well as the literacy associated with writing about music. Further, ...

Blast from the Past: This blog was first posted on November 25, 2014; and reposted on January 25, 2018. Last week, several teachers asked me about the appropriate instructional sequence for phonics or which commercial product had the best phonics sequence. This seems like a timely reposting.  Years ago, when the National Reading Panel (NRP) report came out, Congress tried to impose a national literacy sequence on American schools. Their plan only allowed phonemic awareness instruction until kids could fully segment words. Then the law would let us teach phonics… but no fluency until the word sounding was completed. Eventually, we’d ...

      Last week, I focused on a controversy over prior knowledge. Common core has discouraged enhancing reading comprehension through the introduction of information external to a text.            That challenges the most popular ways of introducing texts in schools—such telling students information about the text topic or exploring student knowledge relevant to the topic. CCSS proponents bridle at such practices. They want students to become independent readers, which means they’d be able to read texts effectively without extra information—information not provided by the author.              They also blanch at the idea of students constructing text meanings ...